Why Ethereum & EOS are eating Steem's dust - Steem is now the best blockchain for tokens as well as DApps!
View this post on Hive: Why Ethereum & EOS are eating Steem's dust - Steem is now the best blockchain for tokens as well as DApps!
In mid-February 2020 Justin Sun acquired the shares in Steemit Inc and proceeded centralise the blockchain under his control, improperly using Steemit's founders stake (intended for development and decentralisation of the blockchain) and tricking exchanges into initially supporting his power grab.
After extensive efforts to resolve the dispute failed, the community revolted and formed a new, fully decentralised blockchain - Hive - without the pernicious influence of Justin Sun and his minions.
Because of Open Source licensing, Hive was legally able to duplicate all the code and content on Steem.
The vast majority of the community and decentralised applications and projects moved to Hive and Hive was listed on many cryptocurrency exchanges without having to pay the normal listing fees.
On 19 May 2020, a Steem hard fork (0.23) designed to steal the Steem from 65 accounts associated with creating Hive became public.
My position on this hard fork can be found here: https://peakd.com/hf23/@brianoflondon/letter-to-exchanges-do-not-run-steem-hard-fork-23-hf-0-23-0
This was the final straw for my involvement with Steem.
I will now post exclusively on Hive at https://peakd.com/@apshamilton/posts
All my old Steem content can also be found on Hive.
If you've been following the recent listings of Steem DApps on DApp rating websites such as State of the DApps you'll be aware that Steem is killing far better known and hyped blockchains like Ethereum & EOS.
Despite their much larger market caps and marketing budget, they are not living up to their promise. They have very few compelling DApps and tiny levels of user engagement.
In the end, community and real world usage are what counts.
Technology has to be good enough and Steem has more than proved itself in that department.
Since Steemit Inc re-focussed on its core priorities it has been getting better and more efficient all the time with RocksDB, Hivemind & MIRA.
Bitcoin is not perfect or the best tech, but it was the first to be good enough at its primary functions and developed a big supportive and active community. That is why that it is the leading cryptocurrency.
In contrast, EOS seems to be primarily a gambling platform which, combined with identifiable, high value block producers with expensive hardware requirements, is likely to attract hostile legal regulatory intervention. How long before EOS block producers are served with some legal filing?
For all the talk of Ethereum smart contracts, the only type of smart contract that has had any traction is the ERC20 token and ICO smart contracts that distributed them.
The success of ICOs is less a technical achievement than a reaction to the ridiculous over-regulation of IPOs by the SEC etc that caused huge drops in the number of US IPOs in the last 10 years.
Tokens on Steem
However the ability of anyone to issue their own tokens IS a transformational economic development, well aside from the now declining (again due to over regulation) ICO craze.
Up until recently, these other blockchains held an advantage over Steem because of the lack of Steem blockchain based tokens that Steem projects could use to reward users, investors, contributors etc.
Indeed the success of Steem DApps to date is even more impressive than it appears because of this handicap.
3 weeks ago, this handicap was lifted, and boy has it been liberating!
I've written here about @jpbliberty's experience with creating and issuing the SUFB ("Sue Facebook") token using Steem-Engine & Steem Keychain. We are very impressed!
While Steem is quite late to the blockchain token party, it has certainly brought the tastiest dish!
Steem Engine tokens are so much easier and cheaper to create and use than ERC20 tokens:
To create an ERC20 token requires programming skill in the obscure language of Solidity. Developers with this experience are more expensive than New York attorneys.
While @jpbliberty is happy to spend big money on Australian lawyers to fight Facebook and Google, it was not so happy spending large amounts just to create a token.To use an ERC20 token requires using long unintelligible strings as public keys and every transaction costs some unknown and ever changing amount of Gas.
Also, compared to Steem, transactions are slow.
Steem Keychain
Steem Keychain is so much better than Ethereum's MetaMask (which I have used quite a bit).
Part of this arises from the fundamental superiority of the Steem blockchain (fast, free transactions and user name public keys) and part arises from a better UI and greater functionality.
I can do almost all my Steem finance & admin functions on the same easy to understand interface. Its the easiest way to vote for witnesses.
I can also handle multiple accounts easily and without confusing them (impossible with ETH public keys).
It makes using Steem a great user experience.
Onboarding Users
I've been onboarding quite a few new Steemians recently so they can get their SUFB tokens.
I haven't had complaints and the Steemit.com process has been quick recently.
However it still leaves a lot to be desired.
However I'm aware of multiple initiatives addressing this issue and fully expect that this last obstacle to a great user experience will be removed soon.
The way I see it, with an amazing community, efficient and inexpensive node requirements, great DApps and now easy to use tokens, everything is coming together on Steem to deliver the full promise of a decentralised internet: the Cryptocosm.
It will take quite a while before the markets catch up with this reality, but I feel privileged to be part of this transformation of human online experience.
This kind of growth during a protracted bear market, is just sensational. The bloggers might be leaving, but the developers are arriving in droves. Like the SM devs said; they wanted to build a blockchain game, but starting their own chain would've set them back a million bucks before they could even start building on it.
Building here gave them a ready made, purpose built chain, and a huge pool of engaged users.
Yes, where many other projects in the blockchain world is slowing down and closing up, Steem is experiencing a Cambrian explosion. Bitcoin, with Lightning, is also gaining greater functionality and ease of use. Again because of a committed and active community, including plenty of developers.
Posted using Partiko iOS
This is right approach. Use existing resources to realise yr vision
I think the bear market will make participants reconsider what is truly needed to increase adoption and when the answer becomes overwhelming community, Steem will once again be brought forward as one of the valuable protocols available to build upon.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Did you see that @dan actually made some steem fud in twitter?
https://partiko.app/@felix.herrmann/dan-larimer-steem-fud-on-twitter
Posted using Partiko Android
Yes. I did see this. Dan’s original is his best but he’s too busy focusing on ever better technology. He doesn’t understand that the tech only needs to be “good enough”. The rest is community.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Agreed.
Maybe an atheistic god complex? Trying to become close to (mathematic) perfection?
Posted using Partiko Android
Nobody can disagree with all the conclusions you came up with. We need to use as many dapps on Steem platform as possible and make them visible in other platforms too
Honestly, I am not a big fan of steem-engine... It's not a very robust approach, with regards to consensus. It is not guaranteed at all that two clients, executing the same code, will arrive at the same state. Things like floating point operations will lead to problems in consensus and even simply skipping a few blocks will lead to alternative histories of whatever the "smart-contract" is tracking. Wosr than that, there is no way of dealing with consensus problems, except maybe social agreement.
This does not happen in ethereum because smart-contracts are built-in in the consensus layer. This is not to say that this could not be done in steem, but it needs to be done either way more carefully, or at the consensus layer itself. This is in part why SMTs are taking so long to come from SteemIt.
I totally agree with you, but I always wonder when you go to these Dapp Sites, that always the Dapps of Ethereum and EOS are shown first, and not the Steem Dapps. We have the best games, social media dapps and innovative plattforms like utopian.io and fundition.io out there.
I hope that our strong community will win in the long run!
The SUFB token issue has completely blown my mind. The sheer ridiculous simplicity of issuing shares in a venture and their transferability is amazing.
Posted using Partiko iOS
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