Make Steem Great Again (once the 4th largest coin)!
Steemitians are thinking a lot why their favorite coin STEEM being one of the fastest (3 seconds confirmation) and scalable (10K transactions per minute), lacks the market cap (only 32 in CoinMarketCap) while the alleged scamcoin BitConnect have market cap of almost $1B. Fellow @ats-david has written a nice blog "Why Does Steem Lag in a Bull Market for Cryptocurrencies?" which trended the whole day in Steemit. His argument is that we are branding the STEEM wrong way. For example, STEEM is advertised by Steemit Inc. as money maker for content creators which may attract greedy people not crypto-investors. He proposed that STEEM should be marketed as the fastest blockchain with highest scalability. He also proposed that Steemit Inc. should burn 50 million of their holdings to reduce the supply to gain trust of investors. He also thinks that Steemit Inc. should do a guerrilla marketing to attract investors.
I can't agree more. However, I also think some other issues are also hampering STEEM's growth. Here are issues I think we need to fix to rule the top of the list in marketcaps:
I believe there is an exchange issue with STEEM. STEEM is only traded with 15 pairs in less than 10 exchanges. It is quite hard to get a large amount of STEEM with ease. For example, STEEM suddenly becomes a super popular coin, everyone wants STEEM. Now the problem is how to get a large amount of STEEM with ease. One way is to get it from bittrex. For which you need enhanced KYC which many investors think as a hassle. The second and forth largest ones: Poloniex and HitBTC have disabled transfers. I think that setting up STEEM in a exchage has a major technical difficulty: proof is regular outage of transfers from Poloniex and HitBTC. Therefore, Steemit Inc. need to provide support or push exchanges to maintain transfers up-to-date . Also, they need to work aggressively to add STEEM in big exchanges. Only fellow steemitian @zappl seems to be taking some actions.
Another issue is to how to solve massive scale sign-up issue. Now one gets a large amount of STEEM, he/she wants to transfer STEEM to an wallet (steemit account). It takes days even weeks to get approved. Around 1000s accounts are approved these days. However, when 10K or 100K people want to join, that will be a debacle for current signup system. However, there are services with Anomsteem or SteemCreate, but they are pay-for service that may not interest large number of new users.
Now think of a scenario, a user joined steemit and write his first post, a very long one and good one. A whale (e.g. with 200K delegated SP) voted him 10 cents and vote $30 on his own thoughtless comment "Welcome to Steemit". How the new Steemitian will feel about this platform and what lesson she/he will learn from this. We need to solve these holes in the system. We have a discord channel for solving these blatant abuses. However, they are rampant and I have seen whales posting 8 posts daily with two sentences and free image each earning $50. I have seen few thoughtless comment with $85. My personal solution is that Steemit Inc. should delegate 1-5M STEEMs to few moderators with good conscious to handle these kinds of abuse. Few whales fight these kinds of abuses but there is no incentive for them to continue longer.
STETM is a great blockchain and it is fundamentally better than top 30 coins. However, before SMT and community lunch, we need to address these issues. I truly believe the STEEM community and developers are working hard to see their favorite coin succeed sooner than later.
Thanks for reading.
@riseofth
Cryptominer since 2013, occasional trader and tech blogger
The only way to stop whales from self-voting is either by a HF that prevents it. Or make their influence on the reward pool lower. The latter one is hard to accomplish because the whole idea behind Steem was that the one with the most SP has the most 'democratic power'.
Another way to think of 'democratic power' is that another whale thinks that this comment or post does not deserve that amount of vote. Total reward is sum of the upvotes and downvotes- agreed by all the voters. The problem is downvote (flag) does not have incentive (curation). Even a benevolent whale can implement his own downvoting policy if he/she sacrifices some curation.
thanks for the insight!
"Upvote controversies " I really think steemit should do something about the self voting , not saying they shouldn't but I felt some of them are really too much as you mentioned in your post. The thing I find with new user is that they also think they can randomly get upvoted with big amount of money .. and when they don't they just give up. I have a friend like that, although he can create great content , he told me he is lazy to do as other ppl can earn with posting just a photo. hopefullly he will learn very soon that it is not the case here.
It is hard to make a very fair system. STEEM is DPoS system that means people who has the larger stake (STEEM Power) has larger participation (Vote Power). There are many ways to succeed: Success needs investment, hard work and innovation. One can buy a large amount of STEEM to make his/her post more visible, rent SP, even buy bot votes, off course, writing a great blog, it is combination of all of them.
Although I am new here, 54 days old, but even I have seen random comments Welcome and Nice Post getting as much as $50. And I would wonder what is that they are doing and I am not.
So that upvoting sounds like a #whalescam.
It is complicated. The more STEEM (e.g. STEEM Power/SP) one has, the more voting power one has. If a blogger writes a great post, also he can vote on his own post with big self-vote (it is quite OK and rational as long as quality of post is OK) if he has large SP. Also, there are lots of advertisement for post through bot vote buying: https://s3.amazonaws.com/yabapmatt/bottracker/bottracker.html
The royal family always inter-marries.
But if SMT is real, then it may solve some of these problems, for STEEM price and recognition.
I see Steemit as BOTH, a half hearted experiment that leads to SMT first and then perhaps, something even greater later, perhaps a gift to humanity. Maybe.
Steemit is stuck in limbo for the time being, and WITH IT, STEEM.
Yes, STEEM has many ways to succeed through its many bright progenies (SMTs, Communities). It is also true that success and fame can solve issues quicker that it was thought.
I love your ideas to revamp the platform. No doubt there are issues with whale votes. I'm glad you took the time to type such a thoughtful article.
Steem does have amazing potential, sure it needs some tweaking or 5 people like Andreas to moderate :) I'm going to link this article at https://honeybadgerdaily.com/ under the altcoin section I hope that's ok! Cheers mate!
Thanks :)
i am new to steemit and I cant agree more well said
I will give it a another few weeks coz it take up some of my time
I could do other things that makes money way faster.
but we will see . hope for the best otherwise I am gone
and put a share button in herer PLEASE!!!!! on steemit it will make stuff much easier
Good job! Thanks to @theia7 you have planted 0.13 tree to save Abongphen Highland Forest in Cameroon. Help me to plant 1,000,000 trees and share my Steem Power to the others. Selfvoting is prohibited, but that should be the reason to spread the world to protect our precious environment. Check out profile of our conservation association @kedjom-keku and the founder/coordinator @martin.mikes to get more information about our conservation program. My current SP is 14420.84. Help me to plant more trees with your delegated SP.
Thanks a lot,
your @treeplanter
www.kedjom-keku.com
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by riseofth from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP. Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
This post has received a 0.35 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @banjo.
This post received a 0.050 SBD (94.30%) upvote from @upvotewhale thanks to @theia7! For more information, check out my profile!