RE: Critical Analysis of Steem and Why I'm Invested
Fair criticism, the problems are very well covered. Can't argue with that.
But the potential of steem was completely ignored in this video. Maybe it's because you like to judge a product on what it delivers TODAY.
That's fair and maybe that is how investors should think, but I like to imagine what steem can become and invest for the end vision.
The amazing feature on steem is the paid upvote. That is what fundamentally differentiate this product from everything else. It's a powerful tool and steemit.com was a good proof of concept. Yes it's not perfect and has problems as you highlighted, but it prooves that it kinda works.
Now what's important is the following: Smart Media Tokens will provide this tool (paid upvote) to everyone soon (hopefully 2018). Imagine countless entrepreneurs trying to innovate, creating websites and phone apps with a paid upvote. The ecosystem will keep growing, and the use-cases for the paid upvote will improve.
Then one day comes a student in his dorm and creates the new facebook with an SMT. Steem just needs ONE homerun. Just one. If any website using SMTs reaches the popularity of twitter or reddit, we will have massive money in steem. And the price will grow more than a hundredfold from where it is now. Just compare the market cap to those of facebook, google, snapchat and others.
I invest in steem because I believe that this technology is very empowering, and I bet on the fact that someone will hit a homerun using it.
I could compare steem to other cryptos point by point and show easily how it is far better. I could also take the problems you mentioned and argue that increased popularity and growth will naturally solve them. But I don't want to get into an argument and just want the focus of this comment to be on the fact that ONE good Smart Media Token is all we need.
It is. But the problem is that rewarding tokens by minting from the collective money supply has a game theory which means it is a “winner-takes-all” eventual outcome. That is what we see going on now with the 8000 signups per day probably being sockpuppets of the cartel that controls Steem.
This is a structural problem that can’t be fixed. That cartel will never willingly give up its cash cow. It will continue to siphon off as much Bitcoin value as it can from this.
I agree with your idealism. And there will come a better design and project which meets the idealism you have. But it will not be Steem nor EOS, because these groups are as corrupt as can be.
I don't agree because they have no incentive to be corrupt. The money lies into taking this product as far as it can go. we can never be 100% sure, but I believe they are clever enough to see this and I trust them because they are incentivized to behave.
The "winner-takes-all" outcome is also not a problem for me because the winner is the best content creator. People don't sign up to social media to make money. I don't care about curation rewards. But I also don't want a centralized company to make money out of my attention, and above all I hate adds. This is the value proposition that steem offers today.