We wanted to make this an opportunity to all Steem users - not only the high reps.
This was an awful “calculated risk.” In fact, I don’t believe it was “calculated” at all. Anyone with just a rudimentary understanding of Steem/Steemit knows that the reputation system is massively flawed, the account creation process/faucet is easily exploitable, and that bots, spammers, exploiters, and outright scammers infest this place.
So this so-called “calculated risk” was then deemed acceptable after consideration was given? Why? In order to sign up exploiters/scammers to Byteball? That doesn’t sound like a promising marketing/growth model. It actually sounds like a great way to look scammy and to devalue your blockchain and tokens.
The fact that reputation scores on Steem/Steemit were used at all is laughable when talking about anything to do with “calculations” and airdrops. There’s a reason why it’s not part of any distribution protocols on the Steem blockchain.
There is now a check for creation date on users, only allowing Steem users created prior to the original announcement to receive the attestation award.
Why this was not part of the original ruleset for the airdrop is beyond me. If the consequences from this bad decision were not foreseen, then I can only assume that having a cut-off date was never actually considered - which means this airdrop was nothing less than completely amateurish. Has anyone on your team ever seen another crypto airdrop before?
Then, why on earth didn't we set out with a much might tight and waterproof system from the get-go? Well, the main reason being the ease of use and a wider spread of the word.
Yes, it’s much better to have people spreading the word that your airdrop was very poorly done and negatively affected both participating blockchains rather than make sure that it was done properly with abuse/exploit mitigation. Because those with investment money and actual development skills/teams love to invest in a good ol’ crypto “scam.”
The way we did it caused the word to spread like wildfire.
Likely in all the wrong places...like websites and forums that spread the word about how easily exploitable the airdrop was. Congratulations, I guess?
See, the first thing I need to underline here, is the fact, that this isn't just a simple airdrop. Steem users are now an integral part of the Byteball ecosystem. We needed the reputation level, how flawed it might be, as a way to allow ICO issuers, merchants, webshops, bot creators etc. to provide discounts and bonuses to a limited set of users. Users' attestations are posted to the DAG (yes, it's not a blockchain as you mentioned) and it allows developers to provide special services to Steem users.
One thing I can honstly say we didn't foresee, was the internal debate this caused in the Steem community. We definitely had no intention to bring focus to what some apparently believe is a broken system.
Whether or not you believe we knowingly set out to do things this way, I can just say, that to a platform allowing users to build and expand on it just like Steem, we definitely got some attention from developers swooping in to take advantage of things.
One final word on all this would have to be, that the network issues we experienced last weekend, was definitely not planned for! It caused all sorts of problems both to users and to us monitoring the campaign. That's definitely a lesson we've learned for the next campaigns :)
Exactly. Every discrepancy in effort/investment/income unleashes spammers.