The secret behind the price crash and recovery of Steem - and the important question it raises
For over two week, the price of Steem had a straight fall then suddenly it rose again. Steem's fall and recovery are not due to Bitcoins rise and fall, they have their own little secret.
The fall
The primary cause of Steem price's fall was because of the rum ours that the upcoming Steem fork will no longer support users being able to upvote their own post.
Obviously most people could not think of any other use of Steem power if they cannot upvote their own posts, they were powering down and investing into other cryptos.
The recovery
Suddenly Steemit Inc comes around and announces the Smart Media tokens. Suddenly everyone realizes that they will need Steem tokens to create and finance Smart Media Tokens.
This is the story behind the rise and fall of Steem, now here are the questions to ask.
Who initiates a hardfork?
For Bitcoins, we do know of the following fork initiation schemes:
- User Activated Hard/Soft Fork
- Miner Activated Hard/Soft Fork
On Steem who initiates the forks? Is it the developers, Steemit Inc or the Witnesses?
Where do we learn about hardforks?
There is no place to get information about Steem hardforks. On explorers like SteemDB.com, we can find out about the current "block number" and hardfork version, however the rest is all JSON data that makes no sense.
The DASH example
DASH is one of the most praised crypto-currencies out there and that is because it has mastered the act of open source development.
First of all all DASH users know that a collective body is incharge of the development of the protocol. On Steem we have no idea who the developers behind Steem are - except for support from Steemit Inc.
Again with DASH all new development proposals are posted to a forums and are voted upon. That way users know all new proposals and they also know who it is that is campaigning for it.
On Steem we do not know what the new proposed changes in the upcoming hardfork are and we do not also know who it is that is calling for these changes. And certainly we never get to vote on which proposals get implemented!
Steem is open source - yes the code is on Github, but the development process of Steem is NOT! Consider this:
- no one knows who is developing Steem,
- what new features will be added to the next hard fork
- what existing features will removed from the current fork
- when the next hardfork will happen
Sure some people do know, but its only the witnesses, a few whales and Steemit Inc insiders. The average Steemians has no idea of these developments and there is no place to access this information.
On by scavenging the whitepaper, the bluepaper and a few random posts by Steemit team will we find part of our answers. It would be great if we could just visit one single website and find out about:
- all the previous forks and all the changes made in them
- all the developers actively working on Steem
- all new proposed changes in the upcoming fork
- the people who propose new changes in the upcoming fork
- and perhaps the change to vote on which new features should be implemented
There are rumors that the next hardfork will take away the ability to upvote our own posts yet not everyone is aware of this.
If this lack of information on development continues, we may soon wake up one morning to find our Steem Dollars gone - only to find out that the new hardfork which happened during the night does not support Steem Dollars!
If you know the answers to these question please enlighten us and other Steemians who need answers to these questions.
Sounds like you are asking for transparency. So you get my vote.
Those are all valid posts... what purpose would taking away the ability to upvote your own posts serve? Seems to me it would just make it harder for the minnows to ever get anywhere. Why should I keep investing my money into Steemit if I can't pay myself back?
Minnows voting on their own post isn't going to help them grow - a witness vote does though! I've put more pocket change into Steemit than I've made on Steemit, but I don't self-vote. I won't 'knock' self voting because although some might say its 'unfair', it is default by design! when you start on Steemit, the default is set for you to vote your own posts.
If this is designed to be a printing press, where you put in 100, click it up some more 00's, then cash out - that sounds like the federal reserve and treasury 😆
When you put money into this platform and the platform allows us to game the entire system to extract as much value as we can, how long will that last? Who benefits? Who loses? If we are to call it an investment, on what metrics do we determine risk/reward?
let's say user-base as an example
Are more users creating reward here OR are more users creating risk?
I think that's a great question to start with, but one I have not yet found an answer for.
Thanks for visiting my post, and i love the analysis you did about self upvoting, i hope it isn't true anyways
thank you too for coming to read my post, but to choose an animal to be - well your post causes some goosebumbs!
hahahahha, just chose to write something different from Cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by blockrush 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.
Thx for letting us know. Good post. Upvote, resteem
Great post. Thanks for the insight. Crazy how much there is to it.
Interesting analysis. Is still think there is a strong correlation between the price of bitcoin and steem's. Historically, almost all cryptos mirror bitcoin's price trajectory. However, on the last few weeks, most crypto prices are going downwards in relation to bitcoin which is very surprising. Bitcoin's market dominance even increased to about 50% now compared to just 40% a month ago.
Every little change in the current way something works will always have an impact on price as well as their tie to other currencies, even though it may not be as strong.
When people see bad things they flee, when they see good things they flock. And since price is set by availability on the market, the price will move largely when these things happen.
Who initiates a hardfork?
Witnesses does that. The developers release a new version, but it's ONLY the witnesses that can enable it. I don't recall the exact number, but I think it's about 60% of the Top20 witnesses that has to upgrade for the new version to be mandatory.
thank you for the answer, @sc-steemit. may I ask who the developers are?
You can see who adds code to the software by looking on the GitHub repository.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/commits/master
Pulse will also give you some insights https://github.com/steemit/steem/pulse/monthly
I don't really self vote any more, but I see people do it on every spammy comment they make. That is abusing steemit. It's supposed to be about good content and that should be up to other people to judge.
I do agree the process should be more open. There should be somewhere we can go to see the proposed changes. The witnesses decide, but we get to vote on them, so they need our support