RE: The rise of the clones (steem clones)
I started writing a post about the same topic yesterday. Just because you can create a fork of Steem (MIT license) doesn't mean that you should - unless you want to make some quick scammy money.. The only case when it would make sense to fork Steem is if you had a team of very competent developers and you believe that your ideas of the future of Steem are not possible to align with the ideas of Steemit Inc and the Steem witnesses - let's say you had a team like Block.one and wanted to create smart contracts on Steem, but @ned doesn't want you to. Even with all what has been going wrong in the past, Steemit Inc still has one of the best and most experienced teams world-wide for development of a DPOS Blockchain.
Most of the forks talked about so much these days - weku and smoke network to name just two - only do some cosmetical changes to Condenser to make their frontend look different from Steem (it still feels exactly the same!), but they leave the backend the same because they have no blockchain developers - if they were serious about their project, they would be off much better with a dApp on Steem and an SMT in a few months. And then there are projects like Whaleshares that actually make some small changes to the forked Blockchain (but mostly just to their UI) and claim to solve Steem's problems. I actually made an account there to know what I write about, but some of their claims are just ridiculous:
Another "YUGE" change on Whaleshares... 😮
There are no megawhales 🐋 on Whaleshares like you may have encountered on STEEMIT, and there is no delegation to create even more megawhale-type users either. Currently, the largest "whales" you might encounter on Whaleshares may hold around 1% of the initial 21 Million WLS Supply.
Two of Steem's largest and best known whales, @ranchorelaxo and @hendrikdegrote, both hold less than 1% of the Steem supply and look how much they are able to influence the rewards pool.. But I guess they are not megawhales then. Ok, there are a few bid bots that use delegations, but most importantly, delegations enable dApps to start off - be in by a delegation bought on minnowbooster or by a delegation from Stinc or another whale. Whaleshares uses some controversies of Steem and tries to do better, but it will never have an infrastructure in terms of developers and dApps anywhere close to Steem nor do I believe that by simply disabling helpful but features that can also be used for reward pool abuse such as delegations is a solution.
And the most important thing that these forks claiming to fix the rewards pool overlook is that Steem is much more than Steemit.com - there is a whole Steem universe and with SMTs, the rewards pool distribution for dApps will differ significantly from the Steem rewards pool.
imo the most promising one is whaleshares atm, but then again, we can't predict human psychology and as much as we hate the idea, greed is an element that is necessary to bring speculators into the fold.
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