A draft of new Steem.center wiki article about "memo"

in #steemcenterwiki7 years ago (edited)

I'm writing a new wiki article about "memo" of steemit.
Following @wagnertamanaha's initiative, I publish a draft of a new article of Steem.center wiki in advance.

If you find my mistakes in my draft or you have some ideas for this topic, please tell me!


Memo

Memo is generally a short sentence written down to help your memory or to leave a message to a person in same office/organization.

In Steem platform, it means a short message which can be attached to transferring Steem tokens. Payees are easily know the reason for payment by seeing attached memo. It is a great feature not implemented in major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.

Direct message

Steemit currently does not have a direct messaging function like that in other social networking service such as Twitter and Facebook. Instead, we can use memo as direct message. In current version, transferring with 0 STEEM/SBD is not permitted, so at least 0.001 STEEM/SBD is required to send memo. This is about 0.1 cent. If there is a reply by the memo, the expenses will be get back to your account.

Spam

Memo is often used for spam and fraud.Even if there is temptation like "send 1 SBD to me, and you'll get $2 worth upvote", you should never send it. There is also a case to request the SBD as fee for the resteem. Sometimes you may be guided to a phishing site.[1]

Steemian @netuoso has announced daily top 25 users who have large amount of bytes of memo they sent. [2] Many of users in the lists are not abuser, but almost memo spammers will be included in them.

Typical use cases

  • Description of payment reason.
  • Deposit to the exchange account.
  • Direct message.
  • Request to upvote bots.
  • Spam

Encrypted memo

Memo can be encrypted by the memo private key. The encrypted memo can be read by only receiver, so it serves as private message.

To encrypt memo, login with memo key (or owner key/master password), and include # as a first character of your memo.[3] To read encrypted memo, memo private key (or owner key/master password) is required. When you logged in with posting key or active key, you cannot read encrypted memo. In that case, Steemit displays login to see memo in your wallet. Also steemd.com displays random phrase as encrypted memo.

If you change master password, encrypted memos will not be readable. To protect from leaking by cracking, you can delete messages which are include critical information by changing password.

In September 19, 2017, third party wallet Vessel supported to encrypted memo.[4]

When you deposit to Bittrex, you can encrypt memo to hide your Bittrex address.[4]

References

  1. SCAM ALERT and WHITE HAT COUNTER-STRIKE Written by @arcange on Steemit, October 10, 2017
  2. Top 25 Users That Sent Messages In Transfers Via Memos for 2017-10-11 Written by @netuoso on Steemit, October 11, 2017
  3. How to encrypt a memo when transferring Steem Written by @dantheman on Steemit, October 10, 2016
  4. Vessel 0.0.7 - Account Creation + Encrypted Memos (Bittrex) Written by @jesta on Steemit, September 19, 2017.

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Thank you very much on following the experiment! I hope our posts could be an incentive to future @steemcenterwiki participants who could have one more monetization option just posting first on Steemit before including it in Steem.center wiki. Thanks, arigatou and good luck again!

This post received a 4.15% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @inoue-t! To learn more, check out @randowhale 101 - Everything You Need to Know!

This post has received a 3.13 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @inoue.

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