It's a very bad idea to power down or sell Steem right now
Disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser and this is not investment advice. These are my opinions based on what I've just seen on Github.
The current Steem is flawed and we all know it
First, the current version of Steem is very flawed. We all know about the problems. There are complaints about abuse of the reward pool, complaints about bots, complaints about how hard it is to earn a stable income from blogging. This is only going to keep getting worse unless participants have more ways to add value to Steem than mere blogging, curating, or being a witness/politician. The majority of participants on the Steem platform genuinely want to add value and want to increase the utility of Steem. Currently the cost of doing this is prohibitively high and this forces the majority of participants into the three main yet limited roles (blogger, curator, politician), which in my opinion is the main flaw.
The bots exist currently and are automating curation. These bots do not do a great job at it and many people complain that these bots upvote posts which "do not deserve" to be rewarded or perhaps not rewarded as much. This is a very subjective thing so I will not really go into which posts do or do not deserve this or that. What I will say is that when there is a very small limited pool, with only main ways to add value to Steem, and perhaps 250,000 or 500,000 people all trying to be bloggers, or curators, or politicians, this is not going to work. Not everyone should be a blogger, and even people who are doing well blogging today (myself included), may not be best suited to continue blogging into the future.
The problems we see with Steem today are solvable
The problem today is that the reward pool is limited, the ways of adding value to Steem is even more limited, and if you look at the math of it all, as there are more people who join then the new people will see the older generations and think of it like it's some kind of pyramid. The truth of the matter is that the only way to allow all participants to build their wealth while adding value to Steem is to expand the variety of ways participants can add value to Steem, expand the reward pool by creating an unlimited number of possible reward pools, and embrace diversification.
The answer is yes, there will be solutions. The answer to our problems in my opinion will be the smart media tokens. These resolutions, these solutions, these new roads being built, are all on Github for people who can read the code and understand the discussions. The specification for SMT is also important because it details how these problems can be solved.
Building wealth on Steem with SMTs
Wealth building is something many of us want. We want to contribute value to this community and be rewarded for it. We want to have our income grow while also seeing Steem improve. This is all possible to achieve with SMTs because SMTs are all about value flow. Wealth building is also about value flow, so this means it will be possible for more people to find a niche where they can contribute maximum value to the Steem ecosystem while being rewarded. It is very possible that many of us who are bloggers today (I'm talking about myself), may retire from blogging once SMTs come online and offer newer and better ways to add value.
SMTs are smart media tokens. These tokens much like pheromones can be used to encourage contribution of value. For example it may be possible to have ICOs over Steem which would allow entrepreneurship moves to take place. It is also possible that tokens can be used to start non profits for those who would like to focus on charitable activities. It will be possible to create all sorts of mini ecosystems where people who are "minnows" right now can actually have the advantages in some of these new ecosystems. We simply do not know what can or will be created in the future by way of SMTs.
Read the smart media token whitepaper here.
If I had the money right now I would aggressively buy Steem
Currently I don't have it but if I did then I see Steem is dramatically undervalued. SMTs will provide Steem with a huge utility boost and on top of this Steem also benefits greatly from Metcalfe's law in that the size of the community is there. So it's just a matter of increasing the number and kinds of connections between nodes. Right now what we can do on Steem is too limited and this is the only thing holding the ecosystem back. Adding greater utility to Steem means that eventually the price of Steem will be going up, possibly 100x from where it is right now, and quite possibly this year.
This all will depend on SMTs and what the participants decide to do with them. There are also the unknowns such as regulation but these unknowns can be navigated. Some flaws do remain with Steem such as the lack of privacy but even if Steem has zero privacy it still can have a lot of utility and become the main community for crypto. This status of being the main community for crypto is a big deal if achieved.
Final thoughts for now
The topic of building wealth with SMTs is going to be a topic I will focus more on once I know more about what SMTs will make possible. I do know that in theory depending on what developers do with it there could be a lot of opportunities there. To provide a basic example what would stop a team from setting up an SMT to create a decentralized Airbnb? Using a certain token a person could pay their rent over Steem. This token may not be the best example but the whitepaper does detail ways which would make it possible. Shared token rewards is also a significant feature because it means myself and others can form a community within a community. This community within a community could be like a tribe and rewards could be distributed based on membership according to the rules the members agreed to. This in my opinion may require a profit sharing functionality to be added to SMTs and to some extent this is planned.
For example reward sharing is going to be possible so that someone can post under a pseudonym and share the rewards of their posts with whomever they like. Between 8 and up to 256 accounts are the limit. This reward sharing in my opinion being limited to only 256 accounts seems kind of arbitrary and I would remove this limit if possible but this may be a hard limit due to the blockchain itself. Still if for every instance it's 256 accounts and there are unlimited possible future instances then you can do a lot just with that.
Finally SMTs can even work in symbiosis with something like Brave with it's BAT token. What about the smart oracles feature which was mentioned? These all are going to have high potential. What about the ability to burn SBD or SMTs, or lock them in smart contracts, or to allow advertisers to pay for our attention and share the profit with all who opt-in? All of this will be possible.
See the second part and solution to this post: https://steemit.com/smt/@dana-edwards/steem-must-improve-and-the-key-metric-for-that-improvement-is-utility
NOW WE ARE TALKING !!!
PS Somebody (@ned )please knock his door https://twitter.com/BrendanEich for collaboration. It's the ultimate benefit for their token holders to make a 1:1 transition from erc20-BAT to SMT-BAT tokens ;)
Where to talk about this?
It will be interesting to watch how SMTs will be used. I'm keeping a close eye on it to integrate them in www.steemmakers.com. I sure hope it helps building communities like SteemMakers.
I think you are mostly right, but there are a few things I don't see a solution for, like bots, I don't see a reasonable way of people not using them and bots don't care about the platforms value they just vote for anything, reward pool abuse, another one that is tied with bots, how can you stop people from using bots to upvote themselves. SMT's look like they could be a trend breaker, so I have a lot of hope in them. As for investing in Steem and not withdrawing, that is also difficult, for example I don't have money to invest and sometimes I have had to withdraw Steem because I had an economic proble. Of course i wish it wasn't so and I could hoard SP, but for now it isn't possible.
I have always been pro bot and do not see bots as the problem. I don't think human based curation can scale realistically because human attention is extremely scarce. If curating paid a lot more then perhaps it could scale but even then the incentive would be to automate it because again human attention is very scarce. So I don't see a way around bots eventually doing the curating. The hope is that the bots becoming increasingly better at it, at least to me, because if not then there is a problem.
The other hope is perhaps content production and curation will both mostly be done by bots with human beings having less of a role in these activities but even if this is the case there has to be enough diversification in the ecosystem that humans can find something better to do. Right now it seems as if the only thing you can do with Steem is blog or curate content which is extremely limited because there is a lot more to human interaction than that.
I totally understand having to withdraw. I've had to do that in the past or I would have 50,000+ Steem Power right now. People have bills to pay though and so people power down as they need to. My point here is that if people could earn doing more than just blogging and curating then maybe more people would have less reason to power down.
incorrect usage of the 'eos' tag
Are you sure Steem will not be using EOS when EOS is released? I'm not sure which is why I used the EOS tag. I don't see why the Steem developers wouldn't use EOS. I would like more clarification from the developers but I expect Steem to use EOS.
It's actually much more safe, valuable, effective to build these on Steem than any general platform, eos or anything else. I wouldn't dare code these on a general platform and purport they would work very well nor that they could have the same economic benefits to the core token. Ultimately, the idea of general purpose blockchains will also mean meta Proof of Brain tokens are limited by bad bandwidth or transaction pricing and other economic pitfalls, and in the end, application-specific blockchains will over-win opportunities like layered Proof of Brain tokens, such as SMTs.
Check out these sections of the SMT whitepaper. It mentions Ethereum, and the drawbacks of eos will apply just the same:
What Makes SMTs Better Suited to Application-Specific Blockchains, such
as Steem, than Application-General Blockchains, such as Ethereum? 53
SMTs are Safer and More Cost Effective in Application-Specific Blockchain Environments
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
SMTs on Steem have Aligned Proof-of-Brain Incentives with the Core Token . 54
SMTs on Steem Have Transaction Pricing that Contributes to a Quality User
Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
SMTs Benefit from a Blockchain that has Scaling Processes Programmed to a
Specialized Set of Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
SMTs Benefit from a Blockchain with Content Management System (CMS)
Primitives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Thanks for addressing my question. I'll remove the EOS tag now.
I'm surprised you swallowed ned's assertion that SMT's will work better on Steem and that EOS will have similar drawbacks to Ethereum in this regard. Is ned qualified to make that claim? EOS isn't built yet for starters.
your defense is it’s not built..but it purports to be general purpose in handling of pricing..this isn’t hard
...i think it is hard and I could most certainly be wrong about a great many things. However, only part of my defense is that EOS is not built.
I'm not sure what you mean by, nor what your criticism is of EOS being general purpose in handling of pricing. Please could you elaborate?
I think you mean that EOS's economic model will be difficult to predict and at risk of instability if dapp tokens and sub-tokens have too much latitude in terms of configuration.
Even if that were the case, I would rather build complexity and scope for flexibility onto a network with a better core token distribution. I think that is a far greater issue and risk to the economic incentives governing behaviour and stability than being general purpose. With a more solid foundation, tolerances for dapps and sub-tokens will be far easier to establish and adjust. Not only that, the relationship between the layers and the flow of value will be more distinct and stable with a broader distribution.
Tell me what EOS can do which Tezos, Cardano, Tauchain, Enigma, and other upcoming technologies can't do? EOS has a lot of competition in my opinion.
The fact that EOS is not built and has no community (no real network effect) is the reason why for me I'm more interested in Steem. The other fact is, there is Cardano, there is Tezos, there is Tauchain, there is Enigma, and perhaps some others I forgot to mention all which will be capable of the same as EOS theoretically but which have chosen different design philosophies. We do not know which of these will be market dominant in the future.
Steem in my opinion is almost a sure thing at this point. The number of users are high, over 200,000, I don't recall exact numbers but higher than any other platform in crypto, and this translates into Metcalfe's law which translates into actual wealth of the network.
The only thing missing in my opinion is the technical mechanisms to maximize utility. SMTs help with this, and I think they can expand on that base to add more and better features before EOS can. EOS may have a technical advantage but that doesn't make me want to buy the token.
I think there is quite a large community forming around EOS, but we don't need to argue that point, I accept that EOS has not yet launched (though a development community has certainly formed and is engaging and building.)
Tezos at this point, given it's legal issues would seem to be a very bad bet.
I know nothing of Enigma yet.
Tauchain looks very interesting, I looked at it based on your recommendation actually. However, It seems a very long way off of delivering.
Cardano I see as an interesting alternative, however, I'm put off by Charles Hoskinson's salesman-like manner, arrogance and seeming failure to credit anyone's work in crypto but his own or his allies.
In my opinion, competition is distinctly thin on the ground.
Steem is doing well considering, but without addressing the token's distribution and unseemly economic incentives, I don't think it will be much competition at all for the next generation of social media dapps. People with smaller stakes will not be loyal to an abusive and unfair platform. If that situation was decisively addressed however, that would be a totally different matter.
Enigma has a large community forming around it as well and the brain power to match EOS. The only thing EOS has over Enigma is Dan Larimer. I do not think EOS has anything over Cardano.
This is a lot more competitive than you realize. It's not just community size but the effectiveness of the members. Sometimes a smaller yet more effective community makes a bigger impact.
I understand Charles Hoskinson is controversial. Dan Larimer is also controversial. This doesn't change the fact that both are extremely effective at what they do. Enigma has heavyweights from academia, from MIT, from Harvard, so a lot of brain power, but not a lot of experience doing crypto specific projects. This is to say that if they can get over the initial technical hurdles then they will be a force and hard to compete with in terms of brain power but they do not have a Dan Larimer or Charles Hoskinson.
I'm actually putting my chips in with Enigma because EOS isn't focusing on privacy. I think privacy is critical for the pursuit of happiness. People require a sense of privacy in order to even seek happiness is my hypothesis and since I know that, I think Enigma has a strategic advantage even if EOS and Cardano have great tech.
I agree that this is not well done, seeing the current steemit development is much more advanced, and a business opportunity in the future, however... For a small fish like me, maybe that's what we can do, powerdown, then the result buy upvote,
The steemit site in blockchain has grown so rapidly and has made economic changes in the world. However, is with the launch of SMT this can it favorable to the steem and if it's safe?
If EOS and SMT are to be profitable to STEEM then if it were safe, it would be something new for steemit.
But everything we returned again to the steemit developers how well for the development of steemit.
The boss laying down the F*** EOS knowledge.
Thank you very much for your explanstion.
On EOS you'll be able to launch a social media dapp with communities and additional tokens built into the model. The critical point is that the EOS distribution will be far superior and therefore the starting point for the cascading economic affects will be far superior to Steem. Added to which, dapps built upon EOS will have better distributions further strengthening the economic balance. Token building and community supporting functions will work far better in this environment.
No one’s saying you can’t build things — just that Tokens that try to be like SMTs will simply be sub optimally priced, sub optimally safe, sub optimally aligned compared to app specific environment. As for distribution, I’m not seeing a clear reasoning. Wikipedia the Pareto Principle and be prepared for the distros you’ll really be dealing with.
"Si tuviera el dinero ahora, compraría Steem agresivamente"
no se hasta que punto eso seria bueno por que cuando un producto tiene mucha demanda el valor tiende al aumento pero seria bueno que todos debemos tener las mismas oportunidades.!
muy buen punto trataste en tu publicación.!
Thank you very much for your idea.
Even though i agree with the buy STEEM now, i think i'm going to buy EOS, i can get STEEM trough this platform, i prefer to diversify as best as i can, and i see EOS rising to probably 100 dollars minimum in the future
What do you think?
I just learned that Steem will not be built on EOS. This means at least for me, I will not be buying EOS. I see the value in Steem while EOS is entirely speculative and has competition too.
But you can earn steem through steemit... don't know really, and yes it is true EOS has like 4 or 6 competitors, but I think it's like one of the most known ones. Really don't know what to do xD
Well thanks for the answer anyway :) You got yourself a new follower
I need to read the whitepaper... I feel like I have some ideas for businesses that could work on blockchain, but very limited technical skill to make them happen. SMT's might be a nice way for regular people to make things happen on the blockchain.
Do we have a date for release?
Also, what are some examples of use-cases that you see this enabling?
Interesting!
Aggressive purchase of Steem is the way forward no doubt
When are you expecting the launch of SMT?
What value could Steem hit if SMT is launched?
From the look of the code on Github it is possible late spring but I'm not exactly sure. I'd like to know when the hardfork 20 will be ready but I don't know. I also know EOS launches this summer, and that too could benefit Steem.
How could EOS launch benefit steem??
I'm all in on that Steem Power.
To the moon!!!