Steemit how can this thing be workable long term?

[iamnotback]

I find that for every brilliant insight Dan Larimer has, he balances it off with something awful/too complicated/possibly sleazy.

Like the liquidity algo has been solved for 100 years...
Just (a) pay every liquidity maker and (b) charge every liquidity taker. Or just do (a) on Steemit.

So there is industry standard practice, but Steemit does something extremely unorthodox. Why?

Well, for one thing the price of STEEM on the Steemit-Market is constantly suppressed...
Right now STEEM costs about $4.45 USD on Polo... but only $3.09 USD on Steemit-Market (30% discount).

But when a n00b uses the Deposit Function to "Buy STEEM" with BTC...
Steemit Inc is charging $4.69 right now... then can just buy it back for $3.09.

Steemit Inc could be making $100,000/day or whatever off n00bs because they have a monopoly on BTC for STEEM deposits...
But for this to work they need fake "liquidity provider" whales to keep the Steemit-Market price suppressed.  

Personally, after about 300 trades I've sold STEEM on the Steemit-Market maybe 2-3 times (I'm always buying it there cheaper).

Call it a conspiracy theory, but I can't see any rational basis for the bizarre algos and market inefficiencies.

Baby Dan and Daddy Stan are serial crooks.  If anybody hasn't figured this out yet they are either brand new to crypto, not paying attention, or mentally retarded.

Yeah I agree with most all of that, except the part I highlighted in blue w.r.t. to my prior post.

Specifically the SP lockup and 1/9 debasement are the key points of design they did correctly. And kudos to them on this concept!

When I reveal my idea for the fixing the long-term funding model, then I think you will appreciate the SP aspect more. Must create exclusivity with a token else the dominant unit-of-account will always siphon away your transactions. Their plan to build a market place and all sorts of services for SP holders to spend their Steem as they cash out weekly, is not going to create any incoming demand for Steem except for the speculation bubble. They don't have a viable funding model. But I think I know what to do to make it viable.


Here was a list of some of the insider accounts, but apparently not all of them:

https://steemit.com/@steemit/transfers

https://steemit.com/@ned/transfers

https://steemit.com/@dantheman/transfers

Those are steem founders's wallets, they own a shit loads of steem yes i know. They own about 80% of steem .

[iamnotback]

Potential issues that I came across today

1) Someone pointed out the fact that steemit has no fees. My question was, ok, then how does it prevent spam?

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemship/the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete#@alexgr/re-steemship-the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete-20160719t214207846z

"1.) Problem: Fees. Solution: Steem has no transaction fee."

Question: Isn't that an attack vector where someone can just bloat the blockchain - in the order of terabytes? How is that avoided here?

I covered that upthread. They rate limit the transactions, which has some negative implications for certain potential applications. And there is a transaction fee, which is the cost of holding Steem while it is debased 9X more than SP (since SP can't be transacted).

A rate limit can only be effective along with size limitations. Otherwise if you have, say, a rate limit of 1 post per second per account, but no size limitations, then

-with one account
-you can make 86400 txs per day
-let's assume 20kb size

=1.7gb spam. If the txs are ike 100kb, that's 8.6gb per day.

At a more restrictive 2 sec between txs / 2kb per tx, you have 43200 txs per day x 2kb = 86mb. For a single account. If someone buys 100 such accounts, it's 8.6gb per day.

I'm really curious on how no fees can work.

Blockchains are good, but not really efficient in dealing with spam.

Their rate limiting is I think bandwidth limited.

I mostly agree there are issues with rate limiting. I had already criticized their rate limiting upthread.

This is a detail that needs to be dealt with, but IMO and AFAICS it is the not the highest priority issue for us to discuss right now.

[iamnotback]

Steemit really needs to work on their security! Some troll just crushed somebody's dream.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@bones/popular-post-gets-hacked

https://steemit.com/blockchain/@dan/does-blockchain-security-need-to-be-completely-reworked

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/02/29/bitcoin-vaults/

They are working on account vaulting and recovery features so that users can prove their identity in ways other than their chosen password, so that it becomes virtually impossible to steal someone's funds. So unless the hacker can also hack into your and your friend's other social networking accounts, then he can't maintain the preponderance of proof that he is the person who was hacked. This of course destroys centralization because you need to trust an oracle to confirm those facts external to the blockchain. If the facts are just the private keys on the blockchain, then it can remain decentralized but then the hacker only needs to crack all those passwords on the blockchain.

And even that doesn't stop the hacker from temporarily defacing their posts, causing a downvote destroying value. I don't see a good fix for this that doesn't involve a hardware wallet.

Bottom line is what I wrote on hackingdistributed above (see my comment there Shelby Moore III), which is that users really need to use hardware wallets. Basically when someone becomes popular at Steemit, they need to immediately be shipped a hardware wallet by the site. Dan is overcomplicating as usual!

Hardware wallets could be cheap in bulk production. Perhaps $10-$30 each manufactured in bulk in China.

https://www.ledgerwallet.com/products/3-ledger-hw-1
http://theblogchain.com/best-bitcoin-hardware-wallet/
https://bitcointrezor.com/
https://www.keepkey.com/
http://www.hardwarewallets.com/

The cost could be deducted from their SP balance.

Or the site could try to enforce hardened passwords. But still have the possibility of the hacker breaking in on the client's computer (and perhaps even Steemit's servers).

How many user accounts does Dan control? @dantheman, @dan ...? Between those two accounts I see 3.63 million SP owned by Dan.  I concerned about this because if we work to fix Steem and make it a $40 billion marketcap, then Dan's 3.63 million tokens become worth $1.5 billion. Smooth would become a half-billionaire simply for mining the stealthmine. Again I am an anarchist, so unless there is some compelling benefit to forking Steem, I would tend to just accept their lead. But a question is can they lead effectively? I am conflicted on this issue at the moment. Hoping for feedback.

[iamnotback]

LBRY intends to compete but I don't see what they have that is compelling:

DOA. Not paid to join. Referral programs can be Sybil attacked:

https://lbry.io/faq/referrals

Right there it tells me they don't appear to know what they are doing.

$1.2 billion marketcap? Why not listed on coinmarketcap? And what is the sign up rate (2000? but are those Sybil accounts)? Sounds like BS to me.

Can't find any info on how they plan to scale a PoW blockchain   It is proof-of-work I presume since they talk about ongoing token issuance.

No white paper!

Edit: it is based on Bitcoin block chain so I don't see how it can scale:

https://lbry.io/news/5-questions-about-lbry

Perhaps they are not putting most of the activity on the blockchain. Perhaps they are putting only the tokens on the blockchain. Even so, it won't scale!

Ah they don't have a clue about social networking. Users change names like the wind. Names are not as important as the connections or links.

https://github.com/lbryio/lbrycrd

Edit#2: they are praying for the arrival and correct functioning of Lightning Networks:

https://lbry.io/news/why-doesnt-lbry-just-use-bitcoin

Edit#3: they do plan to give away tokens and have a HUGE premine:

Currently, 250 thousand LBRY credits (LBC) are in circulation. Over the next year, that number will rise to roughly 80 million just through mining. LBRY Inc. has reserved 200 million for adoption programs, and we intend to deploy them widely over the coming years to give millions of users their first taste of a truly free market in media. There’s also another 200 million LBC split between a company reserve and charitable/institutional programs that might stay static for a while, but not forever.

But they are missing the key design innovation of Steem.

[iamnotback]

There sure are a lot of big names participating in this...investment scenario. Anything for a buck. Right fellas?

Wow respect, i see some people who usually stand on morale high ground here defending and shilling for such a scam mining.... wtf is going on here.

I'm as perplexed, trust no one.

soon this pyramid will collapse and everyone will look silly.

I notice none of you "holier than thou" types were able to provide a rebuttal to my post:

Morals are subjective. They are derived from religion and one's upbringing, and everyone forms their own version of morals as they experience life.

To some a "sneaky mine" is immoral. Others may liken it to starting a business, and equate it to the developers/organizers of a start up obtaining equity in their project. Are all start ups and corporations immoral? Is capitalism immoral? That is subjective...

To some 12% annual inflation is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. Others may liken it as a good way to gain a huge userbase quickly, then leverage that userbase in the form of profitable features that are yet to be implemented. Can a business not change its business plan, or never expand into other markets? To judge something based on exactly how it exists today instead of where it is headed in the future may be a mistake.

To some extent, this is true, but there are some universal moral standards. Which society condones lying? Where is that accepted moral behavior? In my opinion Steem was born of lies and perpetuates them today. Whether you want to call it a sneaky mine, instamine, premine, fast mine, or whatever, Steem loudly proclaimed in their three or four announce threads, "Fair launch! No premine, instamine, or fast mine!", when of course nothing could be further from the truth - the founders mined 80% of the coins generated during the short PoW phase by their own admission.

They perpetuate the lie by advertising, "Welcome to Steemit, decentralized and incentivized social media.", and generally plastering the word 'decentralized' wherever they possibly can. Of course it's not decentralized, the founders just mined 80% of the mineable coins, making themselves able to elect the vast majority of delegates in the DPoS validation scheme, not too mention wield the vast majority of the influence about who gets paid out and how much. Steem is decentralized like Turkey is a democracy.

Ultimately I think this dishonesty will contribute to the failure of this venture, in conjunction with an overly complex system of tokens and a failure to generate enough users to keep the bubble from deflating, but I'm sure the founders and very early adopters will walk away with a nice stash of BTC. C'est la vie.

Apparently all the activity and content goes on the blockchain, so if the blockchain is decentralized then anyone can create a user client for interacting with the blockchain, thus bypassing Steemit.com.

However, with apparently 80 - 90% of the tokens held by the few insiders who were in on the stealthmine, then a few individuals control the blockchain because with DPoS then stake can vote to change anything, including even a hard fork. So thus the authorities can go to these individuals and force them to censor content, sue them for hosting illegal content, etc.. I think Dan, Ned, smooth, etc have potentially placed themselves in legal jeopardy because of the nature of a DPoS blockchain.

I understand the plan is to distribute much of that 80% out to the new signups. But that is 57 million Steem tokens at 10 tokens per signup, so they need 5.7 million signups. Actually the might be possible. So do we trust them to award the Steem to new signups and how do we prevent Sybil attacks on signups? My gf signed up twice with her two Facebook accounts (but only one of her Steem accounts can be logged into, she only signed up 2X because of a bug in Steem or Steemit). The signup is the Sybil attack vulnerability. Earning on blog posts can't be Sybil attacked.

Note I also hold two Facebook accounts, but I only signed up once for Steem.

Without a premine, you can't incentivize new signups. Well you can by paying for the blog posts, but is the initial SP for signup may be one of the factors that causes people to join or are they joining for the big payouts for blogs regardless of the 10 SP signup bonus?

Would not paying a signup bonus work just as well?

Feedback to me please. As I am planning to call Ned Scott. Maybe they can be reasoned with.

I'd rather join them than fight them, assuming they are reasonable. I'll need to get verbal with the personalities and see if there is chemistry.

We as a community need to come together. I can't do all that work by myself. Who out there wants to go create this and do it more correctly? Raise your hand.

Dan has apparently been hard-headed in the past, but perhaps he is not entirely the one in control now and/or perhaps he is willing to relinquish some control. That is not to say Dan isn't a valuable asset. He can be if he is willing to allow issues to be decided by the community's wisdom.

Political shit is difficult. Vested interests and fighting I really hate loosing my time on that. But also we need to accomplish something big.

[iamnotback]

Seems to me that with everything public, the copyright holders can sue the creators of the blog posts.

So the copyright issue seems to be solved, as long as the stake of the DPoS can be well and widely distributed. Otherwise the authorities might try to sue those who control the stake.

Also why not put a hash of the content on the blockchain and keep the content stored separately. This will reduce blockchain bloat and make the blockchain not liable for the content! I hope readers will start to appreciate that I am a valuable developer asset to have on any project.

[smooth]

Well, for one thing the price of STEEM on the Steemit-Market is constantly suppressed...
Right now STEEM costs about $4.45 USD on Polo... but only $3.09 USD on Steemit-Market (30% discount).

This has very little to do with the internal market (the same prices prevail externally) and you are confusing units.

STEEM costs $4.45 USD on Polo, but only $3.09 SBD on Steemit-Market.

Now check the price of SBD on Polo and you will see that 1 USD != 1 SBD (in fact 1 SBD = about $1.40 USD). That's because the pegging method in use has not been very effective overall, but this is another issue. At various times SBD has been above, below and about at par with USD.

But when a n00b uses the Deposit Function to "Buy STEEM" with BTC...
Steemit Inc is charging $4.69 right now... then can just buy it back for $3.09.

No, see above. Also the "Buy STEEM" function doesn't use the internal market. It can't because the internal market doesn't trade BTC, USD or any other external currency.

Potential issues that I came across today

1) Someone pointed out the fact that steemit has no fees. My question was, ok, then how does it prevent spam?

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemship/the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete#@alexgr/re-steemship-the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete-20160719t214207846z

"1.) Problem: Fees. Solution: Steem has no transaction fee."

Question: Isn't that an attack vector where someone can just bloat the blockchain - in the order of terabytes? How is that avoided here?

I covered that upthread. They rate limit the transactions, which has some negative implications for certain potential applications. And there is a transaction fee, which is the cost of holding Steem while it is debased 9X more than SP (since SP can't be transacted).

A rate limit can only be effective along with size limitations. Otherwise if you have, say, a rate limit of 1 post per second per account, but no size limitations, then

-with one account
-you can make 86400 txs per day
-let's assume 20kb size

=1.7gb spam. If the txs are ike 100kb, that's 8.6gb per day.

At a more restrictive 2 sec between txs / 2kb per tx, you have 43200 txs per day x 2kb = 86mb. For a single account. If someone buys 100 such accounts, it's 8.6gb per day.

I'm really curious on how no fees can work.

Blockchains are good, but not really efficient in dealing with spam.

There are two levels of limits. The first level is things like time per post. That doesn't consider size (other than limits on the size of a post) is somewhat circumventable by creating more accounts.

The second level is stake-limited bandwidth, is not circumventable, and is based on size.

The first limit is more intended to encourage reasonable behavior by people with a reputation, or perhaps more importantly by compromised accounts with a reputation. The second is the real anti-spam limit. You would run out of bandwidth and your network access would be suspended (until bandwidth recharges) long before spamming 8.6 GB/day.

[iamnotback]

The second level is stake-limited bandwidth, is not circumventable, and is based on size.

The second is the real anti-spam limit. You would run out of bandwidth and your network access would be suspended (until bandwidth recharges) long before spamming 8.6 GB/day.

As I had pointed out upthread, the tradeoff is the inability to accept surges in transaction activity beyond some threshold. I am not clear if there are any applications within the current Steemit usage which will suffer for that, but it is a limitation that wouldn't be there with transaction fees.

However, I don't see that as the major priority issue to discuss.

A higher priority spam issue is the bots which are polluting the comments. The bot will win the war of attrition against the users manually downvoting them. I don't see a good solution to that which doesn't involve transaction (comment posting) fees. Do you?

(eventually someone is going to wake up and realize I am a strong designer of technology combined with marketing talent, which is a rare combination especially given I can also code with the best of them ... and I am eager to work right now ... you guys don't want me to fork this ...)

Edit: a potential solution not employing transaction fees, is to fight bots with bots. Given my recent realization that minnows aren't financially motivated to curate thus curate on conscience, they could be incentized to install bots which fight back against other bots.

[iamnotback]

I am seriously toying with the idea of creating a clone with a decentralized client (which reads directly from blockchain) so it can't be DDoSed attacked (although I guess that is about the effectively the same as caching on servers and employing anti-DDoS) and which fixes all the flaws including the premine.

Everyone would start fair launch.

Who is with me?

Otherwise Ned Scott can get on the phone and let's talk about this.

But this is a lot of work. I would need other developers to join with me. Who wants to do this?

We need some leverage else they will probably not agree to dilute their premine.

As I said, I'd rather not fight. I'd rather see the community work together.

They've tapped a big idea. That idea needs to be done right. Those of you who are thinking the idea is worthless, I think I am going to change your mind.

There is a tremendous amount of work to duplicate this, even if forking the Graphene/Steem block chain code. So I am not sure if this is realistic. Would need some devs willing to help. Best would be to work with Dan and Ned if can attain synergy on changes that need to be made.

I am thinking most of dissenters aren't really interested in this project any way. And everyone who is interested is already vested in Steem, so they are unlikely to support a fair fork.

Also even with a fair fork, some of the whales of Steem could sell their Steem and buy into the new fork becoming a whale also. Although there would be more market competition. And they might be apprehensive to make the switch early enough.

[smooth]

But that is 57 million Steem tokens at 10 tokens per signup, so they need 5.7 million signups.

Tokens per signup is variable. The currently advertised promotion is $10 worth of Steem Power. Given the price increase that means tokens per new account are reduced to 2-3. In the future the promotion might changed.

Also most of the 57 million is held as SP which means it is earning more tokens. Of course if the price declines then a $10 effective signup bonus would require more tokens too.

@iamnotback, the license for the blockchain prohibits forking. It is more of a shared source model than purely open source. Graphine is open source but the fairly extensive Steem modifications are not.

[kjadB]

Got a reply:

Hi iamnotback,

add me on skype '[redacted]''

Thanks

Will call within 30 minutes.

Edit: note 45 minutes later, Ned and I didn't yet make contact. Will try again later. I have to rush home bcz my gf is locked outside the house and she hasn't eaten whole day and it is 10pm here (she was on job interviews).

Do a reboot with a better launch and you'll change crypto!

Back in November 2013 when NXT was all the rage a lot of crypto noobies realised a NXT clone with a better distribution and launch would attract lots of support and do very well. That's where NEM started (eventually becoming a new coin rather than just a clone), and now it's doing a lot better than NXT.

STEEM's distribution and launch is arguably a lot worse than NXT's, so a re-launch is a no-brainer, it's just a matter of who does it, and how the distribution and launch is made unambiguously more appealing than STEEM's.

[raphma]

I cant help with the development, but i would definitely put some investment in a "steem version 2.0" with a better distribution from the begin.

[CoinHoarder]

I'm not interested in doing a reboot. Dan and company is the glue that holds Steemit together. It is good they are vested for at least 2 years, because I guarantee you Steemit will improve by leaps and bounds over that time frame. Bitshares improved a ton from Bitshares 1.0 to Graphene, and I expect the same with Steem.

Mainly the only ones crying are those that "missed the boat", people that never gave Steemit a chance by posting content and curating, or sock puppets trying to prop up whatever non-STEEM bags they might be holding.

Most of the premine is being distributed to new people signing up. It is not a big deal. Let the trolls harp on about it... I am not going to waste any more time with them.

Let them miss out on Bitcoin 2.0, and watch how much louder they get as Steem approaches and passes Ethereum's market capitalization. It will be 2x worse at least.

[noobtrader]

I am seriously toying with the idea of creating a clone with a decentralized client (which reads directly from blockchain) so it can't be DDoSed attacked (although I guess that is about the effectively the same as caching on servers and employing anti-DDoS) and which fixes all the flaws including the premine.

Everyone would start fair launch.

Who is with me?

Otherwise Ned Scott can get on the phone and let's talk about this.

But this is a lot of work. I would need other developers to join with me. Who wants to do this?

We need some leverage else they will probably not agree to dilute their premine.

As I said, I'd rather not fight. I'd rather see the community work together.

They've tapped a big idea. That idea needs to be done right. Those of you who are thinking the idea is worthless, I think I am going to change your mind.

There is a tremendous amount of work to duplicate this, even if forking the Graphene/Steem block chain code. So I am not sure if this is realistic. Would need some devs willing to help. Best would be to work with Dan and Ned if can attain synergy on changes that need to be made.

I am thinking most of dissenters aren't really interested in this project any way. And everyone who is interested is already vested in Steem, so they are unlikely to support a fair fork.

Also even with a fair fork, some of the whales of Steem could sell their Steem and buy into the new fork becoming a whale also. Although there would be more market competition. And they might be apprehensive to make the switch early enough.

as i said many times, i will put some btc on your coin. this sounds like a good idea

[iamnotback]

My new blog post is about redoing what others already explained, but IMO failed to explain in a way that most readers could understand:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@anonymint/get-33-more-steem-for-your-steem-dollars

I am trying to demonstrate my varied capabilities. I had written the documentation for CoolPage myself.

I am also gently nudging users to power up to Steem Power. So I hope whales would upvote my post because I encourage the user to do the decision that is the best for the whales. If you believe in the long-term value of STEEM, then indeed powering up is the wisest move.


Lol, I deleted those posts and you guys had held them and then reposted them by quoting me. I had intended to remove those. It's cool. Once posted to the Internet, we loose control.

[iamnotback]

I'm not interested in doing a reboot. Dan and company is the glue that holds Steemit together.

Some would argue that Dan et al don't have the chops to solve the funding issue, so maybe they can't hold it together.

But one thing that comes to my mind are all the users who are becoming 2 year invested in Steem Power. As that builds momentum, it will be difficult to overcome.

But what is their attrition rate? We don't know yet as the data is not organized for us.

[AlexGR]

I am seriously toying with the idea of creating a clone with a decentralized client (which reads directly from blockchain) so it can't be DDoSed attacked (although I guess that is about the effectively the same as caching on servers and employing anti-DDoS) and which fixes all the flaws including the premine.

You overestimate how much people care about who owns what. Especially as far as a mainstream blogging/posting crowd is concerned. This only starts becoming their indirect consideration once they realize that the posting rewards are not spread evenly (which is normal up to a degree - not all content is the same, I mean more in terms of whale-touching-people-with-their-magic-wand).

What people would care seeing, is a better steemit in terms of ease of use and features. Better distributed rewards is a bonus (assuming that the model will improve in the future somewhat - or curators will do a better job, because there is a lot of human element involved). But to give thousands of dollars you need a marketcap. Steemit has that marketcap because it has first mover advantage + the limited liquidity (due to SP locked) system in place.

It's not that easy.

I propose you relax a week, immerse into steemit, check the various aspects, and see how it can be improved.

Also remember that radical redistribution of wealth would backfire - I remember Evan proposing the airdrop in darkcoin to dilute it and people almost crucifying him for proposing it. And that was when DRK had something like 2mn marketcap. So... when you have 400mn in marketcap and investors start getting in, you can't have a self-destructive moment where you decide to blow up the economy by distributing hundreds of millions. It's a double-edged knife...

[CoinHoarder]

There sure are a lot of big names participating in this...investment scenario. Anything for a buck. Right fellas?

Wow respect, i see some people who usually stand on morale high ground here defending and shilling for such a scam mining.... wtf is going on here.

I'm as perplexed, trust no one.

soon this pyramid will collapse and everyone will look silly.

I notice none of you "holier than thou" types were able to provide a rebuttal to my post:

Morals are subjective. They are derived from religion and one's upbringing, and everyone forms their own version of morals as they experience life.

To some a "sneaky mine" is immoral. Others may liken it to starting a business, and equate it to the developers/organizers of a start up obtaining equity in their project. Are all start ups and corporations immoral? Is capitalism immoral? That is subjective...

To some 12% annual inflation is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. Others may liken it as a good way to gain a huge userbase quickly, then leverage that userbase in the form of profitable features that are yet to be implemented. Can a business not change its business plan, or never expand into other markets? To judge something based on exactly how it exists today instead of where it is headed in the future may be a mistake.

To some extent, this is true, but there are some universal moral standards. Which society condones lying? Where is that accepted moral behavior? In my opinion Steem was born of lies and perpetuates them today. Whether you want to call it a sneaky mine, instamine, premine, fast mine, or whatever, Steem loudly proclaimed in their three or four announce threads, "Fair launch! No premine, instamine, or fast mine!", when of course nothing could be further from the truth - the founders mined 80% of the coins generated during the short PoW phase by their own admission.

They perpetuate the lie by advertising, "Welcome to Steemit, decentralized and incentivized social media.", and generally plastering the word 'decentralized' wherever they possibly can. Of course it's not decentralized, the founders just mined 80% of the mineable coins, making themselves able to elect the vast majority of delegates in the DPoS validation scheme, not too mention wield the vast majority of the influence about who gets paid out and how much. Steem is decentralized like Turkey is a democracy.

Ultimately I think this dishonesty will contribute to the failure of this venture, in conjunction with an overly complex system of tokens and a failure to generate enough users to keep the bubble from deflating, but I'm sure the founders and very early adopters will walk away with a nice stash of BTC. C'est la vie.

Implying the founders are keeping 100% of the 80% premine is disingenuous in and of itself. You condone lying too? Most of it is being given to people who register new accounts on Steemit.

No cryptocurrency is decentralized, as Anonymint will be happy to explain to you (or at least link to the 100 page thread where it was proven). Yet, all of them use the buzz word decentralized in advertising materials. If you support any other cryptocurrencies, and I am assuming you do since you're here in the first place, then you are being a hypocrite with this point too.

Either way you are being a hypocrite or dishonest, maybe you should not throw rocks from a glass house?

[AlexGR]

Potential issues that I came across today

1) Someone pointed out the fact that steemit has no fees. My question was, ok, then how does it prevent spam?

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemship/the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete#@alexgr/re-steemship-the-missing-link-has-steemit-revolutionized-micropayments-or-made-them-obsolete-20160719t214207846z

"1.) Problem: Fees. Solution: Steem has no transaction fee."

Question: Isn't that an attack vector where someone can just bloat the blockchain - in the order of terabytes? How is that avoided here?

I covered that upthread. They rate limit the transactions, which has some negative implications for certain potential applications. And there is a transaction fee, which is the cost of holding Steem while it is debased 9X more than SP (since SP can't be transacted).

A rate limit can only be effective along with size limitations. Otherwise if you have, say, a rate limit of 1 post per second per account, but no size limitations, then

-with one account
-you can make 86400 txs per day
-let's assume 20kb size

=1.7gb spam. If the txs are ike 100kb, that's 8.6gb per day.

At a more restrictive 2 sec between txs / 2kb per tx, you have 43200 txs per day x 2kb = 86mb. For a single account. If someone buys 100 such accounts, it's 8.6gb per day.

I'm really curious on how no fees can work.

Blockchains are good, but not really efficient in dealing with spam.

There are two levels of limits. The first level is things like time per post. That doesn't consider size (other than limits on the size of a post) is somewhat circumventable by creating more accounts.

The second level is stake-limited bandwidth, is not circumventable, and is based on size.

The first limit is more intended to encourage reasonable behavior by people with a reputation, or perhaps more importantly by compromised accounts with a reputation. The second is the real anti-spam limit. You would run out of bandwidth and your network access would be suspended (until bandwidth recharges) long before spamming 8.6 GB/day.

Aha... nice to know there are these mechanisms in place. I was worried some script-kiddie would make a joke of this with endless bloating. Let's hope there are sufficient anti-spamming mechanisms, as you describe, to prevent that.

[iamnotback]

I'll play devils advocate just to argue the opposing side...

I am seriously toying with the idea of creating a clone with a decentralized client (which reads directly from blockchain) so it can't be DDoSed attacked (although I guess that is about the effectively the same as caching on servers and employing anti-DDoS) and which fixes all the flaws including the premine.

You overestimate how much people care about who owns what.

Don't underestimate all the people here who hold BTC and would like to see the massive 90% "pre"mine fail. There is another side of the market.

Also by definition of a stealth launch and a poorly explained concept, most guys here did not blog early when they could have gained $200k of SP by doing so. They would likely not make the same mistake a second time.

Especially as far as a mainstream blogging/posting crowd is concerned. This only starts becoming their indirect consideration once they realize that the posting rewards are not spread evenly (which is normal up to a degree - not all content is the same, I mean more in terms of whale-touching-people-with-their-magic-wand).

The whale influence on payouts in Steemit is severe.

What people would care seeing, is a better steemit in terms of ease of use and features. Better distributed rewards is a bonus

Absolutely. There is a lot of room to defeat Steemit still now. But that window of opportunity will close fast (unless their attrition rate is very high, they can't improve it, and they can't solve the funding model issue).

It's not that easy.

Agreed it wouldn't be easy. It would be a lot of work.

I propose you relax a week, immerse into steemit, check the various aspects, and see how it can be improved.

I'm continuing to do that. But I am not a lackey.

Also remember that radical redistribution of wealth would backfire - I remember Evan proposing the airdrop in darkcoin to dilute it and people almost crucifying him for proposing it. And that was when DRK had something like 2mn marketcap. So... when you have 400mn in marketcap and investors start getting in, you can't have a self-destructive moment where you decide to blow up the economy by distributing hundreds of millions. It's a double-edged knife...

Proposing a redistribution to whales is of course going to fail (you won't see smooth nor Dan proposing to give away their "pre"mine either). But proposing a redistribution to the altcoin ecosystem which doesn't like stealthmines, might have legs. I dunno.