Great post.
Not trying to self-promote, but I did a writeup on the pro-steemit posts and likened it to marketing and advertising. Steem will grow if it continues to provide value to its users and I think it's demonstrated that soundly in the past year.
As far as Vays goes ... he lives in the 'Bitcoin Maximalism' echo chamber, which is absolutely toxic because their active mindset is to denounce all competitors, as opposed to promoting the value proposition of something.
In regards to Bitshares climb -- I had been watching it closely and attribute the climb to a few things:
- growth of steem, blocktrades and openledger
- decentralized exchange demand (got spooked from Poloniex for a number of reasons)
- speed of transactions
- low fees
- proven track record
- rumors of future potential synergy with EOS , decentralized margin trading, etc.
Those, at least, were my reasonings for buying into Bitshares.
I think the greatest antidote for the echochamber is dissident voices being heard and not censored or shouted down. There is a pretty strong diversity of thought (political and otherwise) here on Steem and I think that adds to the overall health.
I think I rambled far too much for this comment. Again, great post :)
One thing I left out of my bitshares description this time is that much of the rise occurred after it was confirmed that EOS crowdsale would be done on the ETH blockchain.
I know Tone Vays position, but just as I try to separate the positive things about bitshares tech and steemit from the negatives/criticisms, I try to parse his legitimate knocks from his bogus ones. The man notated the entire whitepaper with criticisms, it was worth working through to see the other side.
You can never ramble too much, ramble more IMO
putting it on the ETH was a wise strategic move and i think the BTS was an indicator that the market agreed.
I saw Vays tweet storm with the annotated white paper. in our debate, it boiled down to his belief that
while he may have made other coherent points in his tweets, Steem evolves around the users and witnesses use of the blockchain to provide transparency. it IS NOT supposed to be like Bitcoin because it has a different use case and a different value proposition.
we did not end our conversation on good terms. :P