The focus seems to be very short-term pumpy-dumpy, instead of long-term focused.
Think outside the box. man.
It's not about more boring fucking "social media" for professional slackers.
They are jumpstarting a currency with 3 sec confirmation, 500,000 tx/second blockchain...
The "blogging platform" giveaway is just a Trojan Horse to build the user base to, say, 100,000 in 6-12 months...
Then you can build ANYTHING that requires micropayments on Steemit... any market of any kind that moves real money.
It's not a pump...
Some people are actually serious about "world domination" = mainstream cryptocurrency...
And retiring that embarrassing geezer Bitcoin... and the incoherent, schizophrenic Ethereum.
Think big, man.
Yeah I realized that long before Steem was announced (I been devising similar plans over the past months for launching a microtransactions block chain with social networking):
The only reason to be bullish that I can see is if you think the demand for STEEM will increase. And the only reason I can find for that which makes any sense to me, is if the transactions involving STEEM will increase to $billions per year. That is a very big if.
Agree somewhat. SP as buying access to the network may or may not also be significant...
I have at least two retorts.
1. 100,000 users is not enough to scale up a microtransactions ecosystem. You need many millions. And I don't know if they can cross the chasm:
It is not clear yet if Steem can cross the chasm from gfs of blockchain nerds being coaxed by their bfs to post on Steem, to a wider demographic. Remember Beyonce and professional investors measure importance in terms of the demographic's global share of the population. Blockchain nerds and their bitches isn't likely a very large share of the population.
2. I am not confident that their Graphene blockchain is entirely adequate (it may be okay for some use cases but who knows maybe not for the most important use case that is discovered):
I think the structure can be improved so that:
- A superior, scalable microtransaction blockchain design which is my improvement on Satoshi's PoW blockchain (i.e. not proof-of-stake), so as to give a valid use case for transactions that can't be done (nor scaled) with credit cards nor Bitcoin. Note although Graphene (Steem's blockchain) claims 3 seconds per block confirmation speed, this may not be fast enough for real-time gamification transactions (who wants to pause for more than 3 probably 5+ seconds every time they need to access some resource). I also have my doubts about whether DPoS is scalable without being centralized. Also I have my doubts about the reliability of DPoS when pushing for faster transactions, because it depends on only one delegate validator per block (perhaps this could be improved but game theory issues will arise unless it is essentially a centralized, corporate run blockchain and in which case you don't need a blockchain, just run a corporate database?).
Note proof-of-stake would be retained for some aspects such as voting power and rate-limiting.