Believe Sun, Or Believe His PR Team?

in #steem5 years ago

This Was Supposed To Be Marketing Monday...

It's official. I have the absolute worst timing ever.

At least when it comes to raising the awareness of the need for marketing STEEM.

What I might have been able to accomplish over the course of months and months (if that), was eclipsed in one day by Justin Sun's acquisition of Steemit, Inc., 10 to the 100th power.

Now, aside from everyone being concerned, confused, seeking answers, speculating, etc., marketing, among some other things, is top of mind.

You're welcome.

Except, I obviously had nothing to do with it.

questions-3409194_1280.png

Two Weeks—That's It

Despite some pretty prominent folks calling for calm and waiting and seeing and proceeding as normal, I think I will at least suspend Marketing Monday for now.

I was trying to build awareness. I don't think I need to do that anymore.

Different Topic, Similar Conclusion

In a future post, potentially to be published this week, I was going to talk about how I believe that STEEM is lacking a crucial component, one that is being confused or conflated with another crucial component. The latter component is curation. I think we've got that now. Thanks to the EIP, there are more curation trails covering more topics and their content creators, and combined with autovoting in general, with more of the upper SP participating, we've got curation.

I think we have plenty of content creators, too, at least for the amount of active users we have currently. What we don't have is enough reading/engaging.

Yeah, I just said we've got curation. To me, in this current format, curation and reading/engaging are not one and the same.

Anyway, that was before the whole Steemit Inc. and steemit.com acquisition went down.

Why Not Still Talk About It?

I don't know about you, but despite some people's best efforts here to find out information and allay fears and confusion in the process, things still feel a little too up in the air.

And I'm sorry. As much as I would like to put a positive spin on all of this, I'm finding it hard to believe certain things.

And the only way some of these things can be believed is with time, and right now, like so many times before, it's early days.

I'm really impressed with how so many of you can be so trusting. Taking someone at their word without much hesitation. That's hard for me to do when I actually know someone, depending on who they are and the history we have—let alone a perfect stranger.

What Kind Of Things?

I keep hearing about how Sun is so intelligent, and how he knows his stuff when it comes to marketing and blockchains.

And yet we have conflicting versions of what Sun wants to do with STEEM. In the press release, tweet and now a video on YouTube, we read/hear that the entirety of STEEM, basically, will begin a migration to TRON. Even though Sun supposedly only owns Steemit Inc., and steemit.com, not STEEM the blockchain, and not all the dApps on the blockchain.

In the 'AMA', Sun says, nope, no migration, no token swap—just money, marketing and all the resources STEEM needs to keep on keeping on, so that it can soar to its highest heights.

Apparently, he's said similar things to Steemit Inc. employees—no token swap, no migration, as you were, keep doing what you're doing.

Some people have been rationalizing the conflicting information. The marketing department isn't Sun. The marketing department hasn't spoken with the Steemit Inc team yet. Sun didn't understand fully what he was buying. Now he knows what he bought and he's all for STEEM growing on its own and in the process, taking both STEEM and TRON to higher heights.

If He's So Smart...

I watched another Sun interview where he said that he/they/TRON are actually pretty cautious about their acquisitions. They check into things first, see how it might fit, be beneficial, etc.

From what we know, Ned Scott and Sun or his negotiating team spoke terms. You would think that Scott would tell Sun what was up for sale. Did Scott not fully disclose what STEEM is? Did he not mention a community now primarily composed of diehards who were probably going to balk at the idea of migration, token swaps, etc., etc.?

Or did Sun just ignore all of that? Or did Scott just gloss it over?

Because the negotiations didn't begin and end on Friday morning. Who knows how long they were going on, but they certainly took a while. Sun would ask about the financials, the assets, etc. Scott would disclose the information. They would talk price. Sun would counter, and so on.

It's just hard to believe Sun being intelligent and knowing what he's doing but not having much of a clue what he was buying.

What The Public Sees Vs. Privately

I find it hard to believe that the PR arm had no marching orders. They didn't just make all this stuff up about migration and token swaps. They were told to say all of that. There must have been some kind of discussion about it. There was probably some amount of time to prepare the press release, the tweet, the video.

So, again, not knowing what he bought is just unfathomable. Is there a reason why he would say one thing publicly, but something else privately? My guess is, he's beholden to something publicly. If there's not a board, then maybe there's a reputation as a blockchain buyer to uphold, since supposedly that's what he does.

Privately, he says all the right things, but publicly, he needs to keep up appearances, even if none of it makes sense, really, from any perspective.

One Thing Is For Sure

Everyone's talking about Sun, TRON and STEEM. Even me.

As far as I can tell, that's all anyone cares about. Can't say it's unjustified. The future of STEEM is at stake.

Another thing. Ned's heart was no longer in STEEM. Can't say I blame him. In too many corners of STEEM, he couldn't ever do right. Not that he was able to help his cause much. I do have to say, though, I feel like his approach to STEEM was mainly hands off, and I appreciate that. The worry that Steemit Inc. would use their ninja mined influence in some way or another never really came to pass, not through official accounts, anyway.

So Now What?

I don't know. I thought the last few hardforks brought plenty of uncertainty as to STEEM's fate, and while in some ways they did STEEM no favors, in other ways, they might have actually improved things.

This uncertainty, though, feels different, mainly because there's now a virtual unknown with Sun and TRON in the mix.

I intend to keep posting, commenting and curating as much as I can. I just don't know about what. None of the topics I've been interested in seem as important anymore, but talking about Sun and TRON ad nauseam just seems, I don't know. Wrong, maybe?

No one, including maybe Sun himself right now, knows what he's going to do until he does it.

We can either believe his public stance, or his private one. We can either jump ship now while we can, or we can ride things out.

By The Way, VOICE Had An Announcement, Too

Anybody care about that? My guess, not here, which is probably what Sun was actually trying to do—overshadow the EOS PR.

Mission accomplished.

By The Way, Too

We've been back to receiving SBDs as payment for posts rather than liquid STEEM.

And STEEM is actually holding now at close to double what it was a few weeks ago, after briefly hitting two and a half times the amount it was.

Maybe the bull run is beginning?

Maybe it, more than anything, will influence what Sun does, and what we do.

Who knows. I think it's good to be skeptical, so I'm going to stay firmly planted on the fence at this point, until more time has passed and we get to see the real Justin Sun in action.

Just not sure what I'm going to post about that you all are going to care to read.

Image source—Pixabay

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Howdy sir Glen! Hey this was posted 5 days ago, has anything changed as far as your perspective or are you just waiting to see like most of us? I have no idea. People say that Sun acts rashly and flies by the seat of his pants so if that's true then we REALLY have no idea what to expect.

Hey, @janton.

I haven't had much of a chance to do much of any digging, and I'm not really sure what I might even find, but Sun's education doesn't line up with blockchain or crypto as far as developing it goes—nor does it lineup with running a business, either.

And yet, he was selected by Jack Ma of Alibaba fame to attend a college where Sun was the youngest in the class.

I don't know. I can see some good coming from all of this. I just think he's not quite what he seems, and that there are plenty unknowns, at least for me, like who is he beholden to, and what will that ultimately cost. If not him, his acquisitions.

I'm not all that keen on anyone who has ties to China owning anything so close to the STEEM blockchain, but I'm not sure how to express that without it sounding small minded or something. I'm not sure when China became well regarded—apparently about the same time they started opening up free enterprise zones and basically taking over the world's manufacturing—but Communism is still Communism, and regardless of what the U.S. may be falling in or out of, I don't like the connections to a State that has already proven itself to rule with an Iron Fist.

Howdy again sir Glen! Yeah I didn't think much about his Chinese background until you mentioned it. That adds another concern and big question doesn't it? Wow, could this whole deal be any more of an unknown? Anything could happen!

I've been contemplating a posts on it, but haven't pulled it all together yet. I wanted to see if I could find out first where the seed money came from for his earlier ventures. The ones for Tron are a little more transparent—a large investment fund in China for one—and so anyway.

If we're looking for our definition of decentralization, which doesn't just mean a blockchain distributed over many servers potentially throughout the world, but the way things are also governed—then TRON is not decentralized. He pretty much pulls the strings, or Binance does, depending on who is more beholden to whom.

I'm just not all that inclined to overlook all of the not-so-great things. Sure, STEEM could use some major marketing acumen, and sure, having Steemit Inc funded and secured, all great.

But at what price?

We're all of sudden talking about voting for witnesses and trusting in them and the Steemit Dev team, when both of those groups have been considered part of the problems, if not the main ones, we've had on the blockchain. Controlled by whales.

Oh, how the worm turns.

Now, they're all supposed to be our firewall in case something untoward goes down. I hope they all, or at least enough of them, prove to be up to the task. Decisions are hard when livelihoods and therefore people's families end up being thrown into the mix.

Meaning, if Sun starts waving money around, like he has, or starts firing people, like he has in other acquisitions, supposedly because they wouldn't tow the company line, well, it's tough to find backbone at that point if it doesn't already exist.

I've been concerned what witnesses would do if they were being harassed by their local governments or some other entity that doesn't want crypto to succeed. Now, I'm wondering what Sun will do if he doesn't get exactly what he wants—whatever that proves to be.

He's very good at telling one group one thing, while going ahead with something else. He's done that quite a few times, too.

Oh great. Now I have all kinds of doubts! lol. It'll be interesting to see what happens. What connection does Binance have with Tron?

According to this article Binance controls 53% of the TRON network, however that works on TRON. Binance is a Super Representative, which is more or less the equivalent of a Witness on STEEM. I'm sure there are differences, but TRON is supposed to be DPOS, too, though there are probably differences with that, too.

What is DPOS again? Does China own Binance? What did you think of that open letter to Steemit from Sun? Is this enough questions in one comment? lol.

DPOS stands for Delegated Proof of Stake, as opposed to PoW, or proof of work, like Bitcoin is. There, they mine for Bitcoin. Here, we buy and power up STEEM, and then use the SP for most of what we do on chain.

re: Binance

It originated in China, but it appears that somewhere in 2017 they moved everything to Japan due to a pending ban on crypto in China.

re: open letter

If you're talking about his latest post after the soft fork, I agree with exyle—he doesn't have a whole lot of choice but to come to the table and discuss his plans. Obviously, he should have at least been in communication with the Witnesses before now, but apparently he wasn't.

You didn't ask this question, but I feel like it's implied—who do I trust?

The answer is, no one. Sun is yet to prove trustworthy based on the conflicting information that continues to come from his PR folks (or him), and because of his dealings with TRON.

However, the Witnesses have pretty much set a precedence with the soft fork and binding of STEEM stake, no matter how temporary that it might be, and have open the door for potential freeze outs in the future. At the very least, I think it's a slippery slope, and if at all, it should have been the last resort, not essentially the second one (there are claims of attempts to talk to him).

Lost in all of this is the Steemit Team. I got the strong sense from Andrarchy and the others was they were essentially asking for time to talk to the TRON folks, which is supposed to happen this week, to allow for some road mapping, etc.

Apparently, that wasn't good enough for the Witnesses and whichever 'community members' I keep reading about who were apart of the closed doors discussions.

I have been having fun with all the steem/tron post. One thing I have not mentioned in any of my comments though is Tron now has all masterkeys that have not been changed by users that created their account through steemit free sign up. me included. maybe I should change mine just in case.

Hey, @bashadow.

I'm not sure if it's fun I'm having. I don't think it's total misery, either. Something in between? The problem is, public vs. private communications, and at this point, there's no way to know what to believe.

Stuff about getting out seems a little extreme, and before this, so did forking out Steemit. Now, it doesn't seem so farfetched if all of a sudden somehow, someway, everything begins to migrate to TRON and a coin swap is forced on us.

It's amazing how Justin Sun can be so many things to so many people. From experience, that simply means, no one really knows. The problem I have is, someone is going to be proven right, but no one knows what that's going to look like, and while I don't have a huge stake, it's enough to be concerned over. If it were all earned stake through rewards, not as big a deal. And while I've not put in anything more than we can afford to lose, I'd still rather not lose it, if I have any say in the matter. And right now, it's feeling like I have less say now than I did last Thursday.

I certainly wasn't the first to jump in with impressions. I waited to see what others were saying, did some reading, followed the commentary on the AMA, and so forth. And after it, I'm still unsure of where I should be, other than to try to come up with more posts about something. Hopefully not SteemiTRON, even if that's all people seem to be paying attention to.

It is going to be interesting to see what does happen. I do hope those that started power downs are extremely careful with their keys. It is during times of uncertainty that the con men and women come out looking for easy scared marks.

That is the only thing I am sure of, there will be attempts to con people and steal from them. If people are concerned and want to be prepared for the worst case scenario, then a power down is a somewhat good idea, if they back it with a lease so they still maintain their vote power and ability to continue to grow and earn then I think that would be a smart move, but I have never leased SP, and do not know if that is a fiscal responsible thing to do right now for people.



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Tron doesn't have them. The same people still work at SteemIt Inc, and I highly doubt roadscape is going to rob us because he works for Tron now.

Tron owns steemit. Account recovery will still go through Steemit/Tron now if master key is lost/stolen. It does not matter who in Steemit.inc has the keys, they belong to Steemit/Tron now.

I know steemit had no desire to go through and clean up empty/lost accounts. All Tron needs to do when they hold all the cards is send out an email to all the original email address's that signed up for a free steemit account and advise the people they have 30 days to show that their account is active by either posting or commenting.

Voting can be to automated and run with no human input.

There are a lot of in-active accounts that may or may not still have powered up Steem in them, and those dead accounts that do still have steem in them are getting interest. I do like having FUD FUN sometimes.

Where do those interest payments come from? I think the reward pool. Can you imagine how it would look to people outside of TRON if they see after 90 days of buying Steemit, the amount of post and comments went from 7,000 to 291,360, (my steemit ID number).

Bonus would be all them ankle biter accounts would need to post or comment and open themselves up to being down voted.

Just wishful thinking really, and having some fun, granted haunted house type fun, but still fun to me.

Did you see our Alexa ranking went up 760 spots in one day?

I sign up are incoming, ... cool stuff.

Yeah, I do know Tron could potentially change the policy and get to keys, but... I can't imagine it happening. :)

Have fun, I wasn't being bratty.

Oh I doubt they would do anything bad with the keys, but that Justin guy does seem to be more or a business man than Ned is. Dead accounts taking up digital retail space and drawing down the value may be something he things about. Facebook, Google, YouTube, and a lot of other sites do on occasion go through a house cleaning.

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It's just my opinion but I think Justin is a visionary not a techy.

Also, we are so filled with geeks, people are trying to take marketing words and apply them literally to technology tasks.

I withheld judgement, but I am excited.

Hey, @whatsup.

I want to be excited. I'd like to believe that someone like Justin Sun would just walk up, hand a bunch a cash to Ned Scott, then turn around and say, "Here guys, take STEEM to the moon!"

That would be easier to believe without redundant press releases, tweets and youtube videos all saying the opposite. What's the point?

We've already had a visionary. I think Scott was a little more techy, but regardless, day to day operations didn't seem to be his forte, or at least where his heart was.

I hope I'm expressing that I don't know what to think yet. I'm glad you're excited. I'm glad others are, too. Personally, I hope you're all proven right because the alternative is not so good.

Yep, there is a lot of guessing right now.

I'm not telling you what to think, I am not totally sure what I think.

I believe what I can verify, which in the case of Justin and Steem is nothing so far. I do think that preventions should be in place in case he tries to screw everyone, I doubt that he will try to screw anyone, but better be safe than sorry... Especially after Poloniex delisted Digibyte because of a twitter comment that bashed TRX

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Hey, @teutonium.

See, it's those kinds of things that I just don't like. Sun's going to need to be thick skinned here (or never read commentary about him) because a wrong move or two and the honeymoon is over. I'm getting used to the extracurricular around here, but too many times, it creates more problems than it solves. Someone who is prone to retaliation isn't going to do very well here.

Or maybe they will. 75 million SP does a lot of talking, and people seem to respond to that, one way or another. :)

Remaining skeptical and is a good thing :-) I haven't canceled my powerdown yet but I'm slowly changing my opinions towards positive ones, especially after the interview with Andrarchy yesterday.

Hey, @soyrosa.

I watched that, but dang it, I came away from it thinking, he doesn't know much more than I do, other than he's been handed a bit more reassurances in private.

I guess we're going to find out if Justin Sun is just misunderstood, or if he's actually the say anything type.

The problem I have with positive thoughts is, they need to be supported by something. Walking into a dark alley thinking, Oh, nothing bad is going to happen to me doesn't mean it's so. There's some factors involved that aren't known going into the alley.

Right now, if someone is looking for red flags in all of this, they seem to be flying. Sun being described as not knowing what he bought, having plans to do something like migration and token swaps without knowing what he had, then virtually immediately turning around and say, oh, just kidding, as you were?

I know we don't know all about what's going on. I know there's got to be more to it. We found out things with andrarchy yesterday that we didn't really know before. Steemit, even with ads, was only biding time. Ned's heart was no longer into it. Steemit personnel didn't know much more than we did what was going on.

Now we know that, the sale of Steemit Inc makes sense to me. From there, though, things get murky again.

Some money coming your way!directly into your wallet! (as soon as I actually organize it.)

Not massive amounts, but a lot more than upvoting with small sp....

Read these two posts, and see what you think - I'm trying the experiment out!

part 1
https://steemit.com/blog/@lucylin/rewarding-a-community-communism-as-it-should-be-an-experiment-and-more-profitable-than-just-sp-up-voting

Part 2
https://steemit.com/blog/@lucylin/lets-get-the-ball-rolling-a-quick-update-profits-coming

Hey, @lucylin.

So, I read the posts, and I'm kind of where I was before I read them. I understand what you're doing and why with the experiment, and it sounds like it all hinges on your ability to make money so the wealth can be spread. I wish you the best with that.

I will say that I still believe that somehow, someway, we need to get away from using an inflation-driven reward pool to actual STEEM and or SBD (depending on where a person lands in that regard), for all the reasons of communism and such you mentioned, but in addition to that, too many people feel they can say what you should do with your reward allocations while saying it's everyone's right to do what they will. Gets a little old, and regardless, there's only so far any of this is going to take us before either the pool runs out, inflation is too high or both.

Real use with real STEEM. Let's do that.

Or not, depending on where this TRON thing goes. :)

.....and it sounds like it all hinges on your ability to make money so the wealth can be spread.

Ain't that the story of the last 7000 years, pretty much?

Meritocracies work for a reason, just like socialism doesn't work, for a reason..

the tron thingy, does (possibly) muddy the waters though...

Whuuuuuut?
I take a few months off and this all happens?!?!?!?
Wowzer.
I knew you would have a good article looking at things from different views...

Hey, @wizardave.

Long time no see. Has it only been a few months. :)

I was gone a day or two once, and something major happened, so you just never know.

My different views here is pure confusion on a part at this point.

Good to see you. I think you came back just in time.

Hi Glen, Can you still see this?
I'm majorly confused about what has happened with Hive and such.
Can you point me to info on how to switch and why I should?

Anyone else who happens to read this, it's been a few months since I've been on here and a LOT has gone on.
Where do I start? trying to catch up...

Hey, @wizardave.

I definitely can still see this. I don't check in more than once a day or so, though.

HIVE came to be nearly three months ago. You should be able to find your HIVE account at hive.blog/@wizardave, and your wallet at wallet.hive.blog/@wizardave/transfers

I just checked the wallet and it's definitely there. Hive.blog is more or less a HIVE version of steemit.com. SteemPeak's equivalent is Peakd.com if you want to go that route.

There's really no switching to do other than using HIVE over STEEM or vice versa since both are set up. You'll find more or less the same amount of HIVE, HP and HBD you had at the time of the fork to HIVE (or when the snapshot of the chain took place), plus maybe a bit of 'interest' tossed on top.

As you can see, not everyone left STEEM for HIVE. There are still a few people popping back and forth, too. A lot of the larger community developers went with HIVE, though a few are still around on STEEM, and Splinterlands and STEEM-Engine made the crossover not too long ago.

Things have actually calmed down a little since STEEM's last hardfork that took away around 23 million STEEM from 68 or so accounts that the current witnesses deemed as threats to the platform. That amount was redirected at the last second by someone who sent it to the main Bittrex wallet to sort out, and as far as I know, they're still sorting, meaning, they haven't announced publicly what they're going to do with it.

You might want to do a couple of things, now that I'm thinking about it: Passwords and recovery accounts for both STEEM and HIVE. Steempeak and Peakd were the easiest to change those things.

I'm in the last several minutes of my last power down. That will probably leave around five SP in my account. After that, I'm probably not going to do a whole lot of checking around on STEEM, so it will be easier to locate me on HIVE.

Blocktrades no longer offers a straight STEEM to HIVE pair. I'm not sure if any exist now or not. You will probably need to convert STEEM to BTC and then to HIVE if that's what you choose to do. That's how I've been doing it, but watch out for big fluctuations in price of fees. It's been a little crazy in that regard since their last halving last month.

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