Great news on the exchange listing and a hearty congratulations to all involved in making it happen; particularly the dogged determination of
Cyta.
It is my feeling that we should now focus on what we have always been here to do... open source software development and support of open source programmers.
In that regard there seems, to me, a great opportunity. Allow me to explain.
The last five months has found me very active on
steemit.com. For those unfamiliar with it, steemit has done with the social media model what Devcoin has done with the Wikipedia model. It is a social media app that rewards content creators with the crypto steem, like Devcoin does to Devtome creators with DVC.
The site
steemit.com is owned and operated by
Steem Inc.; or as it is affectionately known as
STINC. Steemit has been the primary delivery app of the steem blockchain since 2016, yet it is by no means a monopoly. The software is open source with a decentralized blockchain ledger. Other apps and delivery sites like
busy.org are popping up all the time. There are tons of apps which could be done as software bounties. Great libraries are available in python as well as Perl at
https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/steem/latest/steem.pdf and
https://metacpan.org/release/Steemit-WsClient respectively.
develCuy has a wittness/miner node running under
steemit.com@devcoin which is practicing a form of merged mining between DVC and steem. We could use the steem blockchain to develop apps which would have a
real revenue streams; which was the plan with AdSense and DevTome.
The steem project is an exciting one, yet there are some serious areas of discontent among the user base. With only a million accounts; of which only 60,000 are thought to be active; this discontent is likely to only grow as the
old timers are vastly outnumbered by new users.
Some of the main beefs of the user base are:
1.
Reward Pool DistributionIf one has been on the platform a long time they have generally built up steem power. That is the amount of steem they hold in a kind of stock. It is steem which they call Powered Up. It would take 13 weeks to get such steem totally
powered down and into your hands again. In the meantime it gives one an advantage on the platform. When someone likes/upvotes a post of yours the amount of rewards, from the reward pool, assigned to you from that vote is weighted on how much
Steem Power that person has in their account. Those with a lot of Steem Power are known as Whales. Some whales are investors who have purchased the steem which they have powered up.
In the early days the whales would seek good content and reward it. This is what they call the Proof of Brain as opposed to Proof of Worth. As time has gone on and more investor types have bought their whale status they are not seeking out good content but seeking the highest rate of return on their investment. Consequentally they are gaming the system wherever it will let them.
One area they can game is to form small cartels of accounts that vote for each other no matter what crap content is posted. You will see $300-$400 rewards for posts that are complete drivel. This has annoyed the lower ranking users to the point of rebellion.
This could be easily fixed by giving a much smoother grade to the weighting instead of the n^2 at present, yet even the good whales have a vested interest to not see that happen and they can have their way due to another great point of discontent...
2.
Witness Voting.
Witnesses is another name for Miners on the steem blockchain. The user base can vote for their preferred witnesses. The top 20 witnesses with the the most votes get to vote upon excepting future software mods. They also produce the majority of blocks on the steem blockchain, with a 21st witness being chosen from the non top 20 group of witnesses each round of block creation. That sounds like a great thing, right? Except for the fact that Witness Voting is weighted with the same formula as post upvoting.
So we have whale Witnesses voting for other witnesses and greedy whales voting for witnesses. The
big guns have the place locked down. Those in charge of direction have too much stake to make unbiased judgments.
Possible SolutionMy feeling is that the only way to force change on those with the power to do so is to offer an ultimatum. That is to first make changes to the code with regards to the vote weighting and then present it to the top 20 witnesses explaining that if they do not except it that there will be a real fork in the traditional sense of the word. That is a fork like BTC/BCH where the branches both retain the original blockchain.
Due to the fact the the users will flood to where the rewards are better for them, only the whales and their buddies would remain behind. It is bound to bring some sanity to their thoughts as they do have large vested interests for the blockchain to not fork.
Who better to support such code changes than Devcoin?
Such a showdown could be used in a political way to garner more votes for our @devcoin witness. My guess is that the masses would herald @devcoin if that was the voice on the steemit platform putting forth the modifications to the code. We may possibly find @devcoin in the top 20 once vote weighting is more smoothed out. Those top 20 witnesses are making 6 figure salaries a year. We are talking cash flow like never seen in the Devcoin Project previously.
Allow me to invite you to come to
https://steemit.com or
https://busy.org. Get registered and check the blockchain out.
There is a new project called Smart Media Tokens (SMT) rolling out with the next version of steemit. DVC would fit it like a glove.
https://smt.steem.io/Feedback is welcome. Thank you for your time.
- Nova
