I read an interesting article last night that @smooth shared. It was talking about how the demographic of countries using localbitcoins has shifted over the years, back in 2013 90% of the volume was coming from the U.S.A, U.K and Australia alone. Now the U.S is in 3rd place with 11.8% of the total volume while Russia is leading with 26.5% and Venezuela on second place with 12.2%. The reason a lot of shifting is occurring does not just mean that americans have stopped trading Bitcoin but it also depends on the development of trusted and better exchanges in the country. Instead of using LBC which does have hefty fees depending on the buyer, they might have switched to exchanges such as coinbase or others.
What I wanted to bring up in this post as well is something that has bothered me over the months. There is a hivemind on r/cryptocurrency that Nano is so wonderful and amazing and most of the time anything related to that gets on the front-page in a regular basis. Now I am not against Nano, the tech is interesting and I'm sure the team developing it are doing a great job, but it seems as though other currenices that have just as good tech or potential to do what it does are getting swept under the rug by the masses there. I am guessing that since Nano is such a new coin and the recent development of the price that it had, seeing astronomical returns for early investors (from $0.01 to $34) and people that joined the crypto space during the hype of late 2017 has lead to a lot of newcomers holding it. The drop from $34 down to $0.90 at one point has place Nano in one of the worst performing altcoins of this year. So it doesn't surprise me that the current bagholders are doing what they can to spread the word abut it in hopes that it will get a lot of attention and correct itself through that effort while maybe leaving behind actual technological advancements or uncertainty.
This one time there was a post trending that mentioned the Nano community having donated ~$60 to a Venezuelan user who then went ahead and managed to buy a lot of food for his friends and family that were in need. This is all well and good and a big reason why cryptocurrency and altcoin solutions are so important but the mere fact that a post like this got so much attention while other currencies are doing something similar and in much greater numbers not receiving the same if not greater recognition due to the hivemind of the subreddit feels a bit wrong. Don't get me wrong, what the Nano community did was really awesome and I respect them for it. Out of shear interest I went ahead and asked a data compiler here on Steem for some information.
I asked him if there was a way to scan the blockchain for users on Steem that have the "location" field filled in with Venezuela and he responded with 16350 total accounts. We went further as to check how many had been active this month and that number dropped to 1735. That's understandable, it can't be easy for their community to receive a lot of support especially with curation currently being the way it is and distribution of bigger stakeholders not being the best, not to mention the bear market, etc. So out of curiosity I asked him one more thing, if he could check the data of rewards earned for this month by those 1735 active users. The outcome showed 8240 SBD and 8140 SP.
This may not seem like a lot to some of our high earners or users living in expensive countries, but for a platform as small as Steem currently is at this time and the price being as low as it currently is. Combined with the costs of buying things in said country I can imagine it is a huge help to those Steemians. Yet if you were to try and share stories about this anywhere outside Steem, even from their own users the manipulations would go wild and the posts would often times get downvoted or negative comments would come up talking about Steem's early inflation or lack of distribution. How they think DPOS is not a real blockchain, linking to videos of Tone Vays, etc.
All I'm saying is that Steem to this day still remains a very undervalued and often times underappreciated blockchain which is a bit sad considering how hard many users here try and spread the word about this amazing technology we have and how easy it is for newcomers to get introduced to it. This is more an issue of Reddit than it is for Steem but many investors are not looking into Steem because of early judgement or this stigma to always ignore our blockchain even though it has time after time again proven to outperform most of them in many ways than just the technical aspects.
I understand that the situation in a country like Venezuela is difficult, users may even be afraid to promote Steem even if they see how well it works and how much it helps them due to their laws and the need to use black markets or localbitcoins. There are other countries out there though that Steem is quite popular in as well and it is a bit disheartening that some users don't make more of an effort to promote what we already got here. I am hoping things will improve over time in that aspect as well, we all know how much promotion the bull market makes on its own combined with being a top currency on coinmarketcap which is still quite high on alexa traffic rankings. I just wish the efforts of the Steemit team to work on the back-end mostly and make sure it is ready for mass adoption won't go to waste because of the ongoing dissing of Steem by outsiders who probably haven't even bothered to look deeper into it since the early days and are completely not aware of the development and amount of dapps and activities we have going on here even at possibly the bottom of the bearmarket.
[Image Source Pexels.com]
Thanks to @abh12345 for the provided blockchain statistics.
I don't think any other crypto project has affected humanity the way steem has done, is doing and will do. It is a bit surprising to see that such gang-up is going on the the crypto subreddit. If a project like Nano could be getting such hype, I think steem should be getting multiples of those hype. Something fundamental seems not to be right.
Having said that, Nigeria is one country where steem is relatively popular among the youths and a lot is being done to promote the platform and even bring in investors from the rich political class. A fork of SF named steemit in Nigeria takes place every year and this year's own is coming up between 30th October and 4th November. The Nigerian community of steemstem stemng also carried out promotion related activities sometimes last July and we still have more planned in the not so far future.
I hope other countries can do the same. Well said Acidyo
Yes, I am glad that it is becoming bigger in developing countries more, even if that means a lot of sell pressure short term - those are the unbanked people that need this technology more than the rest. Once we start having merchants accepting Steem there directly which removes most fees people will start to feel the real power of our blockchain!
Boy oh boy, do I really need to talk about how Steem has helped out in my most dire times of needs? Okay? Okay.
I basically got into this whole blogging thing around mid January. Christmas had passed, I was unemployed and in not so good economical situation. But then my Ex Girlfriend talked to me about some other income opportunities I could get into, one of the ones she mentioned was Steemit.
She sold the prospect of steemit to me as basically "Oh it's like having your own blog but you basically get paid if people like your content." A concept like that was honestly very hard to trust for me because I simply couldn't understand it... Until then she mentioned Crypto; I soon started to understand little by little how everything played out in this sort of blog with utopic properties to it.
Let's say that i'm almost a year into Steemit and I'm still learning the ropes around here and gained quite a lot more thant I had initially hoped for. But that's not the entire experience. I've bonded with so many people, talked to a bunch more and even hanged out with more than i'm normally comfortable with! In terms of income I know i'm not this huge whale who gets hundreds of dollars a week but it's not like I absolutely need to earn 500+ dollars to love Steemit. Yes those Curie, Op Gaming and SteemGC's votes do help A LOT in terms of my economic situation but it's more than that, the payout it's the cherry on top and the people, productivity and skills I've discovered from just coexisting in this ecosystem is what really keeps me i'm here.
So yes, I'm Venezuelan and I'll defend and promote Steemit everywhere I can (Within reason) because it has given a new light into my life.
Thank you for sharing!
You're right, the community here and many other advantages than just the payouts are for many already much better than currently existing centralized platforms. I am glad you've had a nice experience here and I hope it will only get better for us all in the near future. My first year on Steem I had only managed to collect around 8k SP (this was when price was 7 cents, too) as I was focusing on curation and engagement. It's gonna get exciting once we start reaching new heights again, hopefully. :)
I'm in the States, but way, way below the poverty line. When people get all snooty about how I'm being pie-in-the-sky (I'm not, I'm pretty practical) about crypto, I'm like: I've paid my electric bill several times; I've bought food, I've paid rent, I've bought clothes and shoes that I needed; I've bought cat supplies; I've bought cat supplies for my elderly neighbor, I've raised money for tree planting. And that's just ME, a lowly minnow only recently - I did all that as a red fish. No fiat investment, because poverty. Never powering down, that's just the liquid being often (but not always) cashed out. From blogging.
You can ignorantly blather about "magic money on my computer," but it has literally kept the lights on and kept me fed and housed, several times. That's real and effective to me. <3
Awesome, glad to hear that Steem has made a significant and much needed difference in your life.
I totally understand when people have to do it; I just meant that I was able to still get that much benefit without having to go to that measure and still build my account too. Like, that's how much potential there is here!
Oh, totally cool, I just wanted to make sure you didn't think I was shaming people who have had to power down. We're good. :)
Yeah, hearing about those donations is nice, but at today's prices, over $16000 went to Steem accounts in the past month with Venezuela in the profile.
We need to get that out there!
And actually, I think @stephenkendal does similair to this at times when he runs some stats on tags, and puts this up on twitter.
Maybe we could expand this from tags, and use locations? You could say that the payouts would be the absolute minimum for the time-frame chosen, as not all (hardly any?) location fields are accurate.
Yeah, and that's just users that have filled in the location on their profile, so there's probably a ton of others still unaccounted for. Indeed, could be nice information to share these minimums just by scanning the blockchain.
Get to it!
Please. :D
I'm pretty sure that byteball has done way more for Venezuela than Nano, there are some donors there that have given hundreds of dollars to different charities, I know this because the byteball representative of Venezuela is a friend.
Also Steem is a pretty big hit too and there are a lot of Venezuelans thriving here. There's a lot of volume still in Local, in fact it has increased since BTC fees came down to safer levels.
If anyone has any questions about crypto and Venezuela, I'll be happy to answer :-)
Both cryptocurrencies are questionable projects, to be honest.
Exactly, yet you never see many positive threads about Byteball on that subreddit. If ever they are in the two digit upvote level compared to Nano's three to four digit trending posts.
Reddit is quite easy to be gamed if done correctly, I remember when VeChain got permanently banned from that subreddit for constant brigading and manipulation through black market upvotes, etc. Even though they are still lightyears ahead of r/bitcoin for free speech there will always be things they can't fix in a centralized and closed database that doesn't let regular users check the voting activity of threads.
There's a couple dozen websites where you can buy upvotes for pennies, manipulation is obvious when you are 4 digit upvotes and barely any comments, I doubt it will get better any time soon but we have to keep our window on Reddit open too to bring users here and have them enjoy a crypto with a usable product and a blockchain you can actually interact with.
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Yeah, they are often obvious but with a strong community behind it it can get difficult to judge. Not as easy as that guy in r/steemit last night who got record upvotes on our sub within hours. xD
:^) We will eventually break his fake news record
I get that there are problems with distribution here. Everyone knows it, and most everyone who complains about it has learned to do off-chain amongst themselves so as not to piss off the wrong people.
What I don't understand is why that supposedly damns the whole project from the outside looking in, when the highest-valued cryptocurrency, the one that started it all, has a pretty scary lack of distribution itself.
The entire Bitcoin community sits in a big circle-jerk above Satoshi's early-mined coins saying various things like....
Meanwhile the spectre of those early-mined coins grows, and has caused at least one (failed) Bitcoin airdrop-clone to propose "reclaiming" those early coins to be mined again. If those coins ever moved, there would be chaos. I guarantee there are scripts in place to dump at least hundreds of thousands of BTC at the first sign of movement.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. I'm just sick of hearing about distribution on Steem as Bitcoin sits at a $111 billion valuation, with at least $5 billion ready to be dumped by a single actor with mostly unknown motivations and values at any time. Steem's entire valuation is $219 million. That's not even enough to make the largest hodlers mega-rich. There are single mansions with higher valuations than that.
Exactly, and Bitcoin still lacks proper distribution even without accounting for Satoshi's stash, just check the top 100 wallets minus the ones own by exchanges.
Ethereum tried to approach this with an ICO and it is also quite centralized. Eos tried to approach this with a year long ICO and guess what, still quite centralized.
The crying about decentralization are unnecessary. Here on Steem at least you don't need ASIC computers or GPU farms to mine newly minted Steem and the inflation is going to last at least another 20 years so there's enough time to mine them with your sweat and tears. :P
Ehh, fuck em.
Bitcoin has gone through the same thing. Now we're going through the same crap, from the crypto community itself. While they're shit talking us without giving us a chance, we'll be making money and fixing the issues we have, so by the time more of them give us a chance, we'll have more ironed out.
The US market is also turning its back on LBC due to the absurd and extensive KYC requirements now. To even use it, you have to turn your physical government ID as well as other sensitive information over to an unregulated third party that isn't even based in the US.
It's gross, imo. Paxful would be a viable alternative or the Mycelium P2P market, but the human presence just is not there.
Those of us here now can do our little bit by upvoting Venezuelan Steemians, microdonating here and there, and sponsoring them into #steembasicincome shares (tip of the hat to @mariannewest for promoting the SBI idea).
From a strictly selfish viewpoint, this gives those of us here now a shot at getting Steem at fire sale prices. 😁
This is a fantastic point and one that I think we need to capitalize on and spread wide! The fact that people really likely are making grocery money from here is amazing-- and maybe more?
I would love for some Venezuelans to share what they are able to buy with their payouts. While it may look small to those of us in countries where the fiat exchange is quite low right now, I know it can go a lot farther in other places. Fannnntastic!!!
The main problem is instead of making this easy to use to follow coins like reddit you must follow users like twitter, another failing site. The morons in charge of steem spent a year trying to become a token launch platform instead of becoming crypto reddit. It was really a wasted 1.5 years. Steem should be to crypto what Reddit is, it’s just too hard to focus on topics here. I have quite use it but keep checking periodically to see if it’s gotten better.
Well, there's nothing stopping Steem from becoming like the subreddit for crypto. It would definitely do a much better job at it. Just cause the Steemit team isn't focusing on the front-end doesn't mean they wouldn't hope for someone else to come in and create something of the likes, they'd probably support it with a delegation as well, who knows.
I guess their plans are much bigger for now. Also Reddit isn't the main platform where the CEO's and team leaders of crypto projects use, that's Medium nowadays which is probably a lot more alike to Steem. Why Medium is doing so much better is beyond me considering they're just a middleman on centralized servers that could sell out or shut down any day.
Well the content is already there, it’s actually the tools to make it easy to use. I think the devs are to blame. Both medium and reddit allow you to follow topics. In medium you usually only follow devs, because barriers to writing are so high so it’s easier to make a stream you want. Follow the devs of maker or zrx or similiar and you’ll get a stream of stories that are relevant.
Perhaps all that’s needed for steam is multiple groups of followers. Let me follow devs on one tab and commenters on another. I think just organizing them into groups (communities) would help a lot. Also in medium you get suggestions about things you like. This is much easier to discover good content than on steemit.
We just have to be patient. The next cryptocurrency bull will be good.
After the banks in the US prevented credit card holders to buy BTC it contributed to the BTC bear market that made prices of other cryptos low enough that it affected steem price which made some accounts here to stop posting @acidyo
If only crypto price would recover than steem price would also recover thereby making this community grow again as it would attract more users.
That may have been a small contribution yes. To be honest I'd rather Steem move away from the influence of the rest of the crypto market sooner rather than later.
In order for us to break away from market pressure, we need to onboard way more than we are currently on-boarding. At least an order of magnitude greater growth of new accounts being created than we have now. The number of active users needs to grow significantly as well. The value of a network is relatively close to the square of the active users. This means every time the number of active users doubles, the value of the network quadruples. Price can somewhat mirror value once out from under the market pressure. On-boarding new users is directly tied to accessibility of the currency. STEEM has not been all that accessible compared to other currencies. Exchange nodes often don't work for STEEM and the currency is not available in large numbers of exchanges. There are language barriers with most of the exchanges and also with Dapps and Steemit. If these problems are fixed, growth can happen. Then value can grow.
I am not sure, if you are aware or not, but I came across https://mysteemx.com/ recently, where you can convert steem / SBD to any local currency easily. So people really don't need to convert it to bitcoin and then encash.
More such kind of exchanges will help this platform a lot. Even crypt is banned in India, but that does not deter me to stop my activities here.
I believe Steem — and Steemit — is something visionary and amazing. But I also fear it has been sadly mismanaged... or perhaps just that too much energy has been directed in less than optimal ways.
I already left a long comment elsewhere about what I see as a problem of a "too much back end, not enough front end" orientation/culture here.
Let's forget about "blockchains" and "technology" and "apps" for a moment... and consider the reality that the history of business success tends to be one of something catching the imagination of end consumers and then technology and infrastructure trails that to adapt to and fulfill the market. If you think about it in everyday terms, the strategy of creating a "best selling product" before anyone actually can buy and use that product and start an avalanche of demand for it... doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, there are gaming releases that are "best sellers" before anyone gets their mitts on them, but those come from organizations with a long history of stellar products... a track record. We have no track record here, so we have to bring that to the end user.
Answering the question "What makes Steem awesome?" with "I can create great apps and monetize them via the Steem blockchain!" is nice but only meaningful to 0.001% of the general population and won't do much to generate awareness and goodwill. And thus also won't do anything to address the issues you are bringing up here.
The closest thing we currently have to a "street level" answer to why Steem is awesome is the sadly neglected Steemit front end.... forget "getting paid to post" for a moment, and think instead of the easiest possible way for someone to get an introduction to cryptocurrency: "If you can use social media, you can get involved in crypto." And yet, nobody seems to be pushing that benefit anymore.
The other (hopefully!) thing we have is SteemMonsters... which is truly reaching beyond Steemit/Steem... and yet pulling people into the ecosystem. And, technically speaking, buying SteemMonsters packs is the closest we currently have to being able to buy Steem with a debit card. Given the enormous impact of MTG over the past couple of decades... SM could be MTG's crypto-based successor.
So... we're in desperate need of positive feedback over something everyday can experience.
=^..^=
Thats interesting! Some years before we couldnt even dream of such platform or virtual currency. Now we have many of them and they are changing not only the life of individuals, but whole nations.
what a wonderful ♥ donation ! :)
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Since I joined steem a year ago I have been trying to promote, but until now my post still does not make enough has I want, so I hardly promote steem anymore because if they come they might be disappointed if they find it hard to earn here.
Steem is a great project as far as I am concerned and is being continually perfected, it has also made its impact in the third world.
However I think more still needs to be done to entice or attract more people initially before they understand the system more. Great piece all round.
As for why isn't every Steemian in the 3rd world on here all day every day I am going to guess the cost of power to charge a cell phone is more than .8 steem a day the person is making. It's a cool micro income but its difficult for anyone to feed their family on steem unless they are holding lots of SP.
I like these type of posts as they get the conversation going and experiences are shared on the potential of Steem and what it can do for many aspects: fiat devaluations, asset seizures, and basic income which brings a large population around the world closer to services they need in a protocol open to all. However, given that technology is still maturing and developing there is a lot of competition of various projects trying to handle these concerns as well. Like the Internet before, it will be a survival of the fitness and winners and losers will be clear soon as this market disengages users, developers and investors. I have high hopes for Steem given its flexibility and scalability and believe that the future deployment of SMTs could help expand the ecosystem to be more inclusive and improve distribution which could attract more users.
I know many people who were interested in steemit to fight the crisis that is experienced in Venezuela but due to the current value of the rewards much have sought other alternatives, however I do everything I can to keep active in the community and also To help me I feel like a commitment to the people I've met here
I mentioned Steem on the Turtlecoin discord a few months back. A couple people asked questions, I answered, and then got flooded with "SCAM! SCAM! SCAM!" until I couldn't talk to anyone. The deck is stacked against Steem, despite the efforts we put in.
そりはしかたはい。
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Hi @acidyo
To be honest, steem is the only platform which I like. Before this I invested in many hyip but unfortunately I lost everything. Then searching about online income introduced me to steemit and I'm quite happy now being a art of steemit.
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Great article. I also think this back end work is so important so that when the next bull run comes and we get a second chance at mass adoption we are ready to take the baton and run with it. So many exciting things happening at the moment but steem seems quieter than ever.
Hi @acidyo!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
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Your rank has improved 4 places in the last three days (old rank 39).
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I haven't fully utilised my time on Steem and have been wasting it away, but I think that if i focused properly on try to engage create worthy content that will help people then I will succeed on this platform.
People from the outside are one of 2 people: Ignorant or Unsure
The ignorant will always hate steem regardless of how well it performs, this is just a fact. Because they belong to a group of people that don't want steem to succeed in the long run.
The Unsure ones are the people that need evidence and facts that Steemit is the path to success and to be fair roping them in with facts is good because they are going to come onto this platform with trust, where they trust that this system will reward them for their hardwork and then they will continue to work even harder than before.
Congratulations @acidyo!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade in the following category:
In addition to the problem of blockades and even persecution by the government of my country for those who earn in other currencies and cryptocurrencies @acidyo. There is fear in getting to show my country what Steemit is and how much it has helped all of us who are from Venezuela and we are here every day, the subject of crime, any criminal who enters a Steemit account I could enter the portfolio and see the money you have there and kidnap you to ask for that money.
Now, the statistics for this month of 1735 active Venezuelan users giving a total profit of 8240 SBD and 8140 SP, if it is thought that we would have to divide them equally those 1735 users among the 8240 SBD we each have approximately 4.7 $ and subtracting the 0.00015 BTC that LBC charges us fees, we have approximately 3.7 $ and when we pass them to our currency we would have 740 Bolívares Soberanos that is the same at 74,000,000 Bolívares fuertes which is the currency we had until 2 months ago. The truth, that amount only reaches to buy 2 kilos of meat, but it is a great help that we have and more for those who have children like me.
BUT, those 3.7 $ 2 months ago would be giving the amount of approximately 40,000,000 Bolivares Fuertes and that was enough to buy more than 4 kilos of meat, but thanks to the conversion and the new currency everything worsened even more. Previously it was enough to live 30 $ and now not even that.
hehehehehe I apologize for the length of my explanation, but when I read these things about my country gives me something of courage what we are going through because of the power cravings of politicians and governments. Finally, hopefully increase that sifra of 1735 Venezuelans active this month and like me and those 1734 Venezuelan brothers we can benefit from this beautiful community and help our family.
A million times grateful to Steemit, @acidyo and many Steemians who have supported me and my Venezuelan brothers.