I've taken this opportunity to power up another 1200 Steem. Man it sure is cheap. What an awesome time to be a buyer. Of course, no one wants to hear that because we've been bleeding for the last 18 months, but whatever. Silver lining.
Personally, I think 100 Steem is a lot. Considering the current distribution of coins it is highly improbable that a million people could ever afford 100 Steem. Also, the amount of resource credits one gets from 100 Steem is currently pretty generous in my opinion.
Think about it: every time you do anything on the blockchain that information gets saved to every node forever. For me, this is quite mind boggling when I really start to parse the logistics of that fact, especially considering resource credits are given out for "free".
Scaling
Steem is often touted as a DLT that scales well. This is true depending on the context. Compared to other DLT it scales quite well, but compared to every other centralized database solution it is a hunk of junk from a scaling perspective.
Andreas Antonopoulos talks a lot about technological scaling in general. We've been pushing the boundaries of the Internet since its inception. You know who's boundaries are not being pushed right now? Steem.
That's because no developer here has actually created a decentralized application where the burden of spending resource credits falls on the users. It is more difficult to program for blockchain applications with this in mind because most developers are far more concerned with how they are going to make money off of their hard work. This pushes them toward efficient centralized services and servers controlled completely by a single entity.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: When actual decentralized applications start being propagated here, Steem blocks are going to start getting filled to the brim. Resource credits will actually be worth something because the supply is no longer seemingly infinite. People will have to start thinking about what they want on the blockchain and what they don't, rather than just doing whatever they want because we can currently scale a hundred times higher than we are today with little effort.
Of course, if you are reading this, you probably won't have to worry about any of this. It will be the new users who can't even manage to get 20 Steem on their account who are going to be the most annoyed and cry about how it wasn't fair that we all got in so early, just like today we cry about ninja mines and people who bought at 8 cents and all that.
It's not about timing the market, it's about time in the market
I've almost been here for 2 years, and what a bumpy ride it has been. There may be a lot of blood in the water, but my rule of thumb is that I have to give these communities at least 4 years (1 Bitcoin cycle) to turn around and make their comeback. Everything else until then is just noise, and I hear a lot of noise, but I also see a lot of progress, even if it doesn't come in the form of increased STEEM/USD.
Posting and Active key compromised.
I accidentally leaked my posting and active key to the Internet a few weeks back. I allowed them to stay leaked for quite some time just to see if anything would happen. It didn't. This is how early in the game we are. I can straight up leak my keys to the Internet and no one is even around to exploit it. Even if they had been used maliciously, the damage would have been minimal because the vast majority of my stake is powered up.
This brings me back to the tired speech of how Steem has better security and user experience than other projects. I sent 1200 Steem from Binance for a 0.01 Steem fee. Where did I send it?
8254C329A92850F6D539DD376F4816EE2764517DA5E0235514AF433164480D7A
Nope, sent it to @edicted. It's these little things we take for granted that end up making a huge difference to new users. Zero fees, three levels of security, three second blocks, blah blah blah. I know you've heard it 1000 times before, but it really will have the value that people claim.
Annoyed about master key security.
I ended up finally changing my password today and remain very annoyed that as soon as it's changed it becomes exposed to the Internet.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@edicted/steem-airgap-hardware-wallet-utopian-io
My idea for an airgapped hardware wallet still stands. We can bring the security of this project to an entirely new and elevated level in the future. It will literally be impossible to steal a Steem account in the future without cracking encryption or having physical access to the hardware that the information is stored on. It's progressions like this that will really give big investors peace of mind when making the decision to invest their time and money here.
Alright, I think I'm done shilling Steem for now. Sure, there are a lot of problems, but there are also a lot of people who care and want the best thing for the community. Peace.
So many great points in this post.
I also made a significant purchase of Steem through binance. I seriously believe that steem is in a great position for the future.
However, opinions and observations such as the ones you have included here are and will be extremely important for steem's lasting success. The master key issue is one I was not aware of, but find concerning as well.
Please keep up these important contributions!
The market is strange today. Fiat is lent at negative interest. Sovereign nations sell 100 year bonds at 2%.
Netflix, Tesla, and others hemorrhage cash and the value of their stock rises. It's insane, and cannot be sustained. Quantitative easing is of temporally limited value. The price of Steem has a long way to fall IMHO before the profiteers abandon it and it becomes available to investors to begin to build up the social media platform into the growth model it can be, enabling brobdingnagian capital gains and potentiating voluntarist governments to form with Steem as a basis for discussion and funding communal enterprises.
You are right, however, in seeing price as not particularly relevant, except as a means of dislodging parasites. The real value of Steem will be shown to be not capital gains, but the potential to transcend societal paradigms of governance. That will be enabled by investing for capital gains however, and that will be enabled when parasitization of production ends.
HODL '..and damned be him that first cries 'HODL! Enough!'
Also, your experience with leaked keys is different than my own, possibly because your key wasn't leaked on chain, where a perp runs an app that searches for keys and seizes accounts when they are discovered.
Thanks!
I dunno. Im thinking of powering up a few thousand myself. Getting to 10k but ill probably wait for it to go down a bit more.
I kind of have a feeling that all the alts got drained into Bitcoin and no new money is coming into crypto so alt lower lows wouldnt surprise me.
Posted using Partiko Android
My plan for the last 6 months has been to buy in slowly during sept and oct. Lower prices equate to more coins. If the price of Steem suddenly spiked up to 32 cents right now I'd be pretty annoyed.
Peace
perfect
I’ve lost track of my master key. I have the active and posting keys, but the master seems to gone on walkabout.
At some point, that’s going to bite me in the ass.
Sounds bad. I suggest you transfer all your stake to alts and delegate your stake to your main account. Without a master key there is no possibility of account recovery. If your missing master key ends up in malicious hands you could lose absolutely everything you have here. If you follow my advice, you'll keep your stake because you can simply undelegate it. Because of your reputation and network, starting a new account shouldn't be too difficult because you're able to prove you are you by posting new photographs of the same unique subjects you have already posted photographs of. All the malicious actor could do is try to damage your reputation by trolling.
Yeah I had a similar scare a while back... and now because I was forced to change my password once again I'm having similar anxiety. What if my backup is wrong? What if I messed it up?
Luckily I didn't have to abandon my account, but if you can't find the master you are definitely asking for trouble. Perhaps it's time @wombatprepared took over. I can create the account for you right now if you like... it's open.
Thanks, but I found it. It was in a text file on an old laptop that I haven’t used for a couple of years, must have still been using it when I first signed up.
Printed out two hard copies. Put one in the fireproof lockbox in the basement and the other one somewhere else.
glad to hear it worked out.
Great post. The only question is will those apps ever actually be built here???
The best apps are going to be quite modular.
They will plug and play on multiple platforms.
Because Steem utilizes JavaScript I have very high hopes for it in this regard.
In your opinion, what is the biggest reason steem hasn't been able to get something decent built on it to date?
In addition, people just don't know how to think about it in the right way. All we know is centralization, pyramid-like power structures, and scarcity. Flat architectures baffle us at the moment.
Once people start building using Andreas Antonopoulos' tenants of decentralization (the idealist politics behind Bitcoin) (censorship resistance, open, borderless, etc) Apps will get created that don't necessarily have great value to the creator directly, but have massive value to the community at large.
How do we incentivize devs to work for free? Well, if you're a big enough stake holder, that is incentive enough. Also the reputation earned from building such apps is theoretically priceless in the future going forward. Plus this is a tipping platform plus the proposal system etc... it's all geared toward making products with the most benefit to everyone.
Yep, exactly, which is why it has been so surprising to me that it has been such a struggle to get something remotely popular built on here. I get that no other blockchains have really great apps built on them either, so there is that, but in theory steem should be in better position than most and it has been that way for years now... with very little results.
Trust me, my mind is also blown. When I consider that I could be the first one in the world to build the prototype of an entire decentralized genre it really has me questioning my own sanity.
How has nobody done these things yet? I think it's really a testament to just how early in the game we really are and how hardwired our brains are to think in the opposite manner than is required. We're all wired to think in terms of scarcity over abundance instead of the other way around.
Greed, plain and simple. After that is the simple lack of decentralized organization. Centralized corporations are hard enough to organize. Setting up an effective DAO is an absolute nightmare.
One of these days someone will come out when some bad ass template for making a good DAO, but until then governance is being tinkered with by hand in a custom way, and because of greed, that tinkering puts the tinkerers in charge.
Once someone creates an organizational structure that is more fair and can guarantee hard work won't be overlooked, the floodgates will open.
It's also a matter of learning to decentralize development. How do we come up with a system to pay devs to complete small portions of a large project. I can see with the proposal system we are already working toward this goal. Baby steps.
Also I'm in the process of making one right now.
It's called Pentaskill and it allows users to bet peer-to-peer in a fancy game of rock, paper, scissors.
If the user base grows by enough orders of magnitude, the block size will have to be increased. With 10 million daily active users the current block size limit will cause the chain to become unusable.
Personally I think it's not going to be that hard for Steem to develop off-chain scaling solutions where the main chain is only needed to prove when a bad actor cheats. Our blocksize limit is a measure of what information we deem necessary to immortalize on the blockchain. Just because we are putting everything on the blockchain now doesn't mean we will be when space is scarce.
This isn't a linear scaling problem. Exponential user-base growth does not imply exponential storage requirements. As block space becomes more rare projects will pick and choose much more carefully what actually belongs on the chain.
Of course base blocksize is always something to consider when scaling a platform... just look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV... it is a contentious decision to be sure.
The scaling problem is very different for PoW and (D)PoS chains. For PoW chains it is much more difficult because security and permissionlessness (in the sense that on a PoW chain anyone can start producing blocks) are possible because of PoW. Security and scaling are at odds as design choices there. In (D)PoS chains, we can arbitrarily increase the block size without changing anything except increasing the hardware requirements because it's up to the stakeholders to choose the block producers.
Whether or not everything needs to be stored on the main chain is of course a valid question. Our only current side chain stores everything on the main chain as JSON data while Scotbot is the only server that does anything in response to detecting them on the chain. There are different side chain models and I believe there will be many kinds used in the ecosystem.
I like to imagine it this way: say two people are playing a competitive game against one another. If both players can play the game using their posting key encryption, that data doesn't even need to go on chain. All of of sudden, now it doesn't even matter that Steem has a 3 second block limit. Both players can post actions as fast as the latency of the node they are playing on, just like a normal centralized game.
However, due to the private key encryption, the node running the game doesn't have to worry about things like security. If someone cheats at the game the opposing player can prove it using the rules of consensus of whatever game they are playing. No one would be able to counterfeit gameplay because that gameplay is secured locally on said user's machine.
We are going to see some crazy applications over the next ten years that blow everyone's mind. I guarantee it.
It's a steal actually...Time will tell actually but I have a feeling that we can't go really lower...Powered up another 800 myself too.
Steem on mate
The future is bright for steem and i must say we are damn lucky that we were able to recognised and get informed about steem now in its early stage
That's funny. I was just going to write a post about how Steem is a great template to show corporations how they can create communities and own them with premined stake.
It's pretty obvious that the more scalability you add to a platform the more decentralization you lose. The tradeoff is obvious in many circumstances.
Nothing is ever decentralized. It's like saying something is perfect. It's a goal not a reality.
What I'm concerned with is:
Does Steem serve me and the dapps I am trying to create?
The answer is yes. I need 'free' transactions and quick blocks to get this stuff done. My only concern after the fact is to hope that Steem is decentralized enough so that the dapp doesn't get censored. I think it is... and if it isn't then there are still plenty of opportunities to create work-arounds.