RE: Was the Launch of Steem a Scam or the Only Legal Way? - Thoughts on Steem by Charlie Shrem a Week Later
Why is it a bad thing that Steem and its founders mined so many in the beginning?
What you are saying is that they intentionally gave less information to others to give themselves an unfair advantage at mining a currency. As we are talking a about a currency that is intended to be used by everyone I think this would be bad, as not everyone had an equal opportunity to gain that currency. Also it increases centralization.
I think the idea of a start-up based upon a currency is wrong and also rejected here I believe. Steemit is a start up and uses the currency steem to monetize. This is fair - an equivalent would be coinbase. But gaining a large stake in token which is meant to be used by everyone via hiding information would not be fair.
I am speaking hypothetically here - I do not know if the information that you provided are all correct.
Spreading the currency by letting people mine it is mostly stupid. It was done in that way only because there was no other legal way. Better way would have been just to create a lot of tokens when the blockchain was launched.
Everybody has an equal opportunity to earn it. It's possible by writing good content and getting rewards. No other blockchain has fairer and more effective way of letting users get the currency.
And of course mining shouldn't be considered as a fair way of distributing tokens because only a handful of people in the world can mine effectively.
Centralization of decision making power is very important, especially when the project is still young. Steem has already made several hardforks, some of them really fast, which wouldn't be possible if it was truely decentralized.
I just wrote a post about that: How to design efficient and resilient DAO.
These rewards are however decided by a few wealthy token holders (whales). Which in theory have the ability to reward in a way such that they never get out-competed. The way to do this would be to preferably vote for poorer minnows instead of established writers such as @stellabelle - then these established writers could never out-compete a whale. Note: Active whales also get multiple curation rewards which may are about equal or greater size than content rewards would ever generate consistently - e.g. @smooth 7,206 SP past 7 days - few or no other writer made this much this week.
Why would it not be legal to pre-assign some coins to a company or foundation or person? Is Ethereum illegal? Is Ripple illegal?
Read it all from Dan's blogpost: How to Launch a Crypto Currency Legally while Raising Funds
Thanks. I'll read it. But the first thing I noticed is
so I don't expect an answer ;-).
This is true if you think they intentionally gave less information. I'm not gonna make that accusation although I agree it was very difficult for others to mine.
This is a pretty common tactic, wether or not they used it or not, is debateable, i guess thats what makes it such a strong tactic. In your article you mentioned satoshi owning alot of btc, but he also told others about it, just no one else joined in. With steemit, mining wasnt a new topic and people were ready to do so, and even tried, the developers rolled back and started over because they didnt get enough the first time. Kinda shady, but -shrug-.
Guys, use your head.
Are these crypto noobs launching something?
They knew dman well what they were doing, give me a break.
Exactly, its not their first rodeo.