RE: 25 Reasons Steem Will Replace Bitcoin as #1 Cryptocurrency by 2021!
I don’t think Steem will die soon because of the Steem Media Tokens pump coming and the speculation on whether investors will buy STEEM so they can earn 4% ROI monthly by upvoting themselves via sockpuppets in addition to the appreciation of the tokens.
Steem’s witness nodes are paid to generate new blocks for the blockchain, but CDN nodes which serve the content stored in and referenced by the blockchain are not paid.
The reasons that Vid.me failed are what is solved by a tokenized replacement for Youtube as the admitted by Warren Shaeffer the Co-founder of Vidme:
Audience building — Leverage an existing audience, and/or incentivize all platform participants by issuing a native currency (e.g. blockchain) to equitably reward contributors.
But I think he is incorrect about the necessity of operating a video site at a loss. Tokenize then charge the users for the bandwidth costs. It will be minuscule1 compared to the appreciation in the value of the token, i.e. users will see their wallet balances rise. This is what Steem and EOS do by minting new tokens to pay the witness (and pay STINC which presumably makes sure the CDN nodes are funded), which I think is a feature bug because that opens a door for spam as compared to charged users a microtransaction fee. And rewarding tokens by minting them from a collective money supply can’t possibly be designed to not be a system which must end up as a winner-take-all whale dominated clusterfuck (i.e. oligarchy and overlords). And by the time the token stops appreciating some decade from now, then the cost of video bandwidth will have become insignificant and users will have gotten accustomed to the advantages they get as compared to Youtube and not want to stop.
P.S. STINC = Steem, Inc.
1 Roughly less than $0.01 per hour of video consumed. For example at 2 Mbps data rate for 360 – 480p video that is roughly 15 MB per minute which is less than 1 GB per hour. Hivelocity offers a $98 monthly server with 50 TB bandwidth allowance, which is $0.0019 per GB. As of May 2016, high volume pricing was as low as $0.0025 and dropping 20 – 25% per annum.
Should users pay directly or should be like a tax where users are paid a little less in order to cover costs for everything, bandwidth, data, etc, maybe.
Users should pay directly so that we don’t collectively fund spammers.
The point is that given the token is appreciating in value due to all the onboarding of millions and billions of users which Steem isn’t onboarding, then users will not think they are paying anything. Users will noticed their wallet balances are increasing.
And the long-range outcome is that the bandwidth and server costs per transaction shrink to epsilon and the knowledge activity value will be all of the value, so users won’t care that they’re paying. At that point, spammers will be squelched because they have no “decentralized curation” (i.e. not one-size-fits-all) reputations. This latter point is a mathematical one which I expound on at a future time. I’ve been redesigning Steem in my head since 2016 as evident by those past blogs.
Spammers cannot pay directly too?
They can waste their money if they want to. They’ll be wasting it because few will be seeing their content due to the decentralized curation which I linked for you. I doubt they will throw money away for no benefit. The decentralized curation doesn’t work algorithmically and economically if the users can post for free.
P.S. I suggest my most recent blog: Why Crypto Tokens Are Important
You cannot post for free. I was not able to post. There are times I cannot post because I run out of Steemit bandwidth.
Posting doesn’t reduce your wallet balance. Thus it has no cost other than the need to lockup your STEEM for 6.5 weeks (weighted average) as STEEM POWER in order to have posting bandwidth credits.
So someone can spam as much as their allotment without incurring any cost. Thus we can’t build any worthwhile decentralized curation algorithm when the cost of lying (about preferences) is free, because the spammers could simply compute how to fool the algorithm with spam. Whereas, when spam is not free, then the spammers will lose real money if they try to fool the system. And they will lose that battle overall unless they have more wealth in the system than the honest folks. And if they have the majority of the wealth in the system, then the system has failed to be popular any way.
Also as Vitalik (the creator of Ethereum) pointed out in his debate with Daniel Larimer (the creator of DPoS, Steem, and EOS), that the DPoS model of giving an allotment of bandwidth is very bad for users for the precisely the reason you have noted. You can exceed your allotment during peak usage, and then you must lockup more STEEM POWER for 13 weeks in order to get your post to be accepted to the blockchain. Whereas, with minuscule transaction fees then you would always be able to post unless your balance goes to 0, which isn’t likely because the transaction fees will be so tiny that you won’t even care (e.g. maybe 1000 posts per penny).
People and bots will always find ways to fool algorithms and everything is spam and everything is not spam and Facebook is full of spam and Twitter and YouTube is spam and my gardens are full of spam called weeds. People are motivated to make a lot of money. Making a few dollars off spam is not a motivation. It is better to have spam than to have nothing, until we have a better alternative.
Incorrect. Just because you’re accustomed to using Rube Goldberg machine designs from Dan Larimer, it doesn’t mean that all designs will be shitty. I already written to you more than once that I know how to design a system correctly.
Incorrect. I already told you that decentralized curation can’t function properly in Larimer’s Rube Goldberg machine designs, because for example making the transaction fee an allowance that doesn’t reduce the wallet balance makes it impossible to design a decentralized curation algorithm which is objective. This is because when there is a cost and an incentive coupled to that cost to produce curation that others agree with, then spam becomes uneconomic and good curation becomes economic.
Please kindly stop going on and on writing nonsense to an expert. It’s annoying for me to be forced to constantly have to write posts to clarify for readers your incorrect statements and consuming the time I need to be putting into coding and development. I think you’ve written more than 30 replies to me over the past two months. I appreciate your interest in better solutions, but you display an arrogant level of disrespect for my level of expertise. I had been very patient with you in my replies and tried to explain and be respectful and then you come backstab me with a reply like this after how much effort I put into trying to help you understand.
A few dollars here and there automated, amounts to huge profits at scale. Making spam unprofitable is the way to squelch it.
Did I ever disagree with that? No! I wrote that the “free” transaction fees are not really free because they have numerous deleterious effects which are costs on real users while they simultaneously enable spammers (analogous to how sending email is free so we have so much spam in our email). For example we have to endure broken curation and spam. We have debasement of the money supply to pay an oligarchy of witnesses and whales. And we have to lockup larger amounts of STEEM POWER for 13 weeks in order to accommodate our peak usage rate of the site, instead of the minuscule STEEM balance I would need if the system merely reduced my balance by
$0.0001every time I post something to the blockchain.Because there’s no favorable cost structure which penalizes spam and promotes decentralizd curation which provides what decentralized groupings of like-mindedness prefer to see ranked more highly. For example, I think I told you (or I know I posted on Steem) that my gf will click Like on every damn post in her Facebook feed that is from someone she knows regardless of whether the content is worthy. This is because clicking Like has no cost.