Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[iamnotback]

I'll be gone for some days or so:

It can't be paying only for long-form blogging because Medium reports that only 20,000 of its 25 million readers actually blog every week. Expert blogging is not something most people can do well. Perhaps only 15% of the people who join Steem(it) actually earn anything and only 1% anything resembling an income. This is not viral spread, because 85+% of those who join will get exasperated. The cryptonerds are begging their friends and gfs to join, but it isn't moving beyond that one degree of relation.

So yeah the concept of onboarding via debasement distributed to users is innovative, but unfortunately we are failing with this design. Sorry to say. Mark my word.

Absolutely @dollarvigilante, Steemit will probably be that 'gateway drug' for people who know nothing about cryptos and finally get on board once they realize the dollar and other fiat currencies are in trouble due to gov't manipulation.

I wish I could crumple your tinfoil hat into a 1" diameter ball and see if any brains oozed out. You really understand the masses well don't you. Do you think they will also stock their basements with MREs.

Thanks guys for the discussion.

[r0ach]

r0ach I made this post in honor of you master Yoda:

How did you know about my Yoda silver bullion?



And how can you leave after I pioneered a new Steemit subforum:

https://steemit.com/trending/anonymintwilldisagree

[iamnotback]

I'll hedge my bets a little bit if the opportunity presents itself:

I'll offer you $200 in BTC, and if I am able to get more than $1000 out (via powering down and exchange to poloniex), then I will split the difference of the remainder that I can get out in (as measured in BTC value I get out).

So you retain some upside if the price rises, you get some immediately liquidity out and protect yourself against total collapse of the price.

I have a 3 year reputation in crypto, see my introduceyourself post, so I would not reneg on the terms since it would disrupt my reputation which is very valuable to me.

[AlexGR]

Why would he take 200$ for 1500SP? I don't think he'll take the offer.

[iamnotback]

Well I wasn't going to blog post again until something was fixed in the curation and voting reward algorithms, but then I thought of a potential solution, so I was compelled to post:

https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/how-to-fix-steemit-for-communities-and-viral-engagement

This idea came to me while I was going over my design ideas and thinking about if there was any aspect that was easily implementable in Steem.

[ProPumps]

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 .


You know what's funny is that they tell you to power up but they are powering down all 3 accounts and cashing out $2 Millions every week.

And fools on poloniex are buying up all the steems hahah and best of all the founders's money is growing extremely fast so they have essentially set up a system where they could cash out $2M every week for life until the ponzi come crashing down of course but these devs are fucking geniuses.
It doesn't end there though, they have designed a system where they have so much voting power compared to everyone else that they decide where the pool's money is being allocated, so if they want to pay themselves and their buddies they can do it just by a mouse click.
They can also create sockpuppets account and vote for themselves.It's like a fucking cartel, they are the first crypto mafia.
They also get to decide what goes on the front page so obviously they chose to upvote boobs and steem praise, there is nothing better than vagina to prop up a massive bubble.


In 3 years all the new steem power that was created out of thin air to enrich the devs will be detroyed at a ratio of 10 to 1. So if you have 10 SP they will burn 9 from you and everyone else including themselves, But they don't care becasue in 3 years the devs will be in their private yacht  sipping mojito with lots of bitches while you will be powering down but it's gonna be too late my friend.

And you know what they say when you ask but why are you destroying 90% of my wealth in 3 year? They say don't worry  hopefully the price will increase to make up for it rofl It will not because they would have crashed it to pay for the yatch lol

RIP steem power holders.

http://thestringpuller.com/2016/07/a-steeming-bubble/


edit : Dan has deleted transaction history on one of his account.  https://steemit.com/@steem/transfers

Money senta few days ago from https://steemit.com/@steemit/transfers is not showing as received on the steem account like it usually does. I don't know exactly why he doesn't want us to see the transactions but it looks like he is trying to hide something. Fishy

O thanks for telling me years later that these are all scams... fuck man i wouldn't have touched coins that made me a millionaire,.....

[iamnotback]

Well I wasn't going to blog post again until something was fixed in the curation and voting reward algorithms, but then I thought of a potential solution, so I was compelled to post:

https://steemit.com/steem/@anonymint/how-to-fix-steemit-for-communities-and-viral-engagement

This idea came to me while I was going over my design ideas and thinking about if there was any aspect that was easily implementable in Steem.

Follow up:

In spite of the following, I think my blog is still important for the community to read, because we are brainstorming and discussing the very important design characteristics of Steem.

The important flaws in my proposal were pointed by @alexgr, @sunjata, and @smooth:

• Verified accounts can be sold.
• Desired connections between communities dilutes the metric for motivating unique communities.
• Users don't have a strong enough motivation to be verified.
• Intent of following is not a public metric.

I have deeply analyzed in my head (and various writings sprinkled over Steem and Bitcointalk.org) numerous facets and ideas for reducing the top-down effect of (the natural) power-law distributed STEEM POWER w.r.t. to voting for rewards taken from a pool of debasement of the collective, and I can't find any solution that isn't a degenerate outcome that rewards unproductive or winner-take-all behavior. The fundamental problem (design choice) is the rewarding of a collectivized pool of funds via a popularity contest. It is a Tragedy of the Commons. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no way to spread this out to motivate the investment in creating diverse communities.

We can observe recently the whales (or at least apparently @smooth) are spreading their voting out more, so that now the top trending posts typically have much smaller rewards. The only big paying rewards now seem to come when those whales (and perhaps a large contingent of dolphins) who vote less frequently, decide they really value a post such as Dogecoin creator's post today.

But that isn't necessarily motivating community building nor finding (ranking) content relevant to each user's communities. It is a top-down managed effect, and not driving diverse user actions w.r.t. to building followings. The follow and tags features aid somewhat these needs, but it isn't very monetary (mathematically the typical user can't earn more than ~$5 a month on Steem even if rewards of uniformly distributed) as compared to the reach a user can attain on a larger network that doesn't pay anything, e.g. Facebook.

The value of a social network is in the network connections and network size, not in the content. Users (even content producers such as bloggers) go where they can reach their audience (followers/fans) and friends (fans). There won't be viral penetration into the masses (excepting those ones who have a cryptonerd begging them to join Steemit) given there is no compelling reason for them to be on Steemit, i.e. the rewards paid out on average aren't compelling and the network is small with no incentives to drive network connections and no viral engagement paradigm.

In essence what I see on Steemit, are many people joining due to enthusiasm about the idea and thinking that others will too. They view their votes in the site-wide popularity contest as important for influencing this grand "we are changing the world" enthusiasm. It seems to me to be backslapping, but the masses won't see it that way. They will simply ask, "what is the advantage for me".

Edit: the above doesn't necessarily preclude other features and use cases for the Steem blockchain and token that might come to fruition. The onboarding gimmick of voting from a shared pool of debasement could be perhaps just enough to jumpstart an ecosystem, even though it might not (probably won't) virally spread to millions itself. I am skeptical though.

The following blog post quotes are confirmation to me of my idea that the relevance of community is essential to viral adoption:

I had bugger all Facebook friends, and most of them were “lurkers” (they never posted anything or even “liked” anything, let alone made any comments. So meaningful interactions were few and far between.

About half of what few friends I had left on FB disagreed with much of what I really wanted to post about, so if I got into subjects like conspiracies such as false flag shootings or “climate change”, or health subjects like low carb diets or the vaccination con, its safe to say I rapidly had less FB friends.

That giant pool of Facebook users don’t post much worth seeing, so to me FB was like a giant sponge that soaked up every creative urge in my mind and replaced it with a giant sea of shallow distracting crap.

The biggest reason I quit FB was that I wanted to see new ideas and be inspired by intelligent discussion. That wasn’t exactly coming thick and fast on FB

The following appears to incorporate some amount of "we will change the world" backslapping because he doesn't even mention having tried Medium for comparison:

Steemit has already amazed me with the quality of the content. I’ve only been aware of Steemit for 48 hours, but I’m already inspired by what I’ve seen here, and I’ve learned more in two days surfing Steemit than I did in the past two years feeding my FB addiction.

What I think is inspiring him is he sees some of his interests are shared by the community on Steemit. The Steemit crowd is probably into the specific idealistic issues he mentioned. And there are some smart Steemians. But I believe this sub-community can also be found on Medium (but perhaps not as highly charged and massive)?

Any way, the point taken is that communities and size of network (connections and engagement) within the communities is essential, which is my point also.

the quality of content on Steemit is incredible

Is it the quality of intellectualism and prose, or predominantly the quality that the content matches your interests?

Here, people have to make content which is truly engaging

Engaging  as in much discussion and spawning communities of like interests? Or appealing to the site-wide most prevalent desires the voter has to upvote if the post games some emotional need the voters have, such as the desire to get others to promote certain causes, the male desire to see girls show their boobs, the "Steem will change the world" meme, etc..

I agree with the premise of content quality finding its worth in votes

I'm skeptical for the reasons above.

When would demand leave though?

Because not everyone shares the same interests and they may not find their engaging connections here?

Because the rewards for most users will be less than $5 per month, i.e. meaningless?

Medium reports only 20,000 of its 25 million readers blog weekly. Blogging is not something everyone can do well. So what do the rest of the users do that is engaging?

The more likely scenario in that situation would be that the dollar/BTC value of Steem would approach zero.

Which would disincentivize cashing out at some level above zero, because of the cost of cashing out isn't 0.

Facebook has over 1.7 billion users, while Steemit has less than 100 000, so at this point Steemit would still need to get 1700 times more members to be as big as FB.

The sobering truth is Steem may only have about 10,000 active users and we don't know how many of those are bots.

[U2BONO]

Now is 0.0026, which is still overvalued, 0.0005 is reasonable actually, this coin won't last for long term because there are so many  writers who wanna scam steem.

[ijphlrnxewho]

https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptocurrency1/steem-pyramid-scheme-revealed

[iamnotback]

...because there are so many  writers who wanna scam steem.

There is a lot of idealistic appreciation of Steem. See my prior post, which I added to since you read it last time.

[bbc.reporter]

I have a question. Why is it that when a coin goes from no value to over $100,000,000 valuation in market cap everyone will say that it is a scam? Is this envy?

[suchwowwow]

@Iamnotback



I noticed that you are knowledgable about steem so I wanted to ask you this question.

Am I right to think that the inflation of steem is higher than we think because people can power down anytime they want ? let me know if this is a stupid question

With the high rate of inflation the price has a lot of downward pressure as seen in recent days, will the rewards go down a lot or what would happen?

Dan Larimer and the steem community does not seem to be concerned at all about this, but I have heard from many that the lack of incentives to buy steem will be the downfall of steemit

Do you think a marketplace would slow down sell pressure?

I was thinking maybe steemit could fund companies too and get some sort of ROI?

Also advertisers could buy some space on the steemit website with steem?

I have read some of your posts on steemit.com and they are very insightfull . I would love if you could right a post about models to sustain the platform, this would wake up the steemit community on a matter that I think is pressing. I am curious what Dan thinks about this, he seems to think that his system is perfect and won't need advertisement, this is dangerous thinking.

[iamnotback]

@suchwowwow

I suspect most demand is driven by expectations so if there announcements which drive up expectations, then it is possible that might be a net increase in demand.

The money supply is always increasing (and very fast for the next several months) so on a purely Quantity Theory of Money basis, the price should decline, but the QTM may not be the only factor.

The increase in the liquid money supply could accelerate if more people decide to start powering down, but it is limited by the 1% of week cap.

I think to sustain the platform, they eventually have to move away from voting rewards as the main feature (although it serves as an onboarding paradigm for the time being) and have some other compelling viral engagement features, whether it be in social network or commerce or what ever.

I am not convinced that the voting rewards paradigm is the best one that can be done for onboarding, but it is too late to change that now in Steem. And my alternative idea for one might not be better, let's see what others think when and if I announce it.


Okay guys, I like to go quiet now for some days. Happy Sunday.

[suchwowwow]

Thanks for your answers Iamnotback.   From what I heard there will be a fork that will prevent people with a small amount of voting power to vote, probably to encourage users to buy steem power. This is not going to work as it creates a barrier to entry( buying bitcoin,etc..) Instead Dan Larimer should publish a kind of roadmap so that investors know what there are getting into.

[iamnotback]

Just got out of the shower (first one in weeks), and I forgot to say that my opinion is that the rate of active users isn't likely growing enough to support a merchant ecosystem. I think maybe 10,000 - 15,000 active users max right now and who knows how many are bots. To cross the chasm to a merchant ecosystem, I think they need millions of users.

I think we need an onboarding with a higher rate of viral engagement. We'll see....

[generalizethis]

And how can you leave after I pioneered a new Steemit subforum:

https://steemit.com/trending/anonymintwilldisagree

^This should have a follow button:

Wish I had more than .02 cents, but I give what I can:


https://steemit.com/steemit/@generalizethis/room-exclusivity-combats-group-think-noise

(Puns--proof that Shakespeare was a masochist)

[bbc.reporter]

Who else are the users of Steemit that is good to follow if you are into cryptocurrencies? I would like to deepen my understanding about it.

[AlexGR]

I have a question. Why is it that when a coin goes from no value to over $100,000,000 valuation in market cap everyone will say that it is a scam? Is this envy?

There's a rule: Everything cryptocurrency related has at one time or another been called a scam.

[serejandmyself]

I have a question. Why is it that when a coin goes from no value to over $100,000,000 valuation in market cap everyone will say that it is a scam? Is this envy?

There's a rule: Everything cryptocurrency related has at one time or another been called a scam.

Its an unwritten rule, just like:

If you succeed, people will hate you

[Spoetnik]

[NEWS FLASH]

Devs forked their own coin..

It's legit now guys.. they changed user-names !

TAKE MY MONEY NOW !

Go go go !111