Was the Launch of Steem a Scam or the Only Legal Way? - Thoughts on Steem by Charlie Shrem a Week Later
Recently I've found myself in a Twitter storm of anti-Steemness. How? I have no idea. It has been focusing on different aspects of Steem, but I'd like to focus on one right now.
We've all seen it before. The fated Bitcointalk Announcements (Altcoins) sub, where scamcoins, altcoins and the like come to live and (hopefully not) die.
If you look a little closely, there is an announcement for Steem - An Experiment Proof of Work on March 24th
Then on May 9th, the official Steemit platform was announced.
What happened during those 2 months has been one of the biggest arguments of people calling Steem a scam.
Steem as a company and its founders mine a large stake of Steem themselves between that time period, giving themselves one of the largest stakes in Steem.
Does that make it a Scam? I don't think so. Here is why.
I am more sensitive to the plight of companies trying to get off the ground and how hard it is to stay on the right side of the law. I believe the way Ned and Dan launched Steem was the one of the only kosher ways to do it. (I am no legal expert)
Take a look at Dan's article on the subject: https://bytemaster.github.io/article/2016/03/27/How-to-Launch-a-Crypto-Currency-Legally-while-Raising-Funds/
He writes that there are 4 bullet points must be satisfied for a blockchain launch to be considered legal:
- Do not pre-allocate any currency to yourself or others.
- Do not sell currency directly to others
- Aways sell through a regulated exchange.
- Complete the currency and protocol prior to launch.
One of Tone's biggest arguments is that on march 24th there was not enough information given for people to mine Steem and the lack of transparency. However Dan addresses that:
"A startup that attempts to comply with all of the FinCEN regulations AND all of the Bitcoin community cultural regulations finds itself in a pickle. If you reveal enough information about your product with enough warning then the market will speculatively place a high value on your tokens. The higher the value the market places on the tokens, the more capital is wasted on a computational competition to acquire the tokens."
I tend to agree with this.
In working on my own project in the past I realized that if I launched a token and announced it, many people would mine it making the value go up very quickly and my inability to mine enough for the company to fund development.
Why is it a bad thing that Steem and its founders mined so many in the beginning? Wouldn't you want the founders and the company to have enough money to further development of the platform thus making everyone else's Steem value worth more? Everyone who has Steem or Steem Power has an economic interest in furthering the project.
Playing devils advocate here. It is rumored that Satoshi Nakamoto owns a very large percentage of Bitcoin due to the fact that many of the earliest coins have not moved. I don't think thats a bad thing, he deserves those coins as the creator of Bitcoin. His development has brought us one of the most important technologies of our lifetime. https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/
I concede the white paper is very long and may not be perfect. Steem is new and experimental. However I don't think we should throw a project under the bus because of that. Besides, what financial investment is required to participate? NONE!
Let's try to be a bit more objective in our arguments
-Charlie
I have been getting lots of incoherant arguments about Steem also from various people. The more I dig into their arguments with them the more they come down to 'feelings' instead of 'thinking'. Most come down to ad hominmem arguments which, even if they were completely as argued, would still be irrelevant and not useful.
So far I have found Steem to operate, more or less, exactly as the whitepaper represents and it is a far superior content distribution platform to Seeking Alpha, where I am a gold standard contributor, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and so many others.
I am really at a loss for why people make the Steem is a scam argument but then I am a Steem noob and have not thoroughly researched it yet. But at least based on reading the whitepaper and the practical experience I have gained with it I do not find it to be a scam.
You and I are still very new and I'm also learning. We've both made a nice sum of SBD and SP writing here, and I agree thats because we are both good content writers and popular figures. However you and I have personally gone out in the past week and signed tons of people up to Steem, this is the point! We are not only being paid for our content, we are being paid to help further Steem.
I'm staying open minded and objective right now.
The only thing which is a pity is that they seem not to believe too much in the current valuation and are powering down, then dumping the received tokens each week. It seems that the consensus of the development team and whales is that a 150 mil. valuation is too high... Many people would like to see them not selling their tokens, even though it furthers the distribution of the SP's. It just shows a lack of faith that a 50 bil. valuation can be reached or existing social media be replaced. (This obviously does not change the fact that they are free to do what they want with their property for sure).
Many whales have to much of their wealth concentrated on steem !!! So even if they are bullish they are not comfortable to have for example 90% of their wealth on a single project... It is for them like a "one point of failure" ... I assume many of them want only to put some of their eggs on other baskets just in case the project fails...It is just a proper bankroll management, poker players out there can understand me ;)
PS BTW steemit whales could be good poker players ...
moved up ...
Not just this -- i know some "users" with larger stake and they starting to transfer to new users, friends - business partners - on the other side:
I was reading many complaints about the centralization on this game here - now look at the "POWER downs" - This also means - Whales won't have so much influence - From what i can observe - slowly but steady we will see by far more new larger stakeholders and it will get much more fairer "holding" distribution - not that i'm thinking the current distribution is "unfair".
Even u may should take into consideration, that on STEEM u are able to see all the "wealth" a user is [HODL] – ( Hold On for Dear Life ) not like facebook & Co. !
Is this essentially good or bad?
I can just speak for myself but i love the transparent way
of how things are going here ;) - my 2 SBD
Maybe the miserable negative trolls should just be recognized for who and what they are (not you @cass; you are pointing out the inconsistency, and rightly so).
If they held onto their steem how would they pay their developers and do things to grow the network. They are hiring like crazy, Devs can cost 120k+ per year. They need easily a million dollar a year developer budget.
In the case of Dan this is a reason I am aware of and which I respect, but out of 30 whales 28 were powering down, the last time I looked... many of whom are not going to pay any developers.
This is a reply to mexbit's comment below (the system wont let me reply to it). I'm not sure what their motives are, but powering down doesn't necessarily mean they are getting out long term. Perhaps they think the current price downtrend will continue for a bit and want to buy back in and power up even more. Or maybe they want to pay off their debts. I dont think powering down gives a clear indication of motives.
Good point here, can't rely forever on angel investors and volunteer hours - if the developers know the founders have been successful, they'll want to get paid!
Read the disclaimer, Steemitco has a disclamier that they have to do NOTHING!
Nothing zero, and are cashing out every week.
To me the real question is can we demonstrate that Steem Power is a good business investment and not just a potentially good speculative investment? I think we can with the right focus from whales, which I explain in my most recent post about 4 ways whales can help grow the market cap.
Whales almost make up most of what is the market cap. Whaledom is not about getting voted up, but having lots of SP, they are investors. They are the biggest content moderators and behaviour police. It is not about what the whale says but what they vote on that matters. Their effect on the ecosystem is big, and has an impact on engagement with the readers, with the interest that spreads from here to the internet. Fortunately the hard-working would-be dolphins and aspiring minnows who are out there marketing (see @xeroc's comment just above). Marketing people, we need them too.
Really Steem is a DAO, our product is media, but mostly textual, everyone here is not just an employee but to some degree a stakeholder. The Whales and the Devs are the two most important groups, but they need us little guys, and the competition that drives the creation of content.
I actually think, that to some extent the blogging/social media networking is largely and primarily marketing. The mechanisms of vesting are what makes Steem an investment. We minnows and dolphins, we are producing the material that helps get Steem noticed. The Whales mostly try to pick the best stuff we make, and as they do this, they distribute SP towards good content creators whose votes gradually increase in influence. If the mechanism works to elevate content that brings new users and triggers discussion, it also brings in investors. People need to understand that as an investor you get to add your influence to the marketing itself.
This is also where developers using the system to create more ways to access and interact with the data is so important, and why developers are amongst the highest voted single category of users posting. By enhancing the ability to access the material, we increase the chances of gaining more interest in the platform. Developers also can help with scaling issues relating to curation, like the filter and grouping systems I am working on.
I understand everything you've stated and agree, but nothing you've explained relates to my question, can we make Steem Power an obvious good investment?
This is the post I mentioned above that explains how I think we can make Steem Power business investment that will be highly desirable: https://steemit.com/steemit/@nathanbrown/top-4-ways-whales-can-increase-market-capitalization-of-steem-by-local-currency-expert-and-online-marketer-consultant#@wingz/re-nathanbrown-re-wingz-re-nathanbrown-top-4-ways-whales-can-increase-market-capitalization-of-steem-by-local-currency-expert-and-online-marketer-consultant-20160824t092235415z
The issues is "traction", I think. We still don't have the required traction so that marketing SteemPower as "ranking weight" on Steemit.com makes any sense. Holding SteemPower and voting on particular posts is like chaning the ranking algorithm (rather the weights) of the google search engine. Except that the search engine is a crowd of people and the weights are the SteemPower of those people.
Astutely put, Charlie.
I also see the same thing happen with people who release new tools, development libraries, and similar, they get paid a LOT for doing this work. @xeroc made 45k out of his piston platform, on a 'changelog' post. Anyone who is adding value seems to be voted up. Obviously this is an example of the incentives for the Whales to keep their fat balances from slimming down.
Please name them so we can fix this. You need to understand that there are alot of posts on steem and just because a post is good doesn't make the whales become aware of it. If you have good content, you need to market it to people and not just hope for a whale to drop in by accident.
Yes, I am quite aware of the deluge that is content and I am sure that it will probably get worse, this is why I talk so much about developing mechanisms for creating filters and grouping. I try to gather the lists of people, whose work I like, and who like my work, and check on the feed.
Well, I'm only little at this point but I try to remember to vote on things that stand out also. What I think is good is not any indicator for other people necessarily. When I am particularly proud of a piece I try to drop a link to the story, when I can see some angle to introduce it in the discussion. I am by no means any kind of sales genius. I can only sell things that are already very convincingly good by thesmelves. I also don't like to butt into other people's scenes too much.
Are you telling me that nobody, I mean zero people told either one of you something like the following. "hey post over at steem , I will make sure you get 10k$ in steem on your post" or somthing roundabout that? I am sure that this has happened with some other "famous" people. No in itself there is nothing wrong with that, just that it should be noted upfront that the post was payed in order to promote steemit.
I think I'd have more faith in steemit if the devs weren't seeming to power down and sell 2m USD worth of steem a week :/.
oh but it isnt a scam, and you are just crying because it isnt fair wahh , but satoshi has a lot of bitcoin , wahaha
Lol luckily dey making 2m a week and have already lost half their coins value and a majority of its support on exchanges
I think its largely people pinning their hopes and dreams at financial success on things like this and after seeing folks like you, @charlieshrem, @dollarvigilante, etc making tons of cash, and the inevitable emotional backlash when they sober up and realize "nope, this ain't a get rich quick scheme either". I can understand this, as your comment here has cleared the sum of all my content combined lol... but I'm here for shits and giggles at the moment so the money aspect doesn't factor in for me as much.
I think this is a great point. Ironically the fact that it is not a get rich quick scheme seems to be part of the problem!
You mean how upvoting by Dan and his buddies shows that it is not a get rich scheme, got it.
@tracemayer @charlieshrem would love your thoughts on XMR - is it really more anon that BTC - @charlieshrem your insight would be wicked good too on this
why? you dont earn steemit by commenting on anything non pro steemit or pro bitshares
There exists no other solution on the internet that allows for any user to get heavily rewarded for great content - and this user does not even have to invest a penny or has to be a celebrity. How can this be a scam if you do not invest anything except content!?
because of steem envy
damnit jl777, you really need to join us at our hangouts. Just so you know @inboundinken this guy is a very well known person in the cryptosphere. At least to those who see merit in not being in the cult of "only bitcoin"
still a bit busy finalizing iguana and helping with btcfork project, and have an upcoming one too.. I guess I will be a bit busy for a while, hopefully someone here can get me C code for local signing steemit tx so I can integrate it into iguana
Yea as long as you help the founders cash out by providing content, you are in!
There are the accusations that the mining start was intentionally restarted several times (I think it was three) to confuse or trick "outsiders". If that can be proven, then that would be wrongdoing right? Still reminds me a lot of the Dash Instamine Saga where I still think it was a honest mistake by the Devs. I'm still waiting for the XMR Steemit whales to display that level of scrutiny here. Thanks for your insights!
The Dash instamine has been proved many times NOT to be a honest mistake. You really think these "smart" people fucked up something as important as mining clients at the launch, well very well knowing that is a critial time, yea Im sure it was just a woopsie
@tracemayer That's Where I know your from, Seeking Alpha. I used to read their articles every once in a while. Anyways, welcome to STEEMIT and up vote and follow.
full $teem ahead!
@streetstyle
There is one more important fact that people miss that justifies why Steemit Inc has mined a substantial amount of STEEM in the beginning.
Due to the rate-limitation that allows free transfers on the Steem blockchain, all new accounts need to be pre-funded with a couple dollars worth of Steem Power. That means that creating an account is among the few transactions that actually cost a fee. So, Steemit Inc needs these funds to be able to onboard new users! So far, the Steem network knows 74,241 accounts with probably +80% having been registered by Steemit.
Let's assume the account creation fee was at 3 STEEM per account from the beginning (and it was not), then that would amount to 178,178 STEEM or more than a quarter million dollars. All payed by Steemit Inc.
@charlieshrem: Since you seem very open-minded about Steem and think that you can help the whole ecosystem to grow one or the other way, I would like to offer you to call me on skype or appear.in so that I can help you understand the details that are still unclear. Only if you like, of course.
@xeroc is one of the most respected developers/contributors of bitshares & steemit, his reputation of 69 represents quite well how valuable he is in general (he is the 11 most appreciated account out of 74241 !!!) http://steemwhales.com/?p=1&s=reputation Just in case you don't know who made you the invitation ;)
WOW, you mean to tell me Dan and his buddies upvoted a bitshares developers reputation so high! WOW Amazing! I am 100% sure that is based on merit! GOOD JOB! it means a LOT!
... so pathetic
... indeed what you wrote was oh so pathetic
Thats a fantastic point that I missed. I'd love to set up a skype call with you! My email is [email protected] or add me on skype.
Is this explained in the ANN post, Oh hell no.
Stop making excusies for yet antoher instamine.
It doesn't take much brain to understand why the ANN post did not include all the business-relevant details. Further, I didn't mean to make any "excusies" but merely pointed out something that is (obviously) not so obvious to many
Right, guys guys, sorry I mined most of it even though I have launched several crypto projects , I made a woopse! I just mined most of the coins my mistake. I know that you do not understand the power over the platform that I just gave myself, but hey so what. It was a bug. I did not explain what I will be able to do with all these coins in the ANN thread, and for that matter I will leave the tech stuff out of the whitepaper too! Who reads that stuff about distro , mining rewards and how it all works anyway. I am sure that if we fill the while paper full of feel good fluff there will be more users. The more users the higher of a price I can unload my insta mined coins.
It gets on my nerves when people who have never run a business expect the entrepreneurs to just give their creations away. I don't have a problem with Ned and Dan having a large stake because they are equally invested in the mission.
The people who expected everything for free are often people who have no idea what it takes to launch a real business. They just have an attitude of entitlement, that everything should just be given to them. That bothers me.
I don't think making a profit and providing value to society are opposing ideas. In fact I think they should have a directly relationship.
It would be nice if the richest person in the world was also the person who had contributed the most to humanity. Alas, I do not think I can say that about many of the people on the Forbes rich list.
:: applause :: -- Well said!
meh oversimplifcation and lacking any concrete examples.
Warning people about a scam is not entitlment. If you business is a scam, then be ready.
Sow the wind, weap the wirlwind.
I agree they are not the same, but that wasn't my point. There's a certain type of person that automatically labels something a scam if the founder stands to make a profit.
You can see therefore that this person would also expect everything to be given to them for free (because they don't like anyone making a profit). That's the entitlement bit.
The irony is that almost none of these people have ever created anything of value and then given it away (because that takes real work).
Which leaves me with the question to pose to these people "When did you get it into your head that the world should bend over backwards to please you?".
That's a question I'd be really interested in hearing answers to.
The issue is not if the founder stands to make a profit.
The issue is if something is misleading, a scam or some other form of fraud-pr not.
That is a seperate issue than a founder making profit or controling the majority of the coin supply which in turn lets them control what is on top of the platform, and many other questions. If it were mapped out fro the start "founders control everything basicly" well that would be different. Pointing out that the distro of steem is not begging your question.
If you are going ot call people out "almost none of these people" just name names so that we can see concreate cases of what you are talking about.
You are painting this as "profit, oh it must be a scam" and not going any of the reasons , coin distro, whitepaper lacking technicals , instamine launch and many other things. The critics have given concrete issues, please give us examples of these "people" you are talking about. If you can not do that then we can asume your argument is well, crap.
I was debating a principle, not Steem specifically, hence the lack of specific references to Steem.
Once upon a time, there was a great wizard who stomped a whole city out of the desert ground. When people moved in, some observed his house had a pool and furniture already and even books in the shelves. That is how they knew he was a trickster and so they burned him at the stake. And they lived happily ever after. The End.
I am amazed at the shortsightedness of my family and friends, its as though they have been numbed to recognizing opportunity and innovation. Several times I give the gist of steemit, show them articles of success, and even point out the many possibility's they have in their own talents that would earn them steem. They are just too comfortable with fascist book.
The other thing is that perhaps the biggest draw card at this point for people is that unlike Facistbook, precisely there is no censorship. In the circles I used to find myself there, the number of times I saw reports of this kind of mischief, and then there was the damning revelation that fascist books mods in fact have a definite agenda.
So in other words, for the time being, these MSM following types, and their leftist leanings, are not really in the target demographic for Steemit at this point anyway. The idea is that people who believe in freedom and anarchists and this kind of people, we now have our own soapboxes, and as we post this kind of thing here, and not get shut down, sooner or later the entire alt-community will be here because they can find stuff they want to read. Some proportion of the users migrating here will also bring money to the platform, bidding up the value of Steem as well.
Right now people think it's outrageous that a post can get $15,000. Wait until the market cap is over a billion, right now it's close to 200mln... I also mentioned before but those figures can be deceptive. They are based on Steem prices and the reward is split and most of it is vested, into 1 week maturing tokens and 2 year slow payout tokens.
From @l0k1 (So in other words, for the time being, these MSM following types, and their leftist leanings, are not really in the target demographic for Steemit at this point anyway.) I agree with your statement, but the people I am referring to are nearly computer illiterate, all use the smartphone, and those that have laptops & desktops used to depend on me for setup and repairs. ( and now I am hundreds of miles away from them). I am starting to come to the conclusion they might be intimidated by the complexity because all are conservative, libertarian or anarchist.
This is why there needs to be ongoing development. It is one of the very neat mechanisms of the voting rewards system that you can see if you look at for example someone like @xeroc's posts. He has done a lot of work towards developing a platform to allow further development of Steem related applications. He has effectively been paid for this work. He didn't have to go through the complex and probably non-programmer-type activity of marketing it, Whales and Dolphins did it for him. Anyone with an idea and some skill with code can then take that and make something more, and most likely, posting and publishing and making it available, will also result in the developer getting paid through the voting mechanism.
I am also wanting to get involved with this. I have some ideas that will help users filter content down, to facilitate moderated groups, a non-aggressive method of eliminating unwanted content from your feed, that does not impact others helps a lot.
Once all these things are in place and people can use them, the possibility for expanding the demographics of potential users greatly increases. Which is why I should stop talking about it and start coding it :)
My situation as well!
I do not understand why do we still focus on all these negative hodlers? Isn't enough already? It looks like he just doesn't like Dan. The only thing I am worried about is that no one at the moment has incentive to buy steem, so its marketcap could go very low maybe to tens of millions, so we definitely need more smartcontracts, sidechains and other great applications for steem. So far this is the only project that managed a)scale to so many users and introduce them b)steem dollars (stable crypto asset. It also introduced c)crypto as a whole, c)introduced zero fee d)actually fast transaction network and e)actual blockchain-based social network. And all of it with built-in redistribution of wealth. Of course old money does not like it.
I am looking at coinmarketcap and i see that indeed the Steem has decreased in size by about $9mln, in the last week.
I think it is possible that this is just the first wave of big posts making big money being powered down and sold. Steem is in active development at the moment and the community growing out of the facility to blog and earn is a factor in what moves people to buy in or cash out.
Once the codebase settles a bit, and a lot more ways are made to add value, the price should start to move towards a steady uptrend. The simple fact that as the sweat-equity contributors on the blog-discussion side goes, are not necessarily adding money in, but we are getting vested tokens back out that take time to cash out, should help people stop and think for a little while 'hmm well I'm not gonna see all of this SP back before 2 years, I might have another look at this, maybe buy some SBD, or even maybe buy some SP and use that to exert my influence as a curator'...
I think coinmarketcap.com marketcap figure might be a bit misleading, but I might be wrong. There is one problem to your last paragraph argument. No social network so far has managed to make people pay for to use it. Donald Trump in his AMA received 600 dollars worth of reddit gold. That is president candidate AMA. That would mean any trending top posts getting 10-15 bucks in steem. Yes. It could go that low too if no incentives for steem buying are available.
The value at coinmarketcap.com are denominated at base in BTC so the value of BTC has an influence on the figure as well. If BTC goes down, so does this number. A more complicated tracking system would be required to see that value in dollars, and besides, Steem can be traded for several other tokens as well, and is, so really, that value should account for multiple pair crosses... The numbers of different tokens going into exchanges is getting dizzying.
I will give you three guesses who is selling a lot of steem.
Hint , you need three letters.
The "scam" argument comes down to a religious belief about decentralization and immutability. These things are important characteristics of Bitcoin, but what many fail to realize is that decetralization and immutability aren't binary and there's degrees of them that make sense to be experimented with.
While not as decentralized as Bitcoin, that doesn't mean it's a scam. Just that it's more centralized than Bitcoin.
And as we have seen, the decentralization of Bitcoin has been quite problematic. It's incapable of doing important decisions on time. It's anarchy in the bad way – just chaos where people are having bitter fights and nothing gets done.
It's problematic for innovation, yes. I would argue that it's not problematic for it's intended application though: p2p digital cash. There's room for both innovation and p2p digital cash in the world though.
It's very big problem if Bitcoin wants to be cash that has large userbase. Currently it can't scale up and the development has been really, really slow. That's because it's too decentralized and can't do effectively any big decisions.
again, you're assuming the goal is scaling fast rather than being sound p2p cash.
when you scale fast, you sacrifice security. security is essential but comes at the cost of speed. so it's a constant tradeoff, and there's room for both approaches
@ntomaino since cash without a powerful network effect undermines itself, scaling up is a necessary part of becoming effective cash. Cash that I can't use to buy my groceries isn't cash.
If p2p cash can't scale, it's hard to consider it as sound cash. At least it should scale a lot more than Bitcoin does now. Bitshares and Steem are great examples how it can be done.
And the problem isn't exactly scalability, it's the incapability to make decisions on time. Governance model of Bitcoin sucks. If Bitcoin ever wants to be widely used cash, it should make big reforms on it's decision making process – which is, as I said, just chaos currently.
From a security standpoint, I think very much that sound decision making process is really important. If there is no clear way of deciding things, it's hard to react to different threats.
YEa, I know it has been horrible. Nobody uses it and it has no value.
No updates, and no new releases.
Dan got a lot of good experience with crowdfuning via PTS/AGS and did his homework on how to launch the Steem chain to minimize regulatory risk while maximizing stake distribution to partcipants motivated to help Steemit succeed rather than just profiting from mining and dumping ala Protoshares. My only gripe with Steemit is the conspicuous absence of a share drop on the Bitshares community, but overall I believe the roll out was balanced and well thought out. I really think the only people whining about a scam are miners that feel entitled to mine and dump every new coin that comes along.
I think the biggest hurdle is the perception that starting a cryptocurrency/blockchain business which becomes quickly profitable/valuable is unfair to others because of the founders stake. When in reality, the founders are the ones taking the biggest risk, developing innovation, and doing the vast majority of the work. We don't see this in other highly-successful traditional businesses as it is done behind the scenes. But with blockchain and cryptocurrencies, it is more transparent, therefore it is open to more criticisms.
Well said. It's called the risk return profile. It has been working for 6000 years already (or longer).
It's still a BETA project. It's an experiment. It's testing to see if could work. Steemit hasn't even been officially released and taken out of BETA yet.
I find the more popular something becomes, the people who miss it as an early adopter are always the first ones to throw it under the bus and encourage everyone else to throw it under the bus too.
It's human habit to hold true to your initial decision to not get involved in something, and see if you were right, by convincing others to rally with you.
We need to get over these personality defects for the greater good of cryptocurrency projects.
I listen to Tone Vays on his interviews a lot. 86% of what he says has a lot of smarts and accuracy to it. 14% of the time, he's wrong, and spends the remaining time qualifying why he's not wrong on that 14%
His hatred, disgust, and denouncing steemit in anyway he can, is that 14% WRONG where he's over thinking, and over-slamming steemit.
Tone Vays, give it more time. The best thing you can tell your followers is to stop slamming Charlie Shrem for making up his own mind on what he wants to do.. He's intelligent, and doesn't need to be "sold" on how to stay away from steemit.
Some people... really...
I've only heard Tone Vays on the interview posted here on steemit. I guess he's supposed to be an expert, but he comes across like a dope.