Powered down SP goes to STEEM.

If there was one huge power down (I haven't looked) that would probably be the 'steemit' account. All the rest of power downs happen at more or less random times and are not synchronized. I don't know what Steemit's plans are for their powered down STEEM coins other than the long term plan they have stated to give away 40% to new accounts and sell 20%. They have at various times turned on and off the power down on the 'steemit' account.

It certainly does seem plausible that traders would be watching that.


I'm not sure I'm following this but let me try to explain it clearly.

The vesting fund contains STEEM POWER. That STEEM POWER can only be converted to STEEM (1:1) according to the power down rules (1% per week, etc.). STEEM can be converted to STEEM POWER (1:1) by powering up.

The vesting fund can be denominated as VESTS, which represent shares of the vesting fund. VESTS are created and destroyed by:

1. Power ups (creates new VESTS)
2. Power downs (destroys VESTS)
3. Rewards paid in SP (creates new VESTS, and SP is added to the vesting fund so as to not dilute the vesting fund)

The exchange rate is the number of SP in the vesting fund divided by the number of VESTS. The exchange rate is modified whenever new SP are added to the vesting fund as anti-diluation payments. This increases the exchange rate per VESTS but does not change the number of VESTS.


Correct.

The signature is the data. Imagine one bit per signature. That's enough to transfer short links without too many signatures (but it isn't hard to do better).

You can easily encode data in the amounts of payments. If amounts are hidden you can encode data in the number of outputs, or if number of outputs is fixed, you can encode data in the timing of payments.

There are a million ways. How contrived these measure get will be a function of how much effort is put into suppressing it.

The sender can change the data slightly which produces a different signature. This can be used to encode whatever data you want. If the data is encrypted or otherwise obfuscated then it is between difficult and mathematically impossible to distinguish it from random.

I didn't say the signature has to match, but it can still encode data.

You can employ countermeasures, They may increase the cost of encoding the data, but for things like links, the amount of data that needs to be shared is pretty low, and the value of sharing them may be very high. This becomes a likely-unwinnable arms race.


Good questions. They'll certainly all be removed from the web site. Beyond that we are in uncharted territory for the most part. Bitcoin had CP links mined into it, and probably other illegal numbers. So far that has not become a major problem. Steem might force the issue.

This is little different from any other blockchain. There are links to CP and probably some other bad stuff mined into Bitcoin's blockchain.

Links are perhaps the least problematic since there is always someone else you can go to to try to get the data taken down.

It is very hard to prevent people from storing data on a blockchain. Even if you just store hashes, transactions, signatures, etc. all can be used/abused/misused (take your pick) to store data.

I used the term to refer to Bitshares which did have two Larimers directly and publicly involved. Steemit does not.

(I'm not sure I would agree that I ever trolled them; mostly prior to Steem/it I ignored them; sorry r0ach, even true when you were a Bitshares pumper.)

Regarding the "one blockchain to rule them all", that never came from me, so I'm not going to address that straw man. I'm agnostic on how strong network effects are on blockchains, meaning, in the inverse, how likely it is for there to be many of them. I'm even agnostic on whether any blockchains are useful enough to survive long term.

I agree. I place little value on the analysis of internal blockchain data that I've seen so far because I think there is a lot of account scamming abuse, along with non-abuse account creation that doesn't come from actual users (such as what was and is needed for mining). We don't have any good data on the magnitude of these nor how it has changed over time. I wouldn't rule out that someone could analyze internal usage data and convincingly account for these other factors, but I haven't see it.

I think the Alexa trend is mostly valid (and shows growth, but somewhat slow and slowing). I did see the earlier comments you are someone else posted about Alexa rank being bogus but I think that mostly applies to smaller sites like individual commerce sites and blogs. When applied to sites with wider public use, especially when reasonably highly-ranked, I think it is useful. For example, that steemit is now higher ranked than bitcointalk is a reasonable result consistent with the rate of posting and the number of active users I seen posting. That this is only recently the case is also consistent with my experience.

(And by "mostly valid" I mean that it shows a positive growth trend only. I don't think it has much if any quantitative meaning.)


Steemit has about 5000 unique daily users (in practice slightly fewer because of bots). Reddit has about 1 million unique daily users (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic). I guess reddit has bots too, so not sure how that part compares.

The ratio is only about 200:1. I don't know if that is a good or bad stat in terms of prospects.

1 million reddit users is not surprising to me. Most people I talk to are not reddit users. Occasionally I run into them. With Facebook the experience is the opposite.

Essentially all of them when you consider the KYC restrictions. The restrictions on XMR are more severe (and additive), however.

I'm not suggesting that these KYC restrictions are not serving their stated purpose, but they do have a secondary effect in practice.

Which do you think has a higher risk of hidden insolvency? An exchange that lets everyone withdraw as much as they want at any time and never imposes restrictions or delays or limits, or one that has delay and limits, even if ostensibly for another purpose?

Bottom line: Hold your own private keys (and do so carefully).

Hoskinson's post had nothing at all to do with Steemit; he just posted a blog there, as have many other people including a number of prominent cryptocurrency (and non-cryptocurrency) personalities having nothing at all to do with its development. It was related to his returning to work on Ethereum (via ETC), where he was one of the original founders. I also don't think he has anything to do with Steemit; your claim he is an insider is unsupported and probably incorrect. Just because he once worked with some of the same people at a different company/coin doesn't make him an insider.

As for others prominent people blogging there who may, and probably will, be quoted on this forum based on the substance of their posts, I'd list Jeff Berwick (known popularly as "The Dollar Vigilante"), Benbrick (successful songwriter), Rick Falkvinge (Pirate Party founder), Larkin Rose (tax protester), Brenda Zambrano (Playboy Playmate), Barry Cooper (drug war opponent), and many others. None of these people are insiders or have any involvement with running Steemit afaik.

I had several posts of mine deleted from this forum that were in the Steem ANN thread, presumably because they contained links to the site. I was not the author of the Steemit posts. The links related to posts that were highly relevant to the adoption of the coin and therefore speculation on the coin. This is discussion right at the core of the entire purpose of the Altcoin section of this forum. I strongly protest the deletion of those posts.

The Dash Nation thread is not the Dash ANN thread. It is another discussion thread created solely for the purpose of link spamming.

So I agree with most of your comments here, except that the moderation that is occurring does not follow those guidelines either in the positive or the negative. Change is needed.

It discourages withdrawals more directly, and encourages keeping balances on the site. That's actually a bit of a red flag. When Cryptsy was hiding its insolvency it introduced higher withdrawal fees.

You're still ignoring the difference between decentralized control (which doesn't really exist here) and decentralized transparency, which does exist here.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake, whether it is Steemit or Facebook. For any such owner to fork the blockchain and censor it would be transparent. We already know, because Steemit Inc has told us (aside from common sense) that the steemit.com web site may be censored, and users who want to avoid that censorship will have to use different ways of accessing the blockchain. The blockchain is still censorship-resistant. Part of that resistance comes from the unavoidable transparency inherent in forking it to censor it. (A level of transparency that does not exist when Facebook, Twitter, etc. censor with no visibility or accountability by secretly manipulating the behavior of their servers.)

BTW, The term "The Larimers" is trolling (or perhaps you have been successful trolled by someone else with a "The Larimers" obsession) and false unless you have some evidence of more than one Larimer being in a position of authority. Ned is not a Larimer.

(I read your footnote.)

If the entire system is replaced with a web site and the blockchain is entirely irrelevant and ignored, then sure. But then we don't need to discuss stake at all.

This is hard to do while still retaining the token rewards scheme. To get there, exchanges and others would need to accept the new change/fork to the back end. This change would be transparent. In other words, it is still a nuclear option.

It doesn't matter who owns the stake. Censorship still requires a nuclear option, no matter who pushes the button.

Sweeping wouldn't reduce the actual costs though. As long as people make many small deposits and Poloniex doesn't impose any kind of fees on the deposit side (which aren't a standard in the industry so might be a tough sell) then those costs are going to be shifted to Poloniex or its trading and withdrawing customers. Guess which one Poloniex chooses?

Paying higher than average network fees are another matter though. I have no idea why they do that.

I don't see a particular sentence but the concept is woven throughout the SBD section, for example in describing SBD as analogous to convertible notes, mentioning that conversion can only be done in one direction, etc.


First of all converting SBD does not deliver VESTS, it delivers liquid STEEM (which can then be converted to VESTS via a power up). Second of all, VESTS are fungible so there is no such thing as "which VESTS".

A huge part of the censorship being done by sites like Twitter and Facebook is not due to legal action, it is done entirely at their own discretion, for marketing or political reasons, and they can do much of it invisibly. For example by just controlling which posts appear in Facebook feeds. If no one sees the post, then it doesn't matter that they didn't literally remove it. No one gets to scrutinize the algorithms/filters that Facebook uses to decide what shows up in feeds.

Any form of censorship of Steem/it would have to be explicit and would require fairly dramatic public action (such as electing their own witnesses and forking). At a minimum that is a gain in transparency.

It also means that the full nuclear option of a fork would have to be done even for small forms of censorship like deactivating a single account (unlike Twitter/Facebook/etc. who can do this with the push of a button). Again this is a large gain in terms of censorship-resistence, in practice.

Answers (let me know if I missed something):

The supply of VESTS does not change at all when converting SD to STEEM. Not sure where you got that idea? I think VESTS are only created or destroyed by power up, power down, or rewards (that pay in SP/VESTS), unless I'm forgetting something.

If you sell SD on an exchange, literally nothing changes in terms of supply, just the owner of the existing token. That seems kind of obvious, no?

Yes changes in the price of STEEM (as reported by the oracles i.e. witnesses) between the time SD is created and when it is destroyed will influence the money supply (virtual supply; converted to real supply if and when the SD->STEEM conversion takes place). If I'm not mistaken that is covered in the white paper.

There is no special tagging of VESTS nor the STEEM/SP in the vesting fund.

Coinmarketcap's number is kind of made up. I think they excluded some of the steemit account but not all of it, but I'm not really sure. I've never been able to make much sense of their number, but I mostly ignore their market cap numbers on most coins anyway.

 

https://steemit.com/@stan

He has never had an officially-described role or title at Steemit afaik. Unofficially, I don' t know the relationship.

That looks correct. In addition to being a programming issue, VESTS may be more comfortable for traditional accounting since the number of units held doesn't change except in response to specific events (power up, power down, receiving rewards).

Sure at some point it may slow down a bit, but these are relatively small factors. If it gets to 50 million users and beyond then much of the value of the network will be things other than getting paid for your blog. Everyone in the world is not a blogger. Actually as I've stated earlier in these threads, already most people aren't going to (and shouldn't) be paid much because they don't produce much of value. They may get a few coins here and there which might be enough to seed the concept of crypto for them, but if it goes beyond that and there is utility on the network they want to access, they will earn (meaning direct business or employment type earnings, not blog rewards) or buy coins.


I would argue that 50-500 million users on Steem is highly improbable, but conditional on that happening, a very high (relative to current cryptos) market cap is almost a certainty.