Sort of. There was an "official" rename from SBD to SMD to SD. Then all the exchanges listed it as SBD so almost everyone is calling it that now.

Neither.

I think it is becoming somewhat difficult for a direct competitor to overcome the first-mover advantage, especially given that no direct competitors are even ready yet, Steem is still growing quickly, and the platform is improving at a reasonable pace.

But I wouldn't say impossible or even highly improbable. (I would say, though, that, for any particular competitor identified in advance, it is reasonably improbable.)

If growth stalls then the odds shift significantly.


I agree with that and I think I said so earlier in this thread in words similar to these: Most new ventures fail. Most cryptocoins fail. The odds for Steem (or anything else), in absolute terms, are probably not that good. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.


Correct.

I'm not sure what Parker's servers are. Google suggested it has something to do with Minecraft, which I've never followed. Maybe you can elaborate and we can consider what lessons might be learned. We talked a bit about the issue of attacks against witnesses within the past few pages.


I have been buying ETC for a week as part of rebalancing my crypto holdings. I might be done buying it for now, even though it still has potentially significant upside.

I did see your post yesterday about it, and I agreed with it, but most of my position was already established.

This way you can't:

SteemServices is not "official" it is a consortium of a few whales (not me) who do marketing and provide other supporting services for the platform. That's a pretty good number of followers for them at half the official twitter. I doubt they literally bought them but they may have run some sort of promotion to encourage it, I don't remember.

I'm not. They ran the ordinary node which writes to a database. Real world load patterns are of course unknowable and I don't know how realistic any of these tests were but there is also a pretty (or very) wide margin between running on ordinary cheap unoptimized hardware and something actually optimized to host a database.

I'm pretty sure ability to handle only the computational load is much, much higher, but that is completely unrealistic, so pointless to even quote those "Wow!" numbers.

There is a deployment scaling issue in that the database not fully ACID and recovery from corruption is slow (more precisely will become slow if the tx volume increases; currently it isn't too bad). The only way to deal with that currently is with redundant systems and trailing backups. It is a pain in the ass, but workable.


Yes I agree there.


Also there.


Bitcoin transaction volume has steadily increased. It may have finally gotten to the point where recent blocks just can't be indexed on cheap hard drives any more (using Bitcoin Core). i don't know what happened with the mouse and keyboard being dead though.

It kind of depends what you mean by make your money. You can certainly achieve good gains based on continued development and adoption a niche of privacy-focused individuals, private store of wealth, certain niche markets that require decentralized payments, etc. But the enormous gains that come with even realistic prospects for mainstream adoption of any crypto won't come as long as there is no perception of there being any need for it. Of course, if that perception does occur, it will probably be too late to get in cheap...

Okay I misunderstood then. FWIW. LMDB does do most writing to the end of the file, not randomly. Of course any database must some point do some random writes, but it is minimized. I think the main reason for Monero having a high user-perceived impact is just that it is optimized to do a lot of precessing in a short term. When you take the sync time from several days down to an hour and do the same work, the intensity is obviously vastly increased. Probably some work is needed on backgrounding and throttling it better (i.e. take two hours on the same equipment at least while the computer is otherwise in use, but in a less annoying way)

I don't know the details of the database in Steem/Graphine but several different people have said they've tested it at 100x the current transaction volume of Steem and had no problems with ordinary hardware. That takes daily active users to about 4 million, or higher with better hardware.

The person who literally is an expert on that (with a decade of experience developing databases for SSDs), said that particular FUD from an extremely shady competitor was "full of shit" (direct quote). (I also refuted it separately by measuring that routine laptop use generates SSD write volume that vastly dwarfs Monero's). In fact, he replied to you specifically in detail as to why your inexpert concern trolling on the matter was displaying ignorance. So why are you repeating it?

Anyway that is off topic to Steem. The blockchain can clearly scale to orders of magnitude more than current usage. Whether it runs into problems at some point is an issue, but not one for the short term, even with fairly rapid growth.

Front end including the web server. You are still incorrect.


Yes but the blockchain scaling isn't the issue there.

Fundamentals meaning likely realizable value based on public perception that the incumbent financial system is broken and either needs replacement or even that there is an opportunity for such a replacement to possibly occur. That perception died a slow death during the period since 2008 (crypto hard core excluded), but mostly since 2010-2011. Prior to that it was still widespread.

The main thing I disagree with there is that Bitcoin investors are almost entirely irrelevant. If it doesn't gain interest and investment from outside of cryptocurrency circles, then it is useless and will fail. That is the entirely of the value proposition here; I'm surprised you don't see that.

You are certainly incorrect about scaling, at least on the front end portion. I'm not sure whether the blockchain can scale to the necessary degree without redesign, but that certainly won''t be a problem for quite a while.

No you weren't but some do and stylistically it is very similar. Substance may be different, or not.


I'll consider it

Anyway, I never claimed Steem is perfect nor that it will clearly succeed, but it does have a big first mover advantage, isn't terrible, has decent size user base for a crypto (even factoring in the large number of scammer accounts) and is still growing. Thus, I don't think it is certainly doomed. Uncertainty prevails.


I have bought what I would consider to be a lot of STEEM as part of various trading strategies. I'm not just plainly dumping it. And FWIW, I just powered up 10K STEEM two days ago, but I'm not going to claim that is a massive increase to my investment. As I said earlier, I already have plenty, and increasing significantly from here would be a bad call even if I think it is moon-worthy.

Nothing was gifted to me either (the same can not be said necessarily of others who could have been tipped off, but I certainly wasn't). I may have found it lying around on a forum, but to be clear I did risk significant time and resources mining it. I made the decision to do that after evaluating the prospects and I wouldn't have done so had I found it to have no chance of success.

This is a large portion of my thinking about cryptocurrency. If you were around since 2011 as I was then you can appreciate the enormous shift in public confidence in the incumbent financial system. Crypto is surviving and even to an extent thriving despite a five-year trend in the fundamentals of perception that are hugely negative, but I don't really see a moon type event in any crypto without that trend reversing in a big way.

Does this remind anyone besides me of the wall observer thread?

No but it was only a relatively short time in this thread before the above exchange. Shouldn't be hard to find.

The basic idea was to get a hash of the message mined into the blockchain (for example doing a tiny transaction and putting the hash of the message in the payment ID), and paying a fee. The mined hash is then honored by the p2p network to allow relaying that specific message for some limited period like two weeks. This doesn't give a direct incentive to the nodes but at least it minimizes the bloat on the blockchain and prevents cost-free spamming of the p2p.

Replied elsewhere:


(I mentioned paid account because the member to whom I replied has a Newbie account. If your bitcointalk account is ranked up then getting a Steem account from me is free. The cost of a paid account is equal to the market value of the minimum SP balance in a new account, currently around $10.)

There are currently no email signups. You can either use Facebook, Reddit, PM me for a paid account, get mining working and mine yourself an account, or wait for other signup methods.

In my opinion the best way to assess the overall trend is this:

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com (link may not work; if not then type in steemit.com when you get redirected to a query page)

Internal statistics are highly skewed by things like low level scammers mining $10 free accounts. But as long as web traffic is increasing and engagement statistics are relatively constant then we know the (non-attritted; active) user base is growing.

The alexa stats currently show a slowing of growth recently but still a high overall growth rate. The ranking has dropped from 50K+ to 20K over the course of a couple of weeks.

This approach will of course need to be replaced if alternate web site and/or clients take hold, but that hasn't happened yet.

75% of the post value goes to the author. 25% goes to the voters.

Of the portion going to the author, half is in Steem Dollars and can be immediately cashed out. Half is in Steem Power which takes two years to cash out (but many users are not even trying to cash them out at this point).

So for a $5000 post, about $3750 would go to the author and of that $1875 could be immediately cashed out. Currently Steem Dollars are trading below par which reduces the value somewhat more, but still probably something like $1500 or more could be in your pocket as fast as it takes to trade the crypto and cash out the Bitcoin.

I hope that didn't constitute mumbling.