The Facebook comparison is not really valid. Other than sharing the word social there is little resemblance. Steem is somewhat like reddit, also somewhat like a blogging platform, maybe a bit like youtube (the channel organization and commenting features; Steem is not a video hosting service, although videos get linked there regularly). The functionality is nothing at all like Facebook. Whether or why anyone would use it I can't say. The token won't really matter and isn't even particularly visible to end users though, since the content rewards will be paid in a smart coin (USD pegged).

EDIT: The above is about Steem. I don't know enough about Synereo to comment on whether it might be more related to Facebook or whether its token has value.

Yes the staking pool is still open, but has only small users, so the stake rate is fairly low. It does consistently stake every few days or so.

Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1200703.0

Post there or PM me if interested in joining.

Just think of it as a big multisig wallet where people pool a bunch of money and then vote on how to spend it. The rest of the gibberish is obfuscation.

Factual account:

It was announced in public on an ANN thread at launch, the full source code was released. There were no real instructions and no binaries. No real feature list was provided, nor development plans. You had to figure it all out on your own. That was done deliberately to give the developer an advantage in mining, and they said so on the thread. Later the dev wrote a blog post about it.

There was one relaunch after the first few days, and it is disputed whether was shenanigans or not (someone accused the devs of doing it because the devs' miners crashed and others got to mine too much; the devs claim a serious bug required it and this is verifiable in github). Even if it were, the devs didn't get much of an edge from it, if at all, since the relaunch was announced in advance and the same conditions as above applied to the relaunch as well.

If you were able to figure it out, you were on a level playing field with the developers, and it ran as pure PoW with flat mining rewards for a week. Pure PoW then continued for three weeks with declining (but still good) rewards before switching to a hybrid system with 90% DPoS, 5% PoW, and 5% runner-up DPoS (meaning those who aren't voted in to the witness set still get to produce blocks occasionally; if you just vote for yourself this is somewhat like PoS). At some point during the month, when the devs had mined as much as they wanted, they turned off their miners and let others mine at reduced difficulty.

I had no inside information or affiliation with the devs and I was able to mine a good chunk (roughly 1.5% of the total), but still the devs mined probably about 80% as their plan worked as intended. If I hadn't made one logistical mistake (my own fault -- no way to blame the devs for it), my stash would be about 3-4x larger.

You can only fund it using ETH, so mostly the ETH community is a reasonable inference, though we can only speculate how many bought ETH specifically for that purpose.

The DAO everyone is talking about is something like a decentralized crowdfund or investment fund that has collected $150+ million worth of ETH in the past few weeks.

Seems legit.

You can dump on an exchange as soon as it starts trading, but to actually withdraw your ETH from the DAO takes quite a while. I've read around a month and a half. First you have to split your shares from the main DAO, which takes time, then you would need to make and approve a proposal within your own DAO to pay out the ETH, and the proposal process a minimum required time period.

The base supply for variable rewards (each block pays out a tiny fraction of the remaining base supply, so as a result the block reward continuously decline slowly) is about 18.4 million. Once the reward reaches a minimum of 0.3/minute (0.6 per block given the current 2 minute blocks, though that could change) it will stay there forever. In theory this means the total supply is infinite, but once it reaches the 0.3/minute level the rate of growth will be very slow, <1% per year.

A blockchain-based social media platform, somewhat resembling reddit:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1466593.0

That explains lot. A bit early but still roughly within the same timeframe as many of the IOTA and Waves ICO shill accounts

It is curious that you seem to know so much about Monero, Cryptonote, etc. (not really) yet you claim to not care about anon coins and there is no evidence of you ever paying attention to one.

My guess, you are a sock puppet part of an organized (likely paid or affiliated) crew who promote certain coins (Waves, darkdigitalducknote, etc.) and attack others (Monero).

It's pretty clear what is going on here, and pretty much the same thing that has been going on for years, although I can't really blame you guys nor your employer, since it still seems to work to some extent (investors are dumb).

No it doesn't, they are using the old cryptonote block swapping code.

You need to get out more. The whole world isn't crypto traders moving from coin to coin. Many people who have barely heard of crypto at all (certainly have heard of little beyond Bitcoin) are starting to follow Eth/DAO now. That does't mean they will all invest, but it also doesn't mean they won't.

Coinbase is adding ETH to their exchange. It's not in the wallet, but it's only a click away. That's an easy onramp for 500 million (or more?) potential investors.

"Whatever man" = yes I'm obviously lying, but I don't care because I'm a disturbed troll with a serious mental disorder.

I don't hate you, I feel compassion. Get help.

The off-chain message proposal is a good model, in principle. It includes a mechanism for paying a fee on-chain (after all that's the only way you can pay a fee), but the content and most of the interaction is off chain. Even that might become unscalable if the volume of usage is extremely high (so too many fees being paid) but we can address that if and when it happens. For now the bigger issue with Monero is empty blocks, not too many transactions.

Er, no. I paid him to find vulnerabilities in Monero which he posted about many times (though none particularly serious -- still useful effort).

So like I said, read the link above, do some introspection, and get help. You are mentally ill.

Good question. It isn't a problem I've thought a lot about but I think something like my idea for off-chain messaging with on-chain fee payment is probably a good foundation. Listing items, making offers/purchases, etc. could all be messages. Identity, rating, reputations,  web-of-trust, etc. are a tricker problems and probably need some other solution.

Search is unsolved, and openbazzar got a lot of things about the infrastructure obviously wrong (running over UDP which is incompatible with Tor - WTF?, people need to leave their computers on to serve a store - WTF?)

Get help

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2014/02/internet_troll_personality_study_machiavellianism_narcissism_psychopathy.html

I have done some software development in my life yes. My primary role on Monero is a core team member, who are the stewards of the project. Some of us look at the code sometimes, others not at all. I'm somewhere in the middle.

BTW, the github search function is broken and does not find all my commits (likely applies to other searches as well).