Hello Steemians,
As Witness Candidate and Startup Company that hopes to run a content business on Steem blockchain, we would like to express our opinions regarding what is to be included and excluded from coming SMT platform and from future hard forks
Steem Power for What?
Recently, book information pages catalogued by @bukdb have been systematically downvoted. The intention was to have book information pages on blockchain for eternal URL preservation, and to let publishers, bloggers and others point to them in their book reviews, blogs and so on.
Yes, we admit that it was on the borderline between legitimate use of SP/blockchain and spamming(or whatever you may call).
After this fiasco, we decided to post them in the future with "decline payout". No voting, no judgement from the community but preservation of the book information page. Nice and clean.
Suddenly we don't need SP any longer(except a few thousands for RC in writing on blockchain). Surely, there is a good way of using it. Right?
What is the right way of using SP?
The all agreed upon and legitimate way of using SP is to read and vote on good articles for curation payout. I believe no serious business will be able to meet this judgement. They will eventually end up with direct/indirect way of automatic votes to the people/postings that meet their business purpose.
So, how has the world responded to this fair and just community of steemit?
Let's take a look at SP rankings:
And let's compare this with the statistics written two years ago:
Steem Power Statistics - Steemit Business Analytics
Two years ago, 16 whales held more than 1M SP and now the count is only 14. Extending the bracket, It was 36 on or above 500K two years ago and the count is 38 today. For two years with 8+ % inflation annually, the total steem power hasn't increased. In reality, the total value of SP in two years has downed to less than 1/10 of that amount two years ago.
Why? Simple answer: There is no point of having SP (unless you really like reading all the good articles from steemit. I honestly would rather read Medium for that).
Please allow us to share some opinions with you regarding SMT or future hard forks after spending about 2 years on steemit.
Steemit is a Dapp, no more. And it should succeed or fail on its own.
Let Steemit issue a new coin for its own use using SMT preserving all the rules and communities. Let it prosper or fail on its own. Community will choose to stay or leave on their own judgement.
Remove inflation capability from Steemit
Let them inflate their coin, not Steem. After SMT, no Dapp is supposed to inflate platform currency.
Inflation only for keeping the blockchain
Inflation should be minimum. Even interest for SP is not necessary(currently 2.5% or similar). Paying for witnesses may be the minimum.
Flexbile Rules: SMT projects should be able to reset the rules
For example, it can add "blocking" capability that blocks users completely(even no positive/negative voting). Certain social media is not a place for public judgement. Let them create their own social media based on their judgement.
Certain social media may choose to go with zero payout(no inflation on its coin).
Certain social media may choose to go with "membership only" model, which requires either price tag to follow or acceptance from other members.
Question: Will SMT support this flexibility? If not, what's the point?
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I support your arguments. And I am sure many more will support it.
I'm actually in the middle of writing a post about this topic, but my current opinion is essentially that Steem shouldn't have a reward pool as it's too nuanced towards the needs and wants of its too diverse group of users.
Instead, I would propose something similar. Move the current economic model to its own SMT and those who disagree with it or believe other rules will be more successful can do so with their own SMT. This would also prevent our civil war around HF21 EiP.
I agree. I've written a post about this few months ago (https://steemit.com/steem/@therealwolf/steem-2020-reducing-inflation-to-less-than-2). This didn't include the SPS, but we should be able to achieve an inflation pool of less than 3% and probably even less than 1% of the next few years.
For future Steem, the idea could be to advertise the vesting inflation (probably also increase it a bit) or to remove the staking inflation completely.
Use case for Steem(power) would be for resource credits and as the base layer for SMTs. For example: Create an SMT, burn STEEM.
Anyway, important conversation to have. Steem is a tough thing to manage as it's quite decentralised in comparison to almost all other projects in existence. And we're currently lacking a real vision of what Steem is supposed to be.
First of all. Thank you for sharing your views on this and giving some suggestions for solutions.
As for use-cases Steem Power can have for a StartUp in the present situation, I believe there are still quite a few (although I agree with much of your critique). Some examples may be to incentivise authors to create content marketing material for buk.io. Could you also host a blog for book reviews? Or what other form of content could you host that could bring eyeballs to your product?
As for the other suggestions, there's a very significant portion (perhaps even majority at this point) of stakeholders and witnesses who agree that we need to review the role of inflation-derived rewards in a post-SMT Steem. I think this is a conversation that has to start sooner rather than later in order to build a comprehensive strategy for what Steem will be, what key value propositions it will deliver, and how it will accomplish solving some of the key problems worth solving that Steem was always intended to do.
I would be very happy to talk to you guys directly both with regards to how buk.io that use Steem to grow, and also how we can develop Steem further from here.
You raised very important points and questions. As I was working on a potential new feature for communities, I have also been thinking about a potential separation of utility. STEEM remaining resource token and other SMTs could be various utility tokens.
There could be SMTs based on:
attention value; that has native ads (an optional feature I'm working on for hivemind communities, details on my blog). Could be zero inflation as well.
subscription model; where a unit of SMT represents a membership and certain rights within that community
and more...