Continue affiliating with and selling Steem (and
especially EOS) then perhaps
end up in big trouble with the law later.
In addition to
the legal issues already raised, these Steemians want to pile on more legal woes:
Gambling in crypto is like a huge vacuum cleaner that sucks in value into that currency.
Steem would then be enabling activity which is illegal or regulated in many jurisdictions including the USA.
And the problem is that Steem is not a decentralized token system. It is owned and controlled by whales. It was launched as investment security as has been explained.
Startups who embark on the ICO journey are creating automated value transfer systems that operate across borders with no KYC. These systems, once turned on, cannot be turned off or controlled. But the startups will continue to be expected to maintain them.
This is not easy, technically or legally. For this reason, the SAFT is clearly not anything near a cure-all for the compliance issues an ICO startup will later face, whether in the field of securities regulation or otherwise.
Severe legal problems might be coming eventually (maybe not too soon though) to those whales who were involved in Steem.
Im perplexed about @smooths continued involvement in Steem, if at all. I ponder maybe he thinks he is exempt because he mined his tokens as an outsider and he has continuously cautioned about Steem (and he may have unselfishly reinvested all/most/some of his STEEM proceeds into the Steem ecosystem), but I really wouldnt want to be in his predicament. I genuinely hope his anonymity is iron-clad or that he has received expert legal counsel, because afaics @smooth has most often tried to be objective and avoid disingenuous activities in our ecosystem so it would be with some remorse by many here if he were to suffer.
Granted most of us didnt understand the full implications of the law before. But now it is being explained clearly to us and with numerous warnings by authorities. It behoves us to clean up our investing activity.
Okay so there are 2 strategies:
* You get few rich people to sign up
* You get many poor people to sign up
So then you agree with me when I noted that your claim about 300,000 users was not a comparable metric. Dividing by 1000 as you proposed, gives us only 300.
My eyeballing it guess is the actual economic population of Steem is some where in the range of a couple 1000 at best. Which is irrelevant unless it is growing fast and making some fundamental paradigmatic shift of great significance.
And he said in a recent interview that Steem is pretty much ready now, it only needs GUI design from now on for Steemit. The blockchain is mature enough.
DPoS is not antifragile neither technologically (at Internet scale) nor in terms of political economics. When you have 300 million users then we can talk about whether the blockchain is adequate. And I assure that DPoS will fail way before you reach even 30 million users due to the fact that is an inherently centralized technology. For the analogous reason that Visa can not scale to nanotransactions for every individual on the planet.
Dan makes investment schemes, but not paradigmatic solutions which have a long-tail future. However, I will grant that Dan has contributed, especially with his TaPoS concept, which will end up being very important.
And he is very likely in massive trouble with the law in the future, especially with EOS.
There is some conflict now between the whales and it might be bad for Steem that such high profile people are in a fight right now. But we will see what will happen.
This is just the beginning of the natural power vacuum of centralized paradigms.
Watch it either disintegrate or taken over by an oligarchy.
Actually I like blogging on Steem more than Medium, because I am so tired of being censored (and yes I had comments deleted on Medium). But the downvoting on Steem is inane.
That being said. We do really need a way for speculators to participate in our ecosystem. But we do not need a new token for every new venture. That is the fundamental flaw in the Ethereum ICO model.
We need a different way to monetize apps and investing in ventures that develop apps, which side-steps token issuance.
Because there is a huge amount of money out there that wants speculate in decentralized ledger technology. The first project that shows the way forward from ICOs, will likely see a huge success.