Steem pyramid scheme revealed

[iamnotback]

Here's a fund manager who hung himself on Steemit (fund down 50% in one month)....
But is still hopeful and has written more intelligent commentary than anything Steemit has written.

https://blog.coinfund.io/perspective-customer-acquisition-and-retention-on-steemit-327a7f21cd8e#.ybv8x0k3o

https://steemit.com/investments/@jbrukh/disruptive-technologies-speculative-capital-and-thinking-big-about-steemit

I had read that in July. I agree with him about most of that, except that in my analysis Steemit doesn't have the right structure to scale virally and to encourage those ecosystem apps.

The design of Steemit screams short-term pump and cash out.

Of course my analysis could be wrong. And I must admit I am not deep into the design specifics of the Graphene and Steem blockchain.

I'd like to reveal my design so you could understand what I mean in comparison, but I am inhibited by trying to at least get to a working mockup so I can try to raise some funds and accelerate from there.

Note I am speaking with other developers as well.

One problem though is that partnerships with unknown people are fraught with potential failure for various reasons.

As a professional trader for 20 years on NYSE, etc...
I know for a FACT that they fucked up the Steemit internal market as bad as any random pinhead could (down to < $10,000 24 hour volume)...
So in spite of 2 years of working with Bitshares Dan has no clue how to develop liquidity (or it was a straight-up scam to drain rewards)...
This single data point does not inspire confidence that Steemit knows much more than is already evident.

May be they have smart venture capital partners...
But STEEM is going below 0.001... maybe starting to buy there is not crazy if you want to ride the Larimer train.

Agreed, but I see the level at parity with SBD, like now. We'll see whether the promise to keep the peg to the US$ holds. Larimer is hell bent to keep it there, he said. So now people may exchange their Steem for SBD, as a hedge against the falling price, which would put a lot of pressure on SBD. Then again, if some announcement was made that could make it snap up very nicely. I just bought some.

It would actually be a perfect moment in time for a nice announcement, Friday afternoon, STEEM-SBD at parity.

I see the SBD as entirely undesired in my design. And I've never thought that pegged assets could be stable or even desirable. Who wants the pegged shit, when they can trade the real thing (liquidity, frictional losses, etc).

The entire point is to build the token as a unit-of-account through a widespread unit-of-exchange in a virtual commerce market that other social networks currently can't do. You've got to actually build a content ecosystem that can drive that virtual commerce market. A marketplace (Dan's plan) is nonsense. We don't need another ebay.

What most everyone doesn't understand is that you have to tap something that people really need.

The 3 tier system is great, SBD pegged to a Dollar is the perfect token for the merchant side, as it won't float. The rest of the cake could be easily cut to be shared between marketeers and buyers.

I posit that you are envisioning the sort of merchant that you are never going to get with a cryptocurrency. As for marketers and buyers, can't get that without massive onboarding which isn't apparently happening.

I posit that you don't see where the big market for cryptocurrency is. I'll drop a hint. It has to be something you can only do with cryptocurrency.

Again I will be making some revelations when I announce details of my design and thoughts on how we mass market cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

I am delighted that Dan et al, think SBD is important. Gives me some time to catch up on implementation while they chase what I posit are the non-viable directions. Moar pegged assets please.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

As a professional trader for 20 years on NYSE, etc...
I know for a FACT that they fucked up the Steemit internal market as bad as any random pinhead could (down to < $10,000 24 hour volume)...
So in spite of 2 years of working with Bitshares Dan has no clue how to develop liquidity (or it was a straight-up scam to drain rewards)...

BINGO!

[generalizethis]

It's like there's a competition to see who can use the LOUDEST cap--

What's the quotation... I think it goes, "Blog softly and carry a big stick."

https://steemit.com/story/@generalizethis/nine-gates

[magicalacademy]

Steemit founders cashing out big time, they have been crashing the price from 5$ to 0.8$ and they are gonna keep crashing it to pennies until there are no more investors to milk from.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@magnebit/steem-price-is-being-pushed-down-by-1-person-speculation-on-why-and-where-it-may-end-up

WOW and guess what? That post just got downvoted by dantheman it went from $900 to $300 lol 

[iamnotback]

WOW and guess what? That post just got downvoted by dantheman it went from $900 to $300 lol 

He downvoted it apparently because as he explained in his comment, you seem to be conflating the support of the STEEM DOLLAR market, with cashing out to Bitcoin. Those are not the same action. I upvoted @dantheman's comment on your blog. Please learn to be more factual.

You have on numerous occasions unfairly slandered Steem without getting your facts entirely in order. I may somewhat agree that Steemit account may be sometimes cashing out large amounts to BTC. I haven't verified it lately. And BTW, afaik that is the Steemit Inc. account.

[iamnotback]

Off-topic (except it illustrates some serious debate taking place).

How I dealt with an annoying academic and hopefully not waste more time arguing about something which is irrelevant to my priorities (I knew I shouldn't have written this blog!):

> Or take Hans Reiser

> Hunter-gatherers were healthier, better nourished and lived longer lives than early sedentary people

> But there could not have been a teleological evolutionary strategy like hey, let's settle down

You are throwing aliasing error all over the map. And I don't see a benefit to wasting my time on it.

>  Although repeatable scientific tests may be out of reach, it does not mean we have to resort to conjecture. There's some evidence and we may reason based on it

It is all aliasing error, because there do not exist total orders in our universe nor in nature. Everything is a partial order and perspective is always relative. This can be easily proved by noting that a total order would be equivalent to real-time omniscience, but this would require the speed-of-light to not be finite, which would collapse the past and future into each other.

So all you will ever have is relative agreement and disagreement.

That is why I won't waste my time reading your propaganda books.

> Now really? So please point me to his major contributions to browsers, phones etc.

You are consuming my time, forcing me to refute your ignorance because you come here and attack my reputation. That is what I consider to be rude. You come off as an academic who is offended that anyone other than your fellow academics might have a theory and opinion on anything in your claimed area of expertise.

His GIF code for example is in use in all those cases. His GPS code is in use in nearly every mobile device, including the military. Now he is working on the very important problem of rescuing important large historic code bases from archaic version control systems. Man please...

> I don't want to discuss AGW as this is another field I am mostly ignorant of, but it seems to me more than accidental that the same people who had spent years on casting doubt on health effects of tobacco were later casting doubt on AGW.

Well there you go doing what you said I shouldn't do.

When we are in a mini-ice age from 2030 - 2050, then you maybe you'll realize how fucking junk that AGW science was. And that is a backtested prediction.

> Well, a mind open might also be open to bullshit.

Yeah like the variety your academic cohorts are promulgating and then accusing everyone else of being ignorant because we refuse to waste our time reading their agenda indoctrination books.

> these statistics are clearly and badly fucked up, then I have a strong reason to think this work is worthless. Not so incidentally, this can be said of pretty much everything in evolutionary psychology.

> But there's no real argument why it would be more probable than, say, a byproduct of other historical events.

> or example the os penis (the boner bone) which we humans do not have. Dawkins once famously speculated (I think in The selfish gene) which evolutionary forces could lead to humans losing the bone, but it's, well, speculation (and one that begs some obvious questions to boot). But we don't really know if it was adaptive or accidental.

Or you could consider the theory from my blog post which is that randomization is the strategy of nature. So it can all just be random diversity so as to be consistent with the Second law of thermo, that entropy is trending to maximum.

>> None of the 85% of cultures that preferred polygamy were competitive economically with the dominant Western monogamous cultures over the past couple of centuries.

> None, that is, except Islam. Yes, Islam declined over the last few centuries, but how much of it might be attributed to its preference for polygamy, and how much to other factors like, say, Mongolian invasions which barely touched the Western world but destroyed most of the Islamic one twice. Or accidental discovery of Americas

We could posit that building large family networks and having many loyal sons, would be advantageous in those agrarian and somewhat feudal or tribal societies, but would not be beneficial in the modern economy. Perhaps this is why monogamy has been winning and production increasing as a result. Granted these are theories. We write blogs to share our thoughts and impact on others. I don't think your experts should have a monopoly on influence and sharing. Knowledge creation is an accretive, bottom-up process, not a top-down cathedral.

Indeed the Americas have been a huge economic driving force, and especially during the Industrial Age where the USA had a coast on both major oceans the Mississippi River to bisect the Eastern portion and transport cargo most efficiently.  And it was arguably the Puritan, monogamous conservative culture (along with a temporary boost of slavery in the South) that drove the great production to harvest that resource.

Again it is all conjecture.

[DecentralizeEconomics]

WOW and guess what? That post just got downvoted by dantheman it went from $900 to $300 lol 

He downvoted it apparently because as he explained in his comment, you seem to be conflating the support of the STEEM DOLLAR market, with cashing out to Bitcoin. Those are not the same action. I upvoted @dantheman's comment on your blog. Please learn to be more factual.

That's right!  We all know Dan loves his Steem Dollars!

[generalizethis]

Actually DE, that's a good question.

My master key will not work for conversion--I get "transaction broadcast error," when I try to sign with it. Why isn't there a help desk? Steem-help is like walking into a room with a gun shot wound and hoping the guy that maybe/maybe-not helps you is an actual doctor.

[flipme]

As a professional trader for 20 years on NYSE, etc...
I know for a FACT that they fucked up the Steemit internal market as bad as any random pinhead could (down to < $10,000 24 hour volume)...
So in spite of 2 years of working with Bitshares Dan has no clue how to develop liquidity (or it was a straight-up scam to drain rewards)...

BINGO!

Not necessarily, but instead of making a market on the internal steemit exchange and having the others follow, they missed it and are falling prey to the usual manipulators. And they are drained by arbitrage bots. Stupid.

[Zer0Sum]

As a professional trader for 20 years on NYSE, etc...
I know for a FACT that they fucked up the Steemit internal market as bad as any random pinhead could (down to < $10,000 24 hour volume)...
So in spite of 2 years of working with Bitshares Dan has no clue how to develop liquidity (or it was a straight-up scam to drain rewards)...

BINGO!

Not necessarily, but instead of making a market on the internal steemit exchange and having the others follow, they missed it and are falling prey to the usual manipulators. And they are drained by arbitrage bots. Stupid.

The problem with the "Steemit is a straight-up scam meme" pimped by that lonely Synereo zombie...
Is that if you go to the Bitshares Forum people will not bad-mouth and, in fact, defend Dan Larimer...
As someone who's hit some tape measure home runs, but also looked bad striking out a few times.

I could have told you a long time ago...
For every great idea Dan has, he comes up with an equally bad idea... and then doubles down on the bad idea.

Somebody should fork Steemit with a wide distribution and a commitment to meritocracy.

[generalizethis]

Zombies? Thanks for the inspiration.

https://steemit.com/story/@generalizethis/zombie-hurricane

[iamnotback]

A comment from a claimed professional writer:

I'm one of the "professional writers" you mention in your article. My specialty is business writing, or "copywriting" as it is also known. I agree completely that Steemit -- in its current iteration -- is very much like a casino. There is no logic to why some articles do well and others don't. Some of the articles I've put a lot of time and effort on have done poorly, while some that I have put very little effort on have done very well. It makes no sense.

On Steemit, everyone seems to be publishing for the elusive "whale vote," instead of writing for the masses. This isn't good.

[iamnotback]

DE I am sorry but I am just not seeing the economic viability of Synereo:

> Synereo lets the user have ultimate control, as there is no company such as Steemit who can control certain aspects.

False on ultimate control. We can't publish anything, even encrypted, to a group of followers and be guaranteed to remain in control of the information.

We are free to use different clients on the Steem blockchain, not necessarily the Steemit UI. It is true that the Steem blockchain's license does not allow forking.

> "In order to reach my attention with your communications, you must pay me in arbitrary number of amps". It means amps will definitely have value if people value the attention of valuable people, and because as we know on Steemit how scarce attention is, the economic for Synereo make a lot of sense.

> The Synereo attention economy treats the human mind as a sacred resource, where attention is the most scarce resource in the human economy.

You assume that attention is valuable, but existing advertising targeting has shown attention is not valuable for advertising. I pointed this out many months ago on Bitcointalk, when I analyzed Synereo and decided it would fail.

Our attention is most valuable to ourselves, but the way to monetize this is apparently not via advertising!

That is a crucial point. What makes social networking valuable to the user, is they are in control over what is important to them that which draws them to that activity.

A deep understanding of marketing and technology is necessary to create the mass market product. I've done mass market software two or three times in my career.

Now I am going to do it again.

[testz]

DE I am sorry but I am just not seeing the economic viability of Synereo:

> Synereo lets the user have ultimate control, as there is no company such as Steemit who can control certain aspects.

False on ultimate control. We can't publish anything, even encrypted, to a group of followers and be guaranteed to remain in control of the information.

We are free to use different clients on the Steem blockchain, not necessarily the Steemit UI. It is true that the Steem blockchain's license does not allow forking.

> "In order to reach my attention with your communications, you must pay me in arbitrary number of amps". It means amps will definitely have value if people value the attention of valuable people, and because as we know on Steemit how scarce attention is, the economic for Synereo make a lot of sense.

> The Synereo attention economy treats the human mind as a sacred resource, where attention is the most scarce resource in the human economy.

You assume that attention is valuable, but existing advertising targeting has shown attention is not valuable for advertising. I pointed this out many months ago on Bitcointalk, when I analyzed Synereo and decided it would fail.

Our attention is most valuable to ourselves, but the way to monetize this is apparently not via advertising!

That is a crucial point. What makes social networking valuable to the user, is they are in control over what is important to them that which draws them to that activity.

A deep understanding of marketing and technology is necessary to create the mass market product. I've done mass market software two or three times in my career.

Now I am going to do it again.

Why on earth would I chose Synereo over Steemit? Synereo does not even exist! — Steemit
https://steemit.com/synereo/@fyrstikken/why-on-earth-would-i-chose-synereo-over-steemit-synereo-does-not-even-exist

[bbc.reporter]

I am now speculating that it is not just the bloggers that are dumping Steem. Also I do not think the founders will run away with the money like Decentralized said. But the question is why is it going down? Is someone gaming the system? We have seen this happen before where click farms are hired by a group to create accounts in a site. Maybe it is happening now on Steemit. Is there someone with the data that shows where an account was made and the Steem was immediately sold?

[iamnotback]

Extra motivation to destroy the Steem(it) whale model asap:

@misgivings is promulgating social decadence. He advising men and women to destroy their productivity and spend all their time on unproductive animalism.

Whales upvoting this shit over and over again.

Steem is descending into a cesspool culture.

[iamnotback]

Never argue with a woman!

> Strawman. Synereo is user owned

Obviously I was referring to control over what happens to the content we publish.

The Synereo AMP is also a blockchain that is owned by the token holders and/or miners as is the case for Steem.

You are trying to claim that the user has more control in Synereo, but that is far from certain. We can also create different clients to interact with the Steem blockchain. There is no reason one couldn't build a client model that mimicked Synereo's cascade model of content push/pulling, and only put some of the content on the Steem blockchain.

Since you are promulgating vaporware, we can speculate that anything is possible in the future on either system.

> Human attention is the last scarce resource in digital society. We all compete for the attention of other people because we recognize how scarce that attention is. Advertisements steal attention and don't pay people anything in exchange and spam is a perfect example.

> I see Synereo as more than just a product. It's a Social Computer and it runs on attention as a resource, just as there are other resources like storage, computation and bandwidth.

You've drunk the Koolaid. You'd be kicked out of the venture capitalist's office if that was your explanation of a business model.

You've yet to tell me how you can monetize this nebulous resource you name 'attention'. Or tell me how attention as a resource will translate into a popular activity.

> Synero

Thanks for confirming that the Synereo name is not going to be easy for people to remember and type.

[iamnotback]

Mayday, mayday. Taking on water fast, abandon ship:

> Because the only thing that matters in life is productivity? And it's impossible to have a relationship with two women and still be productive?

Thanks for confirming the West is decadent. I will be off this Steemshipt asap. I'll be headed East and South where traditional productive values are and where the economic future is headed. And billions more people also. Goodbye Westerners. You are coming irrelevant because of this cultural disease.

Edit: follow-up confirms this decadent culture and there is no way we should be or could even promulgate these memes to a widespread social network to the majority of the world's population (Filipinos for example would be repulsed by this blog post):

LOL. Becoming irrelevant because we've become efficient enough to continue leading the world economy while working less and actually enjoying our lives?

Have fun working yourself to death!

If you as an individual are efficient enough to do that, then I am not speaking to you. You would be exceptional. But for the average person, you are promoting their failure.

And this blog post attempts to shame average women into not being good wives and supporting a hard working average husband.

Unfortunately most of the affluence you think we have in the West, is a debt bubble. The reality is going to be realigned over the next 5 - 15 years.

If this is what you are passing on to our youth in the West, they are doomed. They need to work hard and be productive instead.

I hope you realize that the majority of the world's population is going to be repulsed by the values and useless theoretical/philosophical time-wasting crap being promoted as prominent here in Steem.

Steemit and sex with animals is next:

WOW! that is a lot of drivel. not just in the article but the comments too.

I am/was a cheater, so no holds barred there. my wife and i survived, but lets face it, Monogomy is an atiquated notion. Polyamory, Swinging, Open relationships, that is the future. We went through a long period of discovery and adjustment, and believe that if more couples had open or swinging relationships there would be a lot less divorce.

Separate sex from intimacy, the act from love, and you will have a much richer, open and truly loving union.

Then WTF is sex then? Just a physical act? Connect yourself to a masturbation machine. You are just feeding your addictions, that is all. Yeah we can all adjust and learn to be addicted. But what is the fucking point? Hey raise your hand if you can be an addict too.

Like any addiction, you'll need to ramp up the thrill, so you can't be too far from fucking dogs in the ass and having a horse fuck your wife and rip her vagina to shreds.

Edit: apparently you two are not doing the sexual acts to create pregnancies. So this isn't sex as an R strategy (see @skeptic).

A man that other women want becomes instantly more attractive.

A man that other women are fucking is not desirable to a woman who is focusing on being able to raise a family and family values.

You are speaking to the hindbrain of the woman, and focusing on animalism. Did we develop big brains for nothing?

We can leverage this animalism to some extent but we also have to contend with competition from other humans with big brains and more productively organized cultures. War and economic defeat may extinct those who prioritize animalism over productivity. Then again, we need some of our animalism to diversify the gene pool. So life is a complex mix, but I am appalled that you tried to shame all women into unmitigated addictive decadence. No wonder you won't tell us your real name.

[iamnotback]

They finally got wind of my block suggestion, but hope they realize some features are impossible in a decentralized system:

Block could be a great feature. Nice point.

Well you finally got wind of my block suggestion, but hope you realize some features are impossible in a decentralized system.

Instead of being able to block specific users from posting a comment that references a blog post (which I think alternative clients would find a way to subvert anyway, by embedding data, i.e. bottom-up supply & demand will drive features not top-down desires), the correct way to design such a feature is probably to allow the blog author to mark specific comments and/or usernames, which clients can optionally agree to hide. Again all power must remain with the individual users and no blog author should (nor in theory can!) be able to block a user from posting a comment.

[r0ach]

Steem is descending into a cesspool culture.

lol, that is my real curiousity about Steem.  

You keep preaching that it's going to die, but there's thousands of altcoins that are far worse than Steem that have not died.  So I'm curious as to what the content will be like if it just goes into a bear market for a long duration and people are only getting paid five cents to post.  Does it turn into 4chan or something then?  Does it turn into millions of posts where people spam ASCII penises non-stop?  Even if the price went to nothing, as long as it stays online, some obscure demographic from an alternate universe will use it for something.