As I don't usually have time to write posts on Reddit nor the incentive, I like to read in the cryptocurrency one pretty much daily. It kinda sucks that every time Steem or some others gets mentioned some people hate on them forever.
So I just decided to write some of my thoughts in there which I don't normally do. I know many may not read it there and it may not get any visibility at all through their voting system, that's why I thought I'd share it here. Warning though it's a long one but a lot of what is said there could easily be said to new and old users of the platform.
Over the years of mostly lurking in this subreddit I've come to learn that a project I am active on and have been for the past 2.5 years has always had this stigma about it, no matter what gets shared. The comments often go from the range of "it's a ponzi", "shit content cause everyone only posts about Steem", "shit content cause people only post about what the influential users with a lot of stake want to see" to "it's ninjamined".
I don't want to talk about most of the other examples in this post, but according to my knowledge the company that started the currency mined it along with other people very early on. Yes there was a restart due to a bug, yes they did manage to mine a lot of stake at a time where people were splitting hashpower into a lot of currencies, but guess what else, they've used a majority of that stake developing the blockchain. So much so they have to lay off employees during a brutal bear market that has hit the majority of coins except xrp and btc just as hard. That they've sold stake in an automated way to help fund dapps instead of dumping at the top only and ruining everyone's ROI.
Then there is the crowd that screams DPOS is not a real blockchain cause it's not POW. This one never made much sense to me, not to mention how centralized mining pools are, how the world needs higher TPS, how so much effort has gone into the lightning network as a second layer solution, how Ethereum is moving into a proof of stake environment with proof of work miners still active. It kinda reminds me of Steem's early mining phase where you could mine it through hardware, being a witness, posting, curating and inflation. Oh, it had both of those plus 3 other methods and theoretically can handle 10k tx/s although its record is currently only at [2.5 million at ~0.21% capacity].
I know you might be thinking, "ugh it was another shill post" but I'm not here to just let you know about stats that are easy to find as investors & holders, I'm sure the majority of you know how to invest or at least have learned some harsh lessons along the way which most of us have and a subreddit like this one has been a great source of info, if not always i the posts then in the comment section. It has helped you along a few times probably, even though some major scandals or exit scams have come to light after it was already too late I'm sure there are a lot of you who are thankful to the thoughts, ideas, predictions, warnings and everything positive this platform has given you. That's why I use it and many of you probably too.
Just imagine for a second if you were someone with a lot of wealth and saw a possible competitor of you make a lot of waves over the internet, know how imbalanced the world currently is in how people evaluate their time. How hard and expensive do you think it is for a person to either a: create a reddit account or b: purchase one from black markets to a: post a lot of good posts about your project and b: constantly bring up flaws or conflicting material up about the other project. Now I'm not saying that Steem is the perfect version to this solution, there are bid bots and hell even bid bots for comments. What Steem does give you access to though, is a history of all actions of any account you want to look up on since everything is stored on the blockchain. There are a lot of projects already on Steem that can help you out a long the way to find more info about the account, what kind of content it votes on, which authors it votes on the most, and a lot of other things. In the end though there can always be very good shills who are dedicated and may say anything about everything, the reputation system is pretty flawed as accounts can "promote" their posts by spending Steem/SBD to a bot that has delegated Steem Power which is only used to sell votes which in turn gives users a higher ROI as they are using 90% of their influence of the weekly reward pool just to give out sold votes. While at the same time you have a big community of users who just want to grow the place by curating content and authors wanting to see where this technology can take us if done part right and part being altruistic as curators only earn 25% of the reward pool thus benefiting the authors only voting on themselves or selling votes. This may all seem like a big flaw but to some users it just feels like something that will take more time to show its strength.
Much like delegating your stake to another account for a higher ROI, you could put your investment to work to just promote content you want to read more about. In a way, you can create your own community by incentivizing them with a token that has value and is being traded on most markets and has one of the best distributions than most coins. No matter how many promotions certain coins give you for signing up with a new service of theirs or how many airdrops alts of theirs do upon holders. This one is designed to be one of the best at distribution cause it is built into the core to reward you for curating. Curation may seem like a joke to many who have tried it on an account and not gotten much returns, but imagine services doing it, exchanges, businesses. You give your favorite restaurant a review and they return the favor with a vote that directly gives you and them a token reward. It is already built in, the things you can do with Steem are endless.
While the company is hard at work to further scale the blockchain, allow creation of tokens that can go with your votes that any company can create for almost no cost at their own and give value to their presence on the blockchain. It will only need one social media manager to learn how to use Steem which is simplified on purpose for beginners, but once you dig deeper into the tech and think that if selling votes as promotion to get on a trending page of thousands of readers is one of its early things, what else can there exist that could evolve the same way? Well, literally everything. You think of it, I could 2/3 tell you a good reason why it would be better over time on the Steem blockchain. I'm not even bluffing here, there are tons of devs and services not just migrating but being created daily throughout the year so they must be thinking the same thing, I can't be the only one with ideas and I'm probably not the best one at it either as I don't code.
There's dapps such as d.tube which gained a lot of traction when the first front-end Steemit made it past rank 1000 during the bitcoin ATH, although decentralization of video is not quite there yet through IPFS they try their best to give you a good experience if possible, not only that, they will reward you for using their service. Most dapps being created on Steem get funding through the users of the platform in forms of "delegation", some dapps have beat Smart Media Tokens to the punch and are already distributing tokens as ERC-20 to switch them up once the hardfork is live when you will be able to create your own tokens. Remember the ICO sell off that happened in 2018? Well here users can go a bit more wild at investing and diversifying without risking their own tokens, them just being loaned out to the dapp in exchange for their tokens. No wonder there are so many new dapps being created here where funding can be minimal, work on a as a pay for your contributions so far and can be distributed to many dapps around the site depending on your judgement in their odds of success. Don't let me even start talking about how an increase in price would affect the reward pool and the funding of said investments as most of you know how crypto works.
To cut this short(er), I just wanted to let you know about some stuff that is happening over there. The rewardpool has given out more than $50 mil to authors since it's existence with hundreds of dapps (recently got listed on stateofthedapps so all activity may not be reflecting the real numbers yet, I reckon it should be more according to @penguinpablo's daily selected stats of the blockchain ). In a market where most dapp activity has gone down, being able to create an account and interact with the blockchain is not easy, Steem has been doing a decent job at getting users introduced to blockchain and some of its main advantages to many existing apps they use daily. Although it's price fluctuations are as crazy as Bitcoins were at some point, it has a lot of potential and has already proven once how quick users could get accepted and how fast people with an account came back to use it, reminds me a lot of Bitcoins early hypes and die outs.
I'm just saying don't judge a book by it's cover. Like most projects, take a deeper look. Not all things need to be decentralized, you can have some actions happen on centralized servers and it won't necessarily affect users in a bad way if something happened with that. The important thing to know here is that everything on the bockchain is public, anyone can see if someone is selling, anyone can see that devs working on it are invested. What people say is not always the truth, if you ask a lot of Steem users today what they think about their currency they might be just as annoyed as the next guy cause they may be experiencing a market cycle at the wrong time or just expected their project to outperform everyone else. Make sure you diversify. The president of Coinbase recently said in an interview to CNBC that he is looking at 200 coins in the general market that "matter" and is interested in adding them.
Do the research, come to a conclusion but give the blockchain project a chance to show it's real potential to you, not what someone said or did about it, not how things may seem. Back in the day when I got in the majority was calling Bitcoin that and it was not pretty. Back when Ethereum had it's presale everyone and their grandmas were calling it a scam on Reddit. Same thing with EOS. There are a lot of people out there and the hivemind can change as often as underwear and some times not even by manipulation.
Sorry for the long read those that made it through, I don't post here often as I am quite busy reading but also because Steem exists so there's no real incentive for me to spend a lot of time here other than getting some news combined with some opinions cause even though Steem has those too, it's just too early for it to be of high-end quality, the same way Reddit was before the community started growing in subreddits.
While Coinbase is trying to outcompete binance in dominance, see if you can gain any short term profit from banks trying to pump ripple and more centralized entities that rely on adrevenue trying to create their own versions of blockchain without realizing an open internet is always better than a closed one, and let the institutional money start flowing in. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!