Quote from: smooth on July 24, 2016, 11:50:15 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on July 24, 2016, 11:45:50 PM

Quote from: smooth on July 24, 2016, 11:38:08 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on July 24, 2016, 11:36:35 PM

Quote from: smooth on July 24, 2016, 11:32:06 PM

Hard evidence no in terms of validated demographics? No, especially since it is hard to tell whether new users are Bitcoin users are not without them mentioning it, but it is pretty apparent to me that many of the new users are not Bitcoin users. Answering their questions about how to get their payments out (they have often never heard of Bittrex, Poloniex, Coinbase, etc.) makes that pretty clear for example.

But you don't know if their bfs are blocknerds who have been mentioning Bitcoin for years.

I saw many blogs explaining that females were coaxed into it by their Bitcoin bfs. It is like they get to make their bfs happy and make themselves some cash at same time. But what about the ladies who signed up and only earned 3 pennies. Do we hear from them?

Of course some are that, but not all. Many ages and backgrounds are represented. The apparent demographics are just much wider than Bitcoiners.

Once it gets large enough that real studies can be done I'm sure we'll see better numbers. Or we'll see that growth plateaus once people one-degree away from Bitcoin are tapped out. That won't take long.

Bitcoiners have all ages and demographics one degree away from them.

True, but a story frequently told is that attempts to spread previous cryptos even that one degree also failed, but with Steemit they are succeeding. The real question will be whether it can spread more than one degree or is getting uptake outside of crypto altogether, and I do think there is at least some of the latter (former is entirely unknown, at least to me). Though even just a high acceptance rate at one degree still beats previous crypto by some factor. Overall we don't know yet. The site has really only been live (meaning payouts, and the explosive user growth) for three weeks.

Agreed on all that.

I'd be more bullish if it was truly open source. I think open source could quickly race past closed source.

I'd be more bullish if they weren't penalizing long-term investors who buy in from the outside.

I'd be more bullish if they weren't using a quadratic (super-linear, sub-quadratic might be sufficient motivation) payout to try to trick users into overestimating what they can earn from the site, and instead were more forthcoming about the potential revenue users can earn. The focus seems to be very short-term pumpy-dumpy, instead of long-term focused. The design pisses off the bulk of your signups (unless they are one-degree from blocknerds in which case they probably happy even if they earned very little), it "pre"-mine 80% (which is probably reducing at only about 10% per year if most signups end up abandoned accounts because can't earn the minimum 100 SP to initiate power down), forces long-term investors to lockup for 2 years (1 year weighted price)...