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RE: HF21: What Makes Steem Valuable?
Well the simple fact is you can't, as a typical user, "look" at a blockchain in and of itself. You are always going to be using some sort of application and the application is effectively a gatekeeper on eyeballs.
For example, steemit.com has started showing "featured posts" which have nothing to do with the blockchain, that is just whatever their company management decides users should look at, and those posts I believe get far more eyeballs as a result.
Yes, of course the programmers of the different apps have quite some influence, but apart from that, if there are more users altogether on a blockchain, business owners (investors) have a bigger pool of potential customers (my example was Steem Monsters). If the products of the businesses are paid with the currency of the blockchain (for example STEEM) that should originate in more demand and thus a higher price of the currency (at least that would seem to be logical in my eyes).
Sure more usage can correlate with higher value. That's not at all the same thing as 'eyeballs' though.
I meant we should care about getting/retaining as much as possible users which means more 'eyeballs' as well (English is not my mother tongue but I translate 'eyeballs' here with people who view content, advertisements, articles about Steem Monsters etc. - tell me if I am wrong) which should lead to more usage as well.
Yes, if someone is buying STEEM that doesn't influence people's eyeballs, but if there are more eyeballs (= more users) there is a bigger chance of more people buying STEEM. Therefore I think the formula more users = more value still should work even on a blockchain based platform.
And that's why we should care about the effect every change has on (potential) new users.
That's the premise being claimed above which I am questioning. In a lot of ways we seem to agree.
Passive users and active users alike increase the value of Steem.
Why do you think Steem has value if it ain't what I highlighted?
Well almost every single cryptocurrency has some value even the most nearly-defunct ones with abandoned development, semi-broken blockchains, etc. They almost never lose all value.
As far as why it has specifically the value that it has I don't think its much different from any other cryptocurrency. People speculate that it may have greater demand in the future for a variety of reasons, or that it may have less. The process results in a price.
But I'm not sold on it having anything to do with influencing eyeballs.
Steem is different than most other cryptocurrencies as most of its inflation doesn't go to pay for the security of the network but to the content creator.
Linear reward introduced a loophole which was explained in the original whitepaper. We talked about this at length already so I'll leave it to this.
This loophole gives the possibility for opportunists to extract a growing amount of value for a negligeable amount of work. This is at the expense of the whole network value.
The network value experienced a similar 90-95%+ drop in 2016 long before linear, and also at that time it was also greatly underperforming other cryptocurrencies.
It was also at the time that broad awareness of Steem was likely close to its peak, and was certainly very high, as it was the first social network-connected blockchain or cryptocurrency and people were notable people from both within and without the cryptocurrency world were flocking to it in part due to the high and highly visible payout values. Dan and Ned were featured on many well known podcasts, etc. One can even see the many attacks on Steem as a scam or ponzi scheme as a sign of its (short-lived) success; nobody even bothers to make these attacks now. At #70+ in market cap ranking, it's not even worth attacking.
And yet, in 2016, long before linear was even considered, it not only lost a tremendous amount of its value, but it fell in value to the point that did not suggest investor believed in there being a lot of promise for it. (Nor, I might add, did apparently Dan, since he left for something which, we can all see with the benefit of hindsight, has indeed been far more promising.) The decision to switch to a linear model, however we may feel about it now, did not happen in a vacuum, it was made after seeing the superlinear model fail to perform in driving the growth and retaining value.
No one has demonstrated either a solid descriptive or predictive model nor empirical evidence as for why people would buy Steem in order to influence eyeballs. There are gaping flaws and leaps of faith in any argument I have ever seen including the original white paper.
This does not mean that Steem can't become popular or increase in value, but these are still very different question, and I don't really attribute the lack of success Steem has ever had (regardless of payout curve) in convincing investors of its promise to the 'eyeballs' issue in and of itself. I attribute it to lack of any convincing story for why Steem should succeed and accrue value. In that I largely agree with @lukestokes.
Probably the closest I've ever seen is the "secret plan for world domination" post that @lukestokes likes to reference (and he is not alone). Indeed that post also has very little to do with people buying Steem to influence eyeballs. It is more about growing a large community with users and a variety of useful apps (including smart contracts) which uses Steem as its currency platform. Unfortunately we got really distracted by this whole "paying content creators" concept which was supposed to be a means to an end. When it became largely an end in and of itself and a primary focus, things went downhill from there.
I disagree and many metrics disagree with your opinion. Superlinear reward weren't given enough time but aren't fundamentally flawed like linear. Don't get me wrong, I was super aware of the collusive voting going on to game the curation but it couldn't be perfectly gamed as the collusion would always profit some more than others.
I bought Steem under superlinear to influence the platform knowing other people would compete to do the same. Currencies are just that, store of influence, store of energy. Whether or not people understand this doesn't make it less true.
We do indeed disagree on superlinear (as implemented in Steem) not being fundamentally flawed or even any less flawed than linear (I would say in some ways more flawed, but yes both are definitely flawed). It was just not fundamentally flawed in exactly the same way as linear.
Name one. There is no evidence in terms of actual metrics of Steem being on a success trajectory in 2017 after about a year of superlinear. It was cratering in terms of user base growth, retention, web ranking of the main site, etc. and there is no data to support that more time would have done anything but continue the trend.
If you were in the top 20, would you work to get the other witnesses to reject EIP for HF21?