Something Fishy about Steemit and Steem?

[iamnotback]

I followed the Galt's Gulch Chili scam at the time (2013-2014) and it was and still is one big mess.

Fact is that he has mislead investors who lost a total of 7 million dollars. It is unclear how much he lost, if anything at all. It seems that he and his managing partner never put any real money into it themselves.

Foolish investors buy into something involving huge sums of money without having their attorney check all the paperwork, especially in a Latin american or third world country where we know that permitting is a political favors game.

It is as if these investors are totally naive and deserve their losses as an education ("charge it to experience").

Please let's stop rewarding people who fail to do their due diligence, by bailing them out or blaming their problems only on the perpetrators. This has a similar smell as The DAO debacle.

Why do we always want a Nanny State to protect fools from their education. It is a moral hazard. I've paid for my mistakes in life for the most part and hopefully I'm wiser for it.

I am not against making these fools aware that they better be more suspicious of Jeff. Right on. But let's not make it all one-sided. Jeff is trying to find ways to make money. He is a promoter. That is what he does. Until he has been proven with evidence to be a criminal, I can't just assume that. It does appear to me he has a chain smoking addiction and this probably reflects on his overall discipline in life, but again I can't entirely judge him and any way I don't need to, because I have no dealings with him.

In general the masses are very gullible and prone to idolization. I doubt we can ever change that.

So while you may cite the "Have no idols" wisdom of the 10 Commandments, I might also cite Jesus in Matthew 7:

Matthew 7 New International Version (NIV)

Judging Others
7 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.


Edit: the huge rewards paid to blogging at Steem are a dilemma because they can end up overly focusing and tying the reputation of Steem to some prominent shady characters. We really need to clean up the image of blockchains and crypto in order for the masses to not be rightfully skeptical, but perhaps we can do that algorithmically instead of via the fingerpointing of the bully pulpit.

The women tend to be more skeptical of things outside the mainstream. And they are often correct!

We boys never saw an adventure that we didn't want to try, often willfully oblivious to risks.

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Foolish investors buy into something involving huge sums of money without having their attorney check all the paperwork, especially in a Latin american or third world country where we know that permitting is a political favors game.

Yeah, that's not really how it happened for many of them.

By the way, Chili is not a third world country.

It is as if these investors are totally naive and deserve their losses as an education ("charge it to experience").

I don't think anyone deserves losing money due to dishonesty, but yeah if you do you could see it as learning costs.

I prefer to view is as a penalty for trusting, accepting and defending dishonest people (most of whom are in politics and ruling our lives).

Please let's stop rewarding people who fail to do their due diligence, by bailing them out or blaming their problems only on the perpetrators. This has a similar smell as The DAO debacle.

Nobody was bailed out, what are you talking about?

Why do we always want a Nanny State to protect fools from their education. It is a moral hazard. I've paid for my mistakes in life for the most part and hopefully I'm wiser for it.

It is a moral hazzard, but that doesn't imply there shouldn't be any recourse. Unfortunately in this world, the state is the only chance for most investors to try and get back what is theirs.

I am not against making these fools aware that they better be more suspicious of Jeff. Right on. But let's not make it all one-sided. Jeff is trying to find ways to make money. He is a promoter. That is what he does. Until he has been proven with evidence to be a criminal, I can't just assume that. It does appear to me he has a chain smoking addiction and this probably reflects on his overall discipline in life, but again I can't entirely judge him and any way I don't need to, because I have no dealings with him.

That is all I intended by posting a link to the full story. People who are interested can make up their own mind.

I did not say he is a criminal, just that he has been misleading a lot of people. I couldn't care less what some state department or lawyer would call him. To me he is a dishonest person and that is all you should need to know.

[jacaf01]

The issue with STEEM is that it's been rigged to favour some selected few with just a click.
Tony Vay is a bitcoin maximalist, He even called Ethereum a scam, so Microscoft too is been scammed by ethereum. Until steem distribution is seen to be evenly distributed, this issue with steemit with no go away.

[MWD64]

I followed the Galt's Gulch Chili scam at the time (2013-2014) and it was and still is one big mess.

Fact is that he has mislead investors who lost a total of 7 million dollars. It is unclear how much he lost, if anything at all. It seems that he and his managing partner never put any real money into it themselves.

Terrence Gillespie has done a lot of research into the Chile scam. The main characters were Jeff Berwick and Ken Johnson.

This is the first of ten (!) parts on his blog: http://mcgillespie.com/galts-gulch-chile-story-timeline-references/

TLDR; Jeff Berwick is guilty, it is just a matter of degree at this point. He has apoligized and he never talks publicly about it anymore. It seems he hopes that it will go away by itself now. Which is kind of working, because people have a short attention span and the next scam is always around the corner. And in Berwicks case, well he loses some fans who take time to look further, but he attracts many more new fanboys every week who don't know any of his history or don't care.

This.

Also: Terrence is a good guy, even before he did the work on this. I know him in person.

MWD

[iamnotback]

Until steem distribution is seen to be evenly distributed...

I presume you mean competitively distributed, because even distribution could only be obtained by force of top-down control.

[MWD64]

 satashoi in 2010 telling Steem creator Daniel Larimer that he's dumb.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpbDqv0UEAAQCWO.jpg

[iamnotback]

...especially in a Latin american or third world country where we know that permitting is a political favors game.

By the way, Chili is not a third world country.

Did I say it is?

The point was it is a different culture, legal system, etc.. So you should always have an attorney sign off on things you don't understand well when investing in foreign lands.

Chili inherits some of the attributes of a third world country apparently, because it is no so long ago that it was, and in some respects it still is. I've heard that is almost impossible to find an apartment in Chili that isn't noisy. Sounds a lot like my frustration in the Philippines (although I finally found a gated community that is somewhat quiet enough for me to work).

I've never been to Chili, only Colombia in 2001 as my only South American visit thus far. I've been to Mexico numerous times starting from the 1980s and Guatemala in 1993. I am interested to tour S.America, but I am under no delusions about it being a first-world environment (although I assume it has developed a lot since 2001). That is not to say I want a first-world environment. One thing is Latin american is apparently much more violent than Asia. (and btw Colombians have the highest average penis lengths on par with Africa if my statistical resource can be trusted, unlike Asia, indicating to me a much higher level of testosterone and violence) Machismo is very big time in Latin america, perhaps greatest in Mexico? Ferfal's blog goes into how violent S.America (or at least Argentina) is. Maybe he is exaggerating, I dunno. Note inner-city USA is also quite violent. Suburban USA had not been, although that might be changing, I dunno bcz I haven't been to USA since 2006. When I was in Colombia I saw people pulling out long blades. I've heard the situation has improved some there.

Contrast this with I believe some town in Germany, where by law men can't stand and must sit down to pee, so they won't disturb their apartment neighbors with the sound of the water trickling into the toilet basin.

Please let's stop rewarding people who fail to do their due diligence, by bailing them out or blaming their problems only on the perpetrators. This has a similar smell as The DAO debacle.

Nobody was bailed out, what are you talking about?

Did I say they were literally bailed out monetarily? You seem to not read the word "or".

Also "bailout" can have multiple meanings. It can mean bailing them out of what would be their own self-guilt and reflection on their own mistake, by focusing on blaming everything on the perpetrator who needs willing victims to become a perpetrator.

Note that for as long as there exist willing victims, it doesn't matter how many perpetrators you DOXX, there will always be more to take their place.

I did not say he is a criminal, just that he has been misleading a lot of people. I couldn't care less what some state department or lawyer would call him. To me he is a dishonest person and that is all you should need to know.

Afaik, you haven't proven he is dishonest. Please be careful with your words when you are slandering someone's reputation. It is as if you've decided that he is scum of the earth, but any of us can have bad luck and get mired in a bad business deal that is difficult for us to extract ourselves from.

Perhaps you can make a good case for he has mislead, if he didn't reveal publicly the problems in Galt's Gulch as soon as he became aware of them.

I am not saying he won't eventually be proven to be dishonest. Everyone is free to speculate.

(Note I don't like to hang out with promoter types of personalities because they'd pull me off in unproductive directions and influences, so I might share some of your sentiments, but I am trying to maintain my rationality/objectiveness/impartiality)

P.S. no animosity intended. Just saying.

[BillyBobZorton]

Jeff Berwick always gave me the classic "internet marketer" vibe, that's all. He has no deeper technical knowledge about anything, he just parrots whatever the smarter engineers are saying.

[tmfp]

Anarcho capitalist.....shit businessman with an attitude problem.

[iamnotback]

satashoi in 2010 telling Steem creator Daniel Larimer that he's dumb.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpbDqv0UEAAQCWO.jpg

Tone Vays is apparently not an expert. Apparently he has somewhat average or slightly above understanding of blockchain tech.

Afaics, Satoshi was incorrect:

The payment processor has connections with many nodes.  When it gets a transaction, it blasts it out, and at the same time monitors the network for double-spends.  If it receives a double-spend on any of its many listening nodes, then it alerts that the transaction is bad.  A double-spent transaction wouldn't get very far without one of the listeners hearing it.  The double-spender would have to wait until the listening phase is over, but by then, the payment processor's broadcast has reached most nodes, or is so far ahead in propagating that the double-spender has no hope of grabbing a significant percentage of the remaining nodes.

This is a good start, but still not impermeable.

I didn't say impermeable, I said good-enough.  The loss in practice would be far lower than with credit cards.

A selfish miner with 33% of the network hash rate would simply withhold the double-spend transaction and release it when it wins the next block, thus reverting innumerable instant transactions.

Thus the loss rate could hypothetically be egregiously worse than the 5% chargeback rate on credit cards.

What Satoshi didn't account for is a systemic attack where the attacker has a game theory to bring down the Bitcoin price, e.g. is shorting it.

I am not saying that case is likely near-term, but when you are talking about the politics of who controls the world's transaction system, the Satoshi's design loses the key quality of it being impervious to control. Thus it is a power vacuum, which is precisely what we are trying to eliminate with blockchains.

Satoshi apparently didn't account well for the systemic risks that come from the natural centralization of mining due to economics of ASIC farms. He seemed to think these parties would be ruled by the Nash equilibrium that says if they attack the network, then they destroy the value of their own investment, but he forgot about shorting and also that ASIC hardware can be fungible and used to mine other coins.

Also bytemaster (Daniel Larimer) was correct about the bandwidth and computational resources being a problem, but he didn't emphasize that the problem was scaling without centralization of the full nodes. But that centralization is coming to Satoshi's design any way due to the (even political, e.g. subsidies in China) economics of ASIC mining farms.

I suspect Satoshi knew this weakness and didn't emphasize it on purpose.

Note Dan's DPoS "solution" is centralized control as well, so it is not like Dan found a solution. He just made the centralization more efficient before Bitcoin does. One could argue that DPoS with a competitive distribution is at least the same as democracy (unlike Steem which is authoritarianism), but democracy is what we were trying to eliminate with blockchains, because it is a power vacuum.

[MWD64]

Jeff Berwick always gave me the classic "internet marketer" vibe, that's all. He has no deeper technical knowledge about anything, he just parrots whatever the smarter engineers are saying.

So true.

Yesterday on the radio he said the Steem white paper is "possibly genius." lolz.

[MWD64]

Anarcho capitalist.....shit businessman with an attitude problem.

He doesn't represent all AnCaps. Not by far. He also isn't really libertarian at all. He goes to full-on copypasta "I'm going to unleash my teams of hackers and assassins" online when he gets pissed at people. Especially people who point out that he's full of shit.

=-=-=-
Here's a thought: maybe Steem's business plan is monetizing rants about how Steem is a scam.

[iamnotback]

Yesterday on the radio he said the Steem white paper is "possibly genius." lolz.

Actually there is some genius in the white paper, specifically they've apparently solved the onboarding problem and the clever idea of a time-locked token (STEEM POWER).

Also they've apparently solved the security problem for mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. You aren't aware of the details. I suggest to you to go read everything I've written about Steem and including my (@anonymint's) posts on steemd.com. If you aren't willing to do that, then you if you keep basing your opinions of incomplete understanding, then you will be suffer mistakes.

[MWD64]

Here's Jeff taking a STEAMIT all over himself on radio for 90 minutes yesterday:
https://www.freetalklive.com/podcast/2016-08-08

[iamnotback]

He doesn't represent all AnCaps. Not by far.

Agreed. He comes no where near to representing my philosophy. Ditto he isn't any where near the league of Eric S. Raymond, smooth, etc..

[MWD64]

I see iamnotback keeps posting, but I don't see it.

I put him on ignore as soon as he:

A. Posted his IQ as an argument. That's hilarious grade school-type shit. And IQ is:
--biased in about ten different ways.
--a measure of actually intelligence in the same way that it's accurate to say "I have a great computer because it's got a 2 terabyte hard drive!"

B. He linked a sovereign citizen (the "80x year-old Constitutionalist" guy) as a defense of something.

Not sure how that mess makes sense in Australia, but in America they're considered about the same as palm readers, people who speak to your dead relatives for you, and 9/11 truthers. And Jeff Berwick.

Oh, to everyone else on this thread, and speaking of soothsayers and hoodoo and woo: Jeff Berwick on "Flat Earthism" ....Here's a video where he's actually taking that "theory" as a serious possibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq8oEpc6CTs

Just that alone makes it astonishing that everyone doesn't have Berwick on "ignore", both online and in their head.

Here's my buddy's commentary on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9FwnggC_IE

MWD

p.s. FYIW, Jeff Berwick brags about his IQ also. lolz.

[iamnotback]

I see iamnotback keeps posting, but I don't see it.

I put him on ignore as soon as he:

So there you go folks. He has totally blown his credibility by playing childish games.

I listened to his radio broadcast. He doesn't let his other co-hosts speak. He is reasonably smart, but you know he has to always be correct. His co-host tried to tell him (more than once!) that others were earning big rewards as well (in addition to Jeff), but he cut him off (more than once).

[defaced]

What i've noticed with steemit is most if not all the big earners are invited directly by the creators to wear shirts that say "steemit" between two boobs. They are using these post to create fomo and condition other users. On top of that, the payout system is devilish. I mean its great for keeping the game moving forward but devilish none the less. There was another social network that paid users to use it, I cant remember what its called though. It didnt last long.

[iamnotback]

There was another social network that paid users to use it, I cant remember what its called though. It didnt last long.

Tsu.

[MWD64]

What i've noticed with steemit is most if not all the big earners are invited directly by the creators to wear shirts that say "steemit" between two boobs. They are using these post to create fomo and condition other users. On top of that, the payout system is devilish. I mean its great for keeping the game moving forward but devilish none the less. There was another social network that paid users to use it, I cant remember what its called though. It didnt last long.

+1.

And that network was called Sue or Tzu, something like that.