Verbatum Transcript
Crypto Growth Forum
Part 2 (2)
Dear Steemians and MSP-Waves Listeners.
Here is Part 2 of Cryto Growth Forum. hosted Dec 9th 2017 by @aggroed.
The Panel:
@jesta, @timcliff, @blocktrades, @pharesim, @lukestokes. @elear, @andrarchy*.
Thank you all for your time and insights!
This 2-part series transcript may serve as event minutes.
During the MSP-Waves Broadcast, we counted an average of 75 listeners, with as many as 150 unique listeners tuning in. It was worthwhile.
Hour 2
00:00 Introductions and opening the mic for audience questions
00:45 @aggroed: We have a platform that's growing. We have a currency that's rising. What can we do to pour gasoline on the fire that seemed to just have started? I know that we have the communities coming. We have SMTs. What do we, as witnesses, need to be doing to help foster this to grow it, to help it grow faster? What are some discreet steps that we can take to working with our various communities in our networks to speed this along?
01:26 @lukestokes: I want to go back to education. There is just such an information asymmetry gap between those who hear about Steem and Steemit and those who join up for the first time, and then the amount of information needed to really get it and realize how world-changing and revolutionary and amazing this whole eco system is. So just so we can educate people as quickly as possible with great.. video is great...pictures, audio, everything you could think of. I think that's gonna be key. A lot of you doing here online and on-the-air is great.
02:00 @aggroed. Thanks. I am trying to do some of that. Every week, or every other week I host an orientation in the P.A.L. Net Discord Channel for trying to onboard new users to explain to them what the different topics are. But obviously, just me doing that every other week isn't gonna be able to handle the influx and I don't speak enough different languages. There is a big learning curve here. STEEM, SteemPower, SBDs, post rewards, transfers, wallet, private posting key, private active key. There's just... trying to look at various definitions... there is a lot that's going on here. It is not as simple as just posting onto Facebook, and part-2, then you have markdown that you have to deal with. What can we do besides the education piece to make it a little bit easier for the brand new users in the community. And is that something that we should be targeting?
03:10 @pharesim: I couldn't get in earlier, before the break... We need to focus a lot more on the currency and the abilities to accept them. About businesses accepting STEEM: it has advantages it offers. Accept STEEM and other cryptos. There is a system called . They have a great interface, and even a POS terminal where you just enter the dollar amount of a sale and it converts directly to STEEM and gives the buyer instructions how to pay. A lot more people need to use that. We need to get users who are not just blogging and trying to earn, but who use the currency for all kinds of transactions.
04:21 @jesta: I think both of those are very important. We need to educate people on the currency on one hand and on the blogging side of it on the other hand. They kind of go hand in hand. But people need a lot of education for both of those. It's a complicated system. I suppose we can make the interface better to alleviate that somewhat.. it just will take time.
04:47 @blocktrades: The answers as far as what the witnesses can do.. the answer is gonna be different for each witness to a large extend depends on what their capabilities are, what their focus is. For us, it's a lot more on the tools side and the blockchain side - discussions around how to move the blockchain forward, the rules, and things like that. But, certainly, education is just as an important part. There is no one answer to this question. There are lot's of answers.
05:20 @andrarchy: And by the way, all this stuff is part of improving the Steemit.com interface. This is stuff we think about, too. It falls well within our priorities list, at least for the condenser team. Condenser is the Steemit frontend. These aren't problems we are blind to. Some of it comes down to marketing. We have a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline on that end. Some if it comes down to user interface. It's certainly something that we think about. You could probably find some pull requests in GitHub. But the process is going to be gradual for making it better and better.
Social Behavior
06:32 @aggroed: One of the things that I have gotten a fair number of concerns and comments about is, in the social behavior category: Flagging is not as big as an issue as it was before. There is still a lot of flagging. There is still some plagiarism. There is still some spam. Should this be a concern of the witnesses, or a concern of the big stakeholders? I am asking the whole panel: Is this on your radar?
07:25 @timcliff I actually like to touch on that a little bit. I wrote a post before the show...and it touched on the fact that with STEEM Dollars recently going up to 10 Dollars, it reminded me that if you had a dollar worth of Steem Dollars, you now have ten! And while I think that the expectation that Steem Dollars are gonna be going to the moon is maybe a little far fetched, I do think that STEEM going to the moon is a possibility. There are so many people that are focused on: I am not earning enough rewards... or The rewards are going to the wrong people, They might get 25 cents or even 02 cents on a post, and the theme of my post was basically that the two cents of STEEM that you earned today, if you hold on to it and the platform really takes off, could actually be worth a lot more... And if people started looking at it from more of a long term perspective, that would allow these small reward frustrations to go away.
And as far as the abuse, the spam and the plagiarism, that's definitely there and I think that it is important that as witnesses and even community members, that we all try to do what we can to have less of that and good things. But at the same time, I think it is a bit too much of a focus right now. There is a lot of money in the rewards pool. And if you look at the amount that is actually going to what people classify as bad stuff, it is a small fraction. There is still a large chunk of the pie for people who are doing good things for the platform, adding value in their own unique way. I'd much rather see focus being put on that as far as what could we do to make the platform better and then doing what we can to reward the people that are doing that, than to constantly being focused on all that stuff that certain bad actors are doing to take advantage of the system.
09:30 @elear: I also wrote something about this recently, specifically on the flagging war. I think it is really wrong, as I also said in my post. The reason being: they're short term solutions for a long term problem. We are trying to get big accounts together to take that... remove the rewards they shouldn't get to bring these rewards back to the reward pool. But this is not going to work in the long term. I want to stress this point again: I believe the only to fix this problem is an organic way...really fixing... content covering the Steem blockchain and to give much more importance to quality contents with better algorithms and a better way to interact and a better way to sort and find quality content inside the Steem blockchain. So, it is both, a frontend issue in Steemit Condenser, but it is also an issue in the Steem blockchain itself right now. By fixing that, these flagging wars become completely unnecessary and useless. We wouldn't need to act like this if we could fix the root cause of the problem.
11:25 @blocktrades: I tend to agree with what was said so far.
11:32 @jesta: The flagging issue is that it is actually a FLAG. Really, these should be down-votes. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with a post and down-voting on it, it's the perception that when people receive a downvote they did something wrong. They didn't. It's just someone else's opinion affecting that reward.
12:01 @blocktrades: I heard that idea before but I don't think it's really true. We had down-votes at one point. I saw kind of the same behavior, the same upset when we had down-votes instead of flags. In fact, they tried to move it to flags... but I don't think it is going to make a major difference to change from Flags to down-votes. I do think that changing the rewards mechanisms will help to reduce the problems that we are facing where people are doing self-voting on bad posts. Obviously, I made a post about that. It is probably not too difficult to implement some of the things that will help out. But overall I think it is a small problem. The biggest problem really is perception.
12:54 @lukestokes: Yeah, perception is key. And as Tim said as well, I like to see data driven explanations as to what is going on. If it is data drive, factual we can look at. We can re-adjust out expectations and have accurate perceptions of reality. I think that is the source of so much frustration where expectations are out of sync with reality. So, people can realize, for example, that investors are extremely important. And we need to make investors happy if we all want to enjoy a healthy rewards pool. And those kind of things were we are just focusing on one aspect of reality and not seeing it for what it is, ok, yeah, there is abuse, but, what percentage if the rewards pool goes to that abuse? How bad is it? What is reality? And once we see what it, what is data driven, we can have a much better perception which can help us all to enjoy the eco system much better because we don't have all this loss aversion making us feel depressed and frustrated.
Network Performance
13:50 @aggroed: How do you feel about the performance of the network these days? I think I saw Ethereum at 500. I saw it dip down to at least 400. And some of this seems to be related to the Crypto Kittens taking up to 25% of the network, having 20,000 transactions that weren't processed at the time, when we're starting to see some of these other paces not really being able to keep up with the amount of transactions that are going on on the platform. How do you see the current transaction load? How do you see our performance in that? Are we stable going forward? Is this a platform that investors should feel comfortable that if we scaled 10x, 100x, 1000x, that we still be functional, or are we gonna run into the exact same transaction limits - and now we are gonna have a whole new set of problems?
14:56 @pharesim: I think that goes back to the issue with the currency. Most of the crypto scene isn't aware what STEEM brings to the table. I have recently seen on a really big German crypto currency site btc-echo.de. They had an article about Ethereum being the highest amount of transfers. They even said, Ethereum had the highest amount of transfers than all other crypto currencies together, they just missed out on STEEM in their research. Of course, I wrote a comment, but that is something we need to bring out more, that is is not just a good entry platform but a platform to stay at to use for crypto currencies, and the network is absolutely stable at the moment. All the issues we had with witness and RPC servers in the past months is a thing of the past. I missed a block today, but none in weeks before. So, my nodes are running absolutely stable, crunching transactions. The infrastructure is fine. We jus need more users using the currency.
16:22 @blocktrades. I think, we can be pretty proud of our current rate compared to other currencies as far as how many transactions we can handle but I don't think we can sit on our laurels either. It seems likely based on the social media aspect of STEEM that we need more ability to handle transactions than any other blockchain, too. So, think we still are gonna have to do work to allow us to scale, in fact, I am sure of it.
16:51 @andrarchy: Just to chime in here, ... we are focused on increasing the runway. The critical issue is that: Where are you starting from... The good thing is that with STEEM we're already starting... we are not even using 1% of our network capacity *at this point. Even with what we have in place, we can absorb 10x more traffic. But at the same time, as Dan pointed out, we can not sit on our laurels here. And that's where things like Jussi, and most importantly Appbase come in. Appbase is the most important new app layer that is going to enable 10x more transactions of the platform. And it's not that we are going to stop at Appbase. Appbase is just the beginning. The problem with Etherum is that they are effectively saying: We're gonna be able to 1000x this. Once. We're gonna do charting and we are gonna be able to absorb a ton more transactions. Whereas what we are saying is: All we have to do is every year 10x network capacity It is much more reasonable. Look! We're trying to scale as fast as we can. Don't get me wrong. The problem is that there are limitations to how fast you can scale. The important thing to bear in mind is what is the original state, how scalable is the original state... and if you assume reasonable increase in scalability, will that be enough to absorb the network traffic? That will be coming. And we are very confident in our ability to meet those demands.
Competitive Threats
19:05 @aggroed: What do you see as some of our biggest competitive threats? Who is gunning for us? Are We the competitive threat? Are we threatened right now? What should we, as a community of people, we weary about from either other blockchains, from fiat institutions? What kind of things keep you up at night in thee scared category?
19:30 @lukestokes In the past I have written some articles about Steemit, the organization, and specifically the leadership and the development team... And as we saw issues with the site, I was a little bit concerned about it. When I went to STEEMFEST, and got to meet the developers directly, I was pretty encouraged by their abilities and what they are building. I had a lot and long conversations with @andrarchy. But, for me personally, one of the concerns is the leadership in terms of... the core developers of the blockchain right now are coming form Steemit Inc. They're not coming from the witnesses. We're not seeing pull requests done outside of that particular organization. And that could potentially be a threat. I am not saying it is a threat right now, but it is a potential concern in terms of where we wanna go in the future. We have to make sure the community is in alignment with the leadership of Steemit, the company at this point. That may not be the case in the future if the witnesses are starting to build out their own code.. and the community says, yeah!... we want to go in that direction instead.
As far as competition from other blockchains, I think EOS is something that could definitely could be a competitor, because if people don't like the distribution of STEEM in the beginning, EOS has a year long ICO, so there is a lot of opportunity for distribution of that token. And if they want to go as a Steemit competitor or multiple competitors, that's something we have to be aware of and think through.
20:56 @jesta: You said it well. To add on to that, it's a matter of... if STEEM is encompassing towards other platforms, then we start seeing competitors? We saw Akasha, Yours, Synereo... There have been a couple of attempts, but really, STEEM hasn't had much competition for what it is. There is a possibility that this will come though if we keep remained focused on this one thing. Then we don't allow anyone else to grow with it. I am not saying that's the direction we're going. It's just something that keeps me up.
21:50 @andrarchy I agree with what everyone is saying in that the basic point is that right now .... competitors and when you have that situation you become the biggest threat. And we are definitely focused on improving what we know to be our weaknesses. And that essentially comes back from the feedback from all of you people, the community members. We are not deaf to the complaints that are coming from everybody else. We are actively working to fix these problems. Because you can only exist without competitors for so long. There is certainly a pipeline - but they're not competitors yet. So, it is true that we don't have competitors, but it is also true that this won't last forever. And we are not blind to that reality.
22:55 @timcliff: I'm actually gonna take an interesting twist on the question and say: I think we should be looking at a lot of the organizations that might potentially be considered our competitors whether that be other crypto currencies tokens or social media platforms and trying to look for more ways that we can work together with them. One example is: How can we get more crypto currencies looking at .... ways to launch their ICOs or their token launches. How can we integrate more into other social media websites, so that sharing something on Steemit is the equivalent of sharing something on Facebook and vice versa. I think there is a lot of partnership opportunity there where we could leverage some of the other platforms that have large user bases and try to create a win-win situation.
And I am gonna talk about a seconds thing. There is one thing that I ran into that has me a little nervous as far as whether we can really sell ourselves to the larger crypto community. There is a Reddit chain where people were talking about Ethereum and STTEEM and lot of us from the STEEM blockchain were on there, making the case why STEEM is awesome. And there are some issues in the crypto currency community that I think are holding us back. One of them is misinformation. There are still people out there that think that we have a 90% yearly inflation rate, so I think getting more people educated on what STEEM is doing today and how it works is good. But another thing that I don't have the answer to and I am wondering nif anyone has the answer to this question: There is a perception that STEEM was Ninja mined. To an extend it was, but there was a purpose to that, which was to essentially fund development and if you look at accounts that have a lot of STEEM right now, it's not like they're using them for hookers and blow... I think was the joke someone made a while back. The money that has gone into these early adopter accounts is primarily being used to grow the STEEM eco system and hire developers, but there is the perception out there that essentially STEEM is kind of a shady coin and I am wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how we can address that...?
- 25:24 @andrarchy: It seems exactly right. Of course, anyone can check that stuff for themselves. I won' ask anybody to trust us. The people that I work with, I feel embarrassed when I don't put in a 60-hour week. This is how hard everybody on the team works. From @ned to every single member of the team. They all believe, 100% in what we are doing. They don't have to work here. They choose to work here. And that's what guarantees that the money that we have access to is gonna be maximally leveraged. But that doesn't mean people should just trust us. At the end of the day, you can check! And that's the beauty of these open protocols.
Live Audience @r0nd0n Flagging
26:22 @r0nd0n: I am just a minnow myself and have only been on the platform for a few months now. Trying to get a grip on this flagging debate. Being flagged for spam/plagiarism is a community standard everybody accepts. But once this distinction goes into opinion, or what ideas are allowed to be shared on the platform, that kind of micro-managing has way more effects on the actual growth of Steemit then I think we can actually see on the service.
28:33 @timcliff: I have two things to say on that. One of them is, with the current state that we're in right now, and the other is what I see is actually solving this problem. Right now, everyone who has Steem tokens is a stakeholder. The more tokens you have the more influence you have on the site. That's essentially the premise on how the blockchain works. And the reality is that every stakeholder gets to choose how to use their stake. And if they see down-voting content that they dislike or they disagree with or they don't want to be rewarded as the proper use of their stake, they have every right to do that. Now, obviously, there is some impact to the end user experience especially when you talk about new users who don't understand the system... it can be perceived in a very negative way. I actually see communities combined with SMTs as the solution to this. I think wrapping our heads around how this is gonna work is a really key element. So, I am gonna try to describe it: Right now, the STEEM token holders have 100% influence on how much reward you have. So, if a large STEEM token holder wants to take away your reward, they can do that and unless an even larger one comes along and adds them back, there is no way around that. With a SMT the community itself can form a token, and that token can have monetary value in the same way that STEEM tokens have. Let's assume that there is a community that likes a certain type of content that may not be as popular among the other whales or people on the platform, if they can create an SMT that has value, let's just say, every one of their SMT tokens is worth one half of a STEEM token. If they can start distributing the SMT token out to their community, the only people that have the ability to take away those rewards are the SMT token holders. Now, a STEEM token holder can always come along and take away the STEEM reward, but the SMT reward are gonna be 100% directed by the SMT token holders. So, for the community that want to launch a new token they can build a community around that token and have full control over who gets the rewards for those SMTs.
30:56 @r0nd0n: So if someone didn't like the thing that that community was doing, they would have to buy into their token in order to downvote the content they were producing.
31:03 @timcliff: Exactly. 100% yes.
28:33 @lukestokes: To add to that, too: They'd have to follow the rules of that community as outlined by the SMT oracles. So, only people who can participate in that rewards pool would be the people that are following the rules that the oracles are checking for.
31:25 @r0nd0n: Now, that might be the answer to all of this - it's a very interesting thing. Thank you very much for answering that.
31:31 @andrarchy: I think they're spot on with this. This is an amazing point. I just wanna highlight how important that point is.
31:40 @r0nd0n: How much longer until these come around? Is it about three months still?
0 31:45 @andrarchy: Early 2018 is our official stance on this - we're not gonna revise that now. But we are working as hard as we can and the progress is very positive. The next step is launching a test net. The preparations for that are going very well. And you can hold me to that.
- 32:10 @r0nd0n: I have one more thing about marketing. I see a lot of people talk about how much we need marketing. I don't really know about that. I don't think that's the case. I think word of mouth is all the marketing we need if we have a good product. If there is something there that people want to talk about and want to share... Facebook started out as like a secret club. You had to be a college member. That created an artificial 'scarcity' where people wanted to join in... I know, STEEM is not Facebook but there are some parallels that could be drawn. I don't think that advertising is the actual answer to our needs. That would be done organically when we get it right.
33:16 @aggroed: Can we do with SMTs... is it possible to have some of those front-facing websites have advertising and others not? Can that then become up to the community to figure out?
33:31 @andrarchy: Yes, in fact, a great way to bootstrap the value of your SMT would be to incorporate advertising and then accept your SMT as payment for it. But you don't have too... The beauty of STEEM, and that's why we're gonna kill the advertising model is because you don't have to use it. But, it is very important that you'd able to use it to benefit your advertising business and increase your margins in order to turbo charge adoption.
34:16 @aggroed: @r0nd0n is one of the station managers who run this radio station that we are all listening to right now. I just invited Shane, who is witness 90 or so right now
Shane: Witness BIAS
34:08 @swelker101 (Shane): I have been paying attention to the witnesses, considering I am one and I've noticed that there are quite a few that have upped their bias to an extreme amount. I think @pharesim, you're at 910%. I see @netuoso at 300%. Can you guys go into an explanation what that does for the platform. My understanding is that it is to help bring down the price of SBD. What is the thought process behind it and what do you think if that's a good idea, if this is just a blip, or if this is a long term increase in SBD?
35:25 @pharesim: The main thing with this is to discourage conversion... This comes back to the education... where users just don't know what they're doing. What you have to see there is that we take the medium. So, as long as more than 50% have a zero value .... but the effect would be that conversions would get less... so people are incentivized to sell it on the external market.
36:12 @blocktrades: I think the problem that @pharesim was suggesting is that people don't realize they shouldn't be converting. There is plenty of of economic reason not to convert at the current moment. And, they'e just not aware, so... I don't know how to solve that problem except maybe, disable it temporarily in the GUI or something...
36:32 @lukestokes: I think a warning would be helpful. I have already seen posts where people, even without that would hurt them even worse, they're freaking out: *Wait, I heard STEEM Dollars are worth 10/11 Dollars, yet I barely got any STEEM when I did my conversion. And there is a lot of people, even now, they're still doing conversion. And we can look that data up on the blockchain. So, it's just an education thing. I would like to the interface to have a warning when we have an external price higher than a dollar for STEEM dollars we should let them know: Hey, you might actually want to sell this on the internal market instead. You get a better deal. And it happens immediately, not in 3.5 days.
37:09 @blocktrades: Yeah, I think that's a better way to handle it.
36:14 @pharesim: That could be based on the bias. If all the witnesses have their bias set or most of them, they can easily find out it might be a bad time to convert for example.
37:30 @swelker101: The main question is then: How do we alert the new users to let them know that this may or may not be a good idea. That's not something that's intuitively known when you go into the convert process.
37:50 @tmcliff: This discussion came up last time when there was a similar price spike in SBD. One thing that we did was: I submitted a pull request, so when users go to the convert option now, there is actually a warning: Hey, this might not be a good idea. You should consider looking at the currency market and see if you could get a better option for trading. I think part of the problem is that with the user base that we're going after, there's so many people that don't understand crypto currencies and tokens a lot of us take for granted.., that just that idea of converting versus trading is kind of a foreign concept and very difficult to wrap their heads around. I had a lot of discussions with other witnesses about whether to use a bias or whether not to use a bias and the main reason that I have been holding out and keeping my bias at zero right now is because I feel that there is too many, unfortunately, uninformed users, that if there was a bias lowering the amount of SBD conversions that they are essentially going to get ripped off by the blockchain in the sense that they wouldn't get the one Dollar worth of STEEM conversion that essentially they were promised as kind of the premise of how those conversions work. Just because of the fact that adding a bias would harm those users, I personally don't think it is a good idea. At the same time there is an unanswered question about what things we can do to bring the price of SBD back down to its peg. And unfortunately with the tools that we have in the toolbox right now, that really is one of the only options. That is an important point and there are witnesses that feel that holding the peg is a very important thing. I definitely don't disagree with them using their bias but I think it is largely a personal judgement and decision as far as which of those two things individual witnesses find more important.
@kittiegirl: Ditch SBD?
40:00 @kittiegirl: I have been here on the platform for less than three months. So I hope this isn't too n00b a question... Why don't we just use STEEM and ditch the concept of STEEM backed Dollars? What are the essential differences between the two. What is it the one can do and the other not?
40:35 @jesta: I think it boils down to: It would be easier to just use one currency. It would be a lot more simple. The idea behind STEEM Dollars was that it was something familiar to people. That way people didn't have to think about currency that constantly changed value. Getting rid of SBD would be hard simply because people have SBD. And you don't want to just take the value away from them.
41:06 @kittiegirl: I would have thought that one could be converted to the other. Because we can freely move them back and forth on the platform.
41:17 @jesta: You can go one way currently. You can go from SBD to STEEM, not the other way around.
41:23 @tmcliff: Just to clarify, there is a difference between converting, which is what @jesta is talking about, and trading, which is, I think, what you're talking about? So, the conversion process actually destroys the SBD token and creates STEEM tokens in its place. That process only goes one way. But at the same time you can still trade SBD tokens for STEEM tokens and you can trade the other way around. Those are two very different things.
41:55 @pharesim It would of course be possible for conversions to be enforced to get rid of SBD. That has been on the table, has been discussed the last time the price spiked. A lot of people still try to trade SBD on different markets, and before we completely cut it out, I think we should try to find a way to stabilize the peg. But yes, this discussion has been there and will be there again.
42:33 @aggroed: Do you find that the high price of SBD is a problem? In a traditional fiat currency, the governements/banks are constantly manipulating the price down. so that when they're taking these loans and they inflate the currency, it's really easy to go and pay those loans off. There is an incentive to constantly inflate. But if I get away from standard banker logic, if I have a massive loan, and I don't want to think that way anymore, now I want to start thinkng as an actual consumer on this platform, does it hurt me to have a strong SBD, maybe it hurts that it is not quite as familiar, but having a strong Dollar, to me it doesn't sound like a crisis or concern. Do you feel differently about that?
43:34 @blocktrades: I think the only potential problem right now, at the moment wtih SBD being high is: It might discourage people from using it as a currency for commernc. But, given that it is not used as a currency for commerce right now I don't think it is a problem at the moment. You have the downside protection that it is going to be worth at least one Dollar, and that's a nice thing to have. It can be useful from that point of view if you're somehow uncomfortable with the price of STEEEM, you think it's gonna take a sudden drop, you can shift into SBD and sort of ride it out until you're comfortable with thngs again.
44:09 @andrarchy: I personally would love to see the SBD be around one USD 99% of the time. But personally, and I am speaking for myself. it would be cool if once in a while it occasionally spiked and I don't think it damages things too much. But if it permanently is not near a Dollar, I think in the long run from an economic standpoint, it would lose its utility and its value and it would eventually crash. What is the point? And it's one confusing aspect. It's hard getting people interested in the first place if the fundamental token is volatile - then it should be STEEM.
45:00 @blocktrades: I agree with @andrarchy. but I think the economics are in fact such that it will drop back down to a Dollar. I think it is pretty invevitable.
45:06 @aggroed: One of the things I like about it: If STEEM goes up and we look at people that hold a lot of it, that's great for maybe 25 to 100 people. Maybe even a thousand at this point. There's really just a handful of people that own STEEM. When I start thinking about SBDs... if SBDs start spking, every single person that's creating post rewards I think that distribution is looking a lot healthier. Because if I look at Steemstats or something like that, what's the distribution of pay-out, that looks healthier to me than the distribution of STEEM. If I see SBDs spiiking, I feel like it's going into he hands of many more people, and if I see STEEM spiking, I feel like that's really going into 25-50 accounts primarily.
46:14 @pharesim: Well, the people that get SBD get the same value in STEEM all the time, so it doesn't really make a difference for them.
46:24 @timcliff: I actually agree with what you said @aggroed. Any user today that is starting out/is interested in growing their stake and becoming a larger stakeholder through their blogging they're getting 5x as much STEEM because half their post goes to Steem Dollars, so, if they get paid 10 Dollars, 5 Dollars of that is SBD. That means they can use that 5 SBD to buy 50 Dollars worth of STEEM. I agree 100% that in the short term this is a huge opportunity for the new users who would like to get more STEEM in the platform to be able to get 5x as much. And if the price of SBD continues to go up they could get 10x as much.
47:10 @thekittygirl: So, was the concep of STEEM backed Dollars SBD created primarily just to make people feel safer about the STEEM crypto currency?
47:23 @blocktrades: It was created to have a stable currency, potentially for commerce. It was expected that STEEM would be rising in value, which has pretty much been the case. But all crypto is pretty volatile. Unless the crypo has specifically been designed to be stable it tends to be volatile, which makes it not so good for commerce. So, SBD was the solution for a stable commerce coin - in the short term at least.
47:52 @lukestokes: Yea, I was one of the first people who did one of those STEEMBay auctions and I bought one of those little STEEM coins... silver coins, and it was funny: It was right as the Steem Dollar was going up in valuue. I ended up paying twice as much as I expected because it was like ... in seven days this all happened. But, because I understood what was going on and I understood how the system works I knew this was a potential. I wasn't too ddiscouraged by it. I was happy to be participating in something that I thought was really cool. STEEM interaction, STEEM transaction on the blockchain. But, I can imagine new users... that can be really frustrating. If they make an agreement to pay something in seven days with the value of a Steem Dollar and that value goes up to 10 and they still owe that number of Steem Dollars, that's a problem. So it will hinder commerce on the platform until it levels out. But historically it has been relatively stable. We only had a few times where it has done this big spike. I think we'll know more in a couple of weeks.
49:00 @aggroed. @rainsa had some concerns about flagging and plagiarsm specifically.
Unfortunately, @rainsa was not at the computer at the time, and @aggroed had to move on, We encourage you, @rainsa, to call back in next time. [globosop]
Panel's Closing Thoughts
- 49:42 @aggroed: Priorities, Key Takeaways.
From Steemit Inc. Perspective
- 50:47 @andrarchy: Well, first, I think that my presence here has to be a little bit different because I shoudn't be telling you guys what you should be working on. I feel like what we should be doing generally as part of our mission is to inform you guys about our plan. Our plan is effectivly to tokenize the web with STEEM ... on the STEEM blockchain. We also need your feedback and what you guys are saying what we should be doing. We're gonna be trying to improve as we go forward as we pursue this goal of tokenizing the web. ... Informing you guys and then listening to your feedback.
2018?
51:37 @aggroed: How do you think 2018 will look different from 2017on this blockchain?
51:50 @andrarchy: Nuts, people. It's going to be so different than what's come before. Not, that what's come before was bad - like that was insane too, right? That whole ride has been insanee. And, so, the ride is gonna continue to be insane. 2018 is going to be awesome. I think SMTs have the potential to go viral because they have the potential to .... patience that go viral. All it takes is one or two. SMTs are really gonna change the game. They have the potential to really impact the mainstream. And that is going to feed back onto STEEM and into Steemit n very interesting ways because Steemit.com is and should be the best advertisment for STEEM. It should be the app you would people telll to go to... gets them hooked, gets tthem interested in exploring those other applicaions made by third party developers. That's what I think next year is gonna look like. We're gonna step up our marketing game. Onboarding is gonna become an order of magnitude easier. So, that's going to enable us to bring the kind of traffic into the eco system - that does take the whole thing to the next level. that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to stand stil. ... every year 10-xing what we did. That's not a revenue, 10x. It's 10x the amount of value you're delivering to the worlld. And if you can continue to elevate the value of your protocol - that's the beauty of being an upstart, is that we can continue growing hundreds of percent because we're still small. That's what we got to be doing, is continuing to innovate because that's how you get developers. That's how you get products and serviices. That's how you get vendors.... by demonstrating to the world that the value of this thing is literaly billions of dollars. That's what 2018 is gonna look like.
chucklesThat... helps...54:14 @aggroed:
chucklesIt would help a lot. It would help plenty of people.
Improvements
54:25 @blocktrades: I agree with a lot of things people have brought up during this talk. Probably number one is actually @elear's point in my mind. I'd like t see steady continuous progress on the Steemit front end. It's the primary user interface. And while I agree with @jesta It'd be great if we had more people using other platforms as well, it's just kind of a state of the system that most people are on Steemit. So, I would really like to see very steady improvements in what kind of things people can do there. That's out of my control though, at least right now. As far as what I am focusing on, what our company is... just other tools to help people: YouSteem... We're actually working on trying to solve some of the onboarding problems and probably gonna come out wth a feature soon to allow people to buy accounts.... there's a thing's that's out there already but we'e basically gonna add our own twist onto it, give another option to people. Beyond that, I certainly like to see some work done on the blockchain for the curation thing, SMTs are certainly a long term solution to that problem but I think some relatively simple things can be done that could improve it quite quickly. Finally, I can't really say much about what 2018 is gonna look like. I don't like to predict that kind of future: Too many people doing too many things.
55:58 @elear: 2018, it's right here. I am really excited for the SMTs. I heard about it a number of times already. I am really looking forward to them. But I think we should really focus more on what we have now than what we wiill have in the ffuture. And, what we have now, the Steemit front end, it's the first place were everybody lands the first time. So, in the short term that is the plarform that we should ... there is much more work to do. I also agree with what @jesta said also, trying to give to the new users a way to know all the other projects around the Steem blockchain. I am trying to do this with Utopian. It would be great, of course, if Steemit itself could do that. I have no idea who 2018 is going to look like. I am very new to this platform. Yea, but I believe it's gonna be a great time.
Big PIcture - Much Bigger
- 57:20 @jesta: Where to start. I appreciate the mentions. The focus on Steemit is an important thing. But when you guys say things like this it worries me because it's like the BTC development team saying we should focus all our efforts on a website like
blockchain.info. The big picture is so much bigger, And I don't know if we'e gonna get there in 2018. This is gonna take a lot. But, we have STEEM as this protocol, and it can be absolutely massive. And, currently, if Steemit is that way that we are onboarding people, which it is like 90% of the use of the blockchain, that deninitly needs to be improved. It will. But just onboarding people in a different way is what I'd like to see in adding diversity to how these tools can be used. That's what I talk about a lot in the various chat channels. As far as what I'd really like to see out of 2018, it's a hard to say. I am going to be adding some stuff myself. But I think that focusing on the protocols be good and getting develpers to also try to expand it. SMTs is gonna be great for this. And. to avoid rambling, I don't have anything else spedic to add.
Education
- 59:04 @lukestokes: The question had to do with what we can do not only just as witnesses but also just the wider community, what can we do to prepare us for the future? And one thing that I would love to see more of us doing is to engaging with the core developes of the STEEM blockchain and what they'e asking us to do. So, currently that's Steemit, the company. They've asked us to look at the Smart Media Token Whitepaper. They've asked us to look at the Oracle Whitepaper for what the Smart Media okens are gonna be. Even now just there in the chat, someone bravely asked: What is that SMT everyone is talking about? ... Lot of people don't know what they are. and they feel even ... Look, I don't know what's going on! There is a lot of information we all can help with to educate people on. What is a Smart Media Token? How many people that are using Steemit.com right now and are passionate about the future of it have read that Whitepaper? Probably not that many. So, reading the Smart Media Token Whitepaper, learning about Oracle, learning about where things are going, and we can all take on some responsibility for educating ou friends, our family, people that are excited about this eco system but haven't yet fgured it out. So, there could be a lot of different ways that we could do that. And I think that could be really beneficial. because then we'd be in alignement where the core developers are currently going. And then, once we understand where they're going we can actually contribute, and in meaningful ways. We can say: *Hey, has anyone thought about this, What about when this happens. And that could be really exciting to get everyone moving in the right direction instead of pulling in a bunch of different directions. As @blocktrades said, We all have different skills. We all have different abilities. We can all contribute in so many different amazing creative ways. But if it is not in alignement to our shared vision, we might pull in different directions. I'd like aggain, just to see that education and to see that taken on as a personal responsibilities for everyone. And related to that, I think one thing we can do for adoption is: bring whole communities together to the STEEM blockchain. I invited a number of people and they all have created accounts but they don't post because none of ther friends are here. So, a way to come in and say:
Hey, community, let's all, everyone here, create an account on STEEM and all these conversations we're having elsewhere
Let's just hav'em here now. Let's like actually get paid to do ti. How cool would that be? And also educate ourselvs on this new thing called crypto curency, and this new thing called The Blockchain while we... participating in an actual version of it. So, if we all have dfferent communities that we're part of that are not currently on STEEM, maybe become a salesman, pitch it. Hey, what if this entire community moves to STEEM? And that would be a real cool way to do both the education part and the adoption part and onboarding part together when you bring a whole group together. That would be my thought.
Promoting - Marketing - Rewarding
1:01:46 @aggroed: I'd love to see some STEEM behind the an account of like @SteemitSales, Steemiit doesn't have a sales organization. And we do have 450,000 accounts maybe it's 200,000+ people. We could incentivize 'em to bring people on. I keep thinking about that. Sort of like an Utopian-Io, but specific for sales efforts. And just get everybody here incentivized to go bring their friend on board. though some upvotes or something like that.
1:02:19 @lukestokes: Yea, and if I could add just one last piece too, it's realizing: We don't just need content creators and voters. We also need investors. And keeping both of those groups on together will keep the rewards pool growing as we pay more people out of it.
1:02:35 @pharesim: Yea, I am looking forward to 2018. as a year which. show us a lot of new platforms to use. We had several come up in 2017 and I know ther'e are several in the making. Be it with SMT or not. Just growing the eco system giving new possibilities to onboard dffernt kinds of users we couldn't catch till now and just grow the whole STEEM universe. All the rest of the guys before me said it.
1:03:22 @timcliff: I got quite a bit to say, so I try to talk very fast. Really quickly, I wanted to touch on what I've been up to recently: I am mainly focused behind the scenes right now. I've been having a lot of discussions with people about different directions to take the platform. That's been taken up some of my time. I am also involved in the help channel in Steemit.chat, helping new users when they get stuck with issues on the website, But there is another project that I have been spending most of my time on: I am pretty excited about it. I have a general policy of not talking about what I am doing until it's done and ready. I am gonna kind of break my own rule a little bit. One of the projects that I have been working on has been Exchange Outreach to basically reach out to some of the other crypto currency exchanges that are out there and engage with them and talk to them and try to get STEEM listed on more exchanges. I don't have any news to share just yet but just know this is were I am spending a lot of my effort right now, and I am doing my best to hopefully have some good news to share with everybody relatively soon. but, again, I don't want to talk about anything until it's actually gonna happen. As far as everyone else in the platform I agree with what @lukstokes said as far as we need to focus more on investors. I think it is important for everyone who has the ability to marketing STEEM as a currency to really be doing that more. Some of the main talking points are obviously zero transaction fees. That's actually HUGE. Three seconds confirmation times is amazing especially when you compare to Bitcoin and Ethereum. There's also a lot ot other aspects of the currency that I think you should be aware of and I would highly encourage to read the STEEM Bluepaper. It does a really good job of summarizing all the key points of what makes STEEM as a token and a blockchain amazing and it's really not that hard of a read, so if you can consume that, integrate it into your knowlefdge base and just have those talking points when you're talking to people about STTEEMl; it will go a long way as far as selling the curency. As far as devlopers, I think the Utopian.io project is an amazing addition to the STEEM eco system. I am really impressed with the work they're doing and I am excited to see how that's going to continue. I think some areas that the development community need to be focused on a little bit more is: How do we make it easier for a developer to work on STEEM projects? A lot of people that I talk to are stuck. They don't know where to turn to. There aren't very good resources, So, if that could be more of a focus for the development community in 2018 would go a long way as far as getting more apps. And I think there needs to be a better discussion and I am not sure how to orchestrate that with the development community as far as what projects so we want people to be working on and really try to get the developers that we do have that are able too write these awesome apps focused on the things that are gonna add the most value to the platform. A couple of last closing points: I know I have taken up some time here, but I really want to emphasize that everyone on the platform has uniqe value to add I think it is crucial that everybody looks at what they have to offer and find a way to use it in a way that makes the platform more valuable. and better for the users, better for the investors and so, essentially what that boils down to is:***What can you do to increase the value of the platform and try not to do things that will decrease it. That's very vague but I think people definitely need to be asking themselves that question and take it as a personal responsiblity for what can you do that's gonna help us move towards that $10 STEEM target. And then the last thing is just from a user perspective: There is a few things that I think we can focus on a little bit more that'll definitely help. Obvosuuly, onboarding is one of them. But there is three key areas that I would encourage us as a community to focus more on. One of them is creating viral content or conent that's gonna be picked up by SEO searches. Putting the time to do a well written article that when someone sarches for something on Google, it's gonna come up as one of the top search results, or somethng that everyone is gonna want to share friends because it's just so awesome. The more of that type of content our author communnity can be putting out the better becasu that's just more eyeballs that that are gonna be landing on STEEM. And then a part of that too is that we need to be doing everything we can to share the content on STEEM outside of STEEM. Postings on Facebook reddit, send them to your friends. Get the good content that's aleady on the platform in front of more eyeballs. And then another thing I hear a lot of people talking about is: "Well, I am not a content creator. I don't really blog. There is a huge market for writing, valueable,well written replies to people's posts. I remember when I was a new user and I wasn't making a lot of money on my rewards, one of the main things that kept me here was the interactiton I had with the people in the community, When I had people that were commenting on my posts and putting friendly, well written, thought-out responses to what I was writing, it didn't really matter as much that I was only making a few cents on what I was earning, becausue I was making connections and friends with people on the platform. So, if all you do is spend an hour a day going and finding people you think you would be friends with and engaging with them on the posts and writing a valuable commentt, that is gonna make their day or increase the value of their post, Tha's a huge way to add value to the platform.
Closing Remarks
- 1:09:08 @aggroed: I can also share that the MinnowSupport Project here, we're gonna try to keep growing this, and as we get more and more new members as part of the STEEM platform, we're gonna try to onboard them and educate them... Actally, I hope that @lukestokes, you in particular will help work with us some more, whether that through a radio show or some time... You have a passion for the education of people on the channel or in the block. So, this is one of the best spots to get that education. I invite you to go to that with us. I also think that we need outreach. I am hoping to expand just how much the MSP-Waves Broadcast.., and what capabilities we have with that. Especially with higher SBD amounts, we can start paying people to be on. this radio station with us and try to drag a variety of celebrites to be on here. I also try to think of novel to go raise some money for MSP-Waves and getting developement and if I can hammer out some detail: It might be a new way to bring money into the platform to try to figure out a way to get investment opportunities working here to again, fgure out ways to go combine... There are people that have that impression of the big, evil whales. I am oftentimes thinking, well, change the word from whale to investor. We ar not gonna attract lots of people here and raise the price of STEEM by just calling them big evil whales. If this becomes a good place for invstment, even trying to think about ways that we can use this platform to lauch companies, communities, whatever, can help us grow quite substantially. I think and believe that this media platform in it's current state, there is more we can do, but this is a place that I can dedicate a lot of time and grow the media outlet out of STEEM I think would help quite a bit.
End of Panel Session Hour 2(2)
End of Transcript
Next Forums:
From @aggroed's summary post:
Saturday Dec 13th at 11am
"we'll host the next Steem Panel Discussion
This panel hasn't been formed yet, but you can be sure that movers and shakers on the platform will be present to talk about their vision for the Steem platform, and what we as a community need to do to rise up to the challenges we're facing."
Saturday Dec 27 at 11am we'll host a Crypto Growth Forum
"Steem is just one part of a larger crypto ecosystem. I'm going to use the mspwaves broadcast station to reach out to other crypto communities to see if we can't unite the clans a little more than we have to date."
Useful Links
- Part-1 was be published Sunday, Dec 10, 2017.
- @aggroed's original Post
- Panel Discussion Part 1 Video
https://steemit.com/steempanel/@aggroed/the-panel-discussion-was-a-great-success - Panel Discussion Part 2 Video
https://steemit.com/steempanel/@aggroed/the-panel-discussion-was-a-great-success
This forum has done to Crypto Education what @aggroed's and @isaria's Peace Academy do for achieving Peace, Abundance and Liberty in our ever growing Minnowsupport community.
Thanks @aggroed for spear heading these discussions and involving the community and** MSP-Waves** listeners so effectively.
An new Steem Panel Discussion will air December 13th and the next Steem Growth Forum going live Dec 27th.
Make sure to let @aggroed and the MSP Leadership team know what you like to hear discussed by the esteemed panel of Steemit movers and shakers.
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Christopher "The Hat" Hatfield @globocop
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I was sad I only made the last half hour of the discussion, but glad I made it at all, and to be able to hear the recording, and see this transcript.
Thanks!
It was a rich 2nd hour. Glad you will be able to review. Valuable stuff. :)
I have focused on a narrow set of issues that I reckon I understand, and this panel has really helped me to understand the broader issues facing cryptos, Steem, and Steemit, now in into the future.
I also reckon I have overestimated my understanding of the issues I thought I had grasped =p
Thanks for your dedicated help and assistance to us all!
I think the suggestion to read the White and Bluepapers is good. I shall make time for that.
I've been threatening to read the blue paper for weeks now. Putting it off has become some kind of 'thing'. It's sad. I'm mental =p
1:03:22 @timcliff says that the blue paper is an easy read - so that s something that encourages me to actually do read it! :)
I just read the STEEM Bluepaper. It's only seven pages and v easy to understand. Go for it!
Interesting subject - however, not relevant to this post, and it could therefore be consideered SPAM. Please use care when commenting or risk flagging.
Thanks for completing the transcript. It's not so easy to do. Having both steem and Steem Dollar is the best but I think it's cutting down on the rewards.
@seyiodus.
Rewards are also tied to SteemPower. So holding STEEM or SBD will do nothing for rewards - but just now it's an opportunity to multiply STEEM and convert it to much more STEEM power than it would normally be the case when SBD is around 1 USD.
Hmm, Thanks for that. I will power up now. I don't think that SBD will come down back to 1 USD soon. This is a great opportunity for us.
This post has been resteemed from MSP3K courtesy of @r0nd0n from the Minnow Support Project ( @minnowsupport ).
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