Steem is one of the only cryptoassets I am holding for the long-term (not trading). That likely sets alarms off for many of you (as I promote Steemit in all my videos), so fair disclosure that there IS an economic incentive for me to boost the price of Steem so I get paid more for posting my content on Steemit. However, I am NOT being paid by Steemit or anyone else to make this video - I am doing it of my own accord.
First, this video explores some of the many flaws associated with Steem and its biggest application, Steemit. In summary, we discuss:
- The "instamine" by developers and relaunch of Steem blockchain at beginning so that developers received 80% of Steem supply in beginning for "development purposes"
- The issues associated with trending posts on Steemit - The lack of integrity in buying votes or whales colluding to upvote posts for reasons other than curation (e.g: a friend made the post)
- The fact that all of the money comes from investors, which makes payouts extremely volatile and, in a way, makes the business model seem Ponzi Scheme-like as money is created from 'thin air' (wish I explored this more - one of the downsides of not writing a script is not spending enough time on certain topics)
- Reward Pool Abuse
- Whether or not delegated Proof of Stake is corruptible (briefly, don't go into detail here)
- The quality of most posts (at least in trending) is rather poor. In my opinion, which I didn't share in the video, payments should be proportionate to quality and # of views which at this time, there is a massive disconnect which means tons of value is being destroyed.
Flaws I Didn't Discuss (Mostly due to constraints or forgetting while recording):
- Inadequate policing tools or incentives available for reducing the frequency of low quality submissions
- How complex Steemit feels to a new user
- How frustrating the account creation process can be (although this is being worked on)
After we go through the flaws, I discuss why I hold Steem for the long-term:
- It's the only cryptoasset with an application that sees real use, as verifiable through Alexa & SimilarWeb
- There is a culture in Steemit, as you can easily see with community discussions and "wars" over particular topics (e.g: Haejin, voting bots, etc.)
- It "feels" active - A lot of crypto projects "feel" dead due to low number of overall users. While trending may not be filled with high quality posts, it certainly has a lot of interaction which brings people back to the platform
- There is a team actively working on improving the platform and the witnesses are generally doing their best to make it a better place as well (a fact I forgot to mention in video)
- There are community members who are actively hard at work to improve the platform and Steem ecosystem (forgot to mention in video)
Overall, while Steem & the application Steemit have many concerns, it is my opinion that Steem is the closest to achieving its goal among almost all cryptoassets. I am hoping that the issues I have discussed will be addressable in the long-term and am willing to take the risk personally.
In the future, I might write an article that goes more in-depth on my opinions of Steem - this is more of an overview. Thanks for watching / reading.