Steemit.com has been updated, and its a big one!
Because it's open source we can see the details of pull request #460 on github :
Here's a tour of some of the changes that I found most interesting in this update.
304 phone verfication and sign up flow refactoring
This is desperately needed to stop the mass abuse of the "free" facebook and reddit account registrations, just last week I saw someone offering up to 30k accounts for a dollar each..
These changes only apply to new registrations - if you want an anonymous/pseudonymous account you can always purchase an account fairly with btc or ltc from witness @someguy123 's anonsteem .
Email verification
Phone verification
223 Transfer to savings
Both your liquid steem and steem backed dollars can choose to enable a 3 day delay on withdrawals - so you can recover your account before anything gets stolen.
See more info about this change on github
Access via your wallet page:
Select either steem or steem dollars, and select "Transfer to Savings" .
Done! Your savings balance will immediately appear.
Withdrawals are simple , and you can cancel them on the same page
I will do more updates to steemviz in the coming days to display these nicely (piggy banks icon ?)
For now you can see savings deposits/withdrawals (or any other unrecognised transaction) via your browsers developer console whilst using steemviz.
262 Update payout options
This update allows you to choose 3 payout options when creating a post
- Power up 100% - Get paid completely in Steem Power
- Default (50%/50%) - Get paid half liquid steem/sdb , half Steem Power
- Decline payout - Refuse author rewards completely
I plan to alternate between Power up 100% and the default - this post is 50%/50% .
I'm grateful for the option to decline payout, and would like to see some of our largest users and official accounts use it where appropriate.
These are just some of the latest changes, be sure to check github for more information or to get involved in helping develop the site.
Email verification is worthless: it's trivial to create fake email accounts. Bot checking is not very effective as many click farms are operated as sweat shops off China with cheap labor . The phone verification was the absolute basic requirement to (somewhat) contain the click farm abuse and should have been there since day-1 but even that won't stop click farms: Facebook already has phone verification, and that doesn't stop click farms from farming hundreds of thousands of accounts because they buy SIM cards wholesale on the blackmarket and swap SIM cards between account creations. At best, this creates a fixed cost in time and resources: there are only that many SIM cards that can be swapped in a day of work, and it still has a cost to buy these SIM cards wholesale, so click farms will probably use all that they already have but may not buy more just to abuse Steem, at least not at the current growth level which buys some time.
Anyway, all that and much more was already discussed with @ned 6 months ago. Good to see that Steemit finally figures the hard way what they could have realized a long time ago by simply taking into account early advice.
Next thing you'll realize is that all the "good" (at this rate, it will soon include everything remotely pronounceable in english) have been taken already including every Fortune 500 companies, every media outlet, every celebrity, every crypto company and exchange, and top 1000 twitter posters etc. I told @ned to reserve these when it was clear that names were being squatted, but that was just shrugged off like everything else. Now you'll either have to expropriate the name holders and see the large libertarian and anarchist user base flee, impose a minimum reputation requirement to holding a "premium" account, or tell interested companies that they'll have to make do with "google123" and "amazonsteemit". Such a pity that something that would have been trivial and painless in the early days becomes such a pain later on when all it would have taken to avoid it was being a bit more proactive and receptive to feedback.
Sad but possibly true.. The namesquatting is out of control but at least this is a step in the right direction :)
In most countries anonymity is completely lost after providing phone number.
Hmm, that's a good point, I wonder how phone numbers are actually stored? As it's sensitive personal data, it would make sense to encrypt it and just store some hashed version of it that couldn't be reverse engineered from the blockchain. And the only valid use for it should be limited to blocking multiple account creation attempts.
Oops something is wrong after upgrade, I could not edit my comment. I just wanted to add that since pseudonymous accounts are mined by witnesses what will stop the gpu miner to mine another 30k if needed?
I don't think that is really the problem they are trying to solve. The phone authentication is just for the Steemit.com signups where the user gets free Steem in their account for signing up. If users want to create multiple accounts through mining, AnonSteem, or some other means that doesn't use the free Steem, they are still welcome to do so.
Unfortunate but true - I'm not sure how else we can keep giving away accounts with preloaded value without it being abused otherwise. Anonymous is still an option if you mine or purchase the account with anonsteem - but these don't drain the faucet in exchange for fake facebook accounts
could change downvoted? with one people that check the flag, your post could disappear, even 8 peoples likes it, maybe likes less dislikes is better.
So when you decline payout, is it burned or does it go to curators?
Under what situations do you think it would be most appropriate to decline payout?
The author rewards never get created in the first place because theres no reward shares, but it does seem like curation rewards still apply at least on this post .. I'm not sure how this will be used yet, it'll be interesting to watch
Austinbank i really like some new updates but i am facing a problem before updates i can switch markdown to editor when i am writing my post but now i can't switch markdown to editor.
Sorry mate not sure what to suggest I haven't seen that issue yet..
I've noticed this too. I suspect it is a glitch. I'll report it when I get home tonight, if it is not already fixed by then.
Thanks for bringing these changes to our attention! I'm happy to see the web site continues to evolve at a decent pace, and these are all great changes. The phone verification is particularly important to stop account sign-up spam. The decline payout option seems like a mere band-aid though; can't imagine many whales voluntarily making use of this, but I guess we'll see. It might make more sense to have a "if you have more than X Steem Power, then your posting rewards will be diminished by Y percent" rule. That way, posting rewards will go down past a certain point encouraging whales to focus more on curation.
Thanks for the comment, I agree on the first 2 points but I feel that rule change would encourage more sockpuppet accounts instead..
I've had some thoughts to encourage both curation and the use of the 100% SP option but it really needs a full post to explain how it would work, its on the to-do list :)
Wouldn't sock puppet accounts be avoided by the fact that Steem Power is not transferable? A whale looking to divide his holdings into multiple accounts would first have to power down into liquid Steem. New whales I suppose could set up multiple accounts from the start if they have really deep pockets (presumably they could buy plenty of burner phones to get around the phone number validation as well).
Looking forward to seeing your more in-depth thoughts on how to encourage curation, etc.
The main purpose for this is so that when @dantheman, @ned, etc. create posts that are official Steemit communication, that they don't take from the reward pool when the post gets a lot of votes. Some witnesses may use it to if they feel that their efforts are getting sufficiently rewarded through witnesses pay, and don't need to double dip and also get paid through their post.
It is possible that some altruistic whales might choose to do it too, but I agree tthat this probably won't happen very often.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing comes into play here. Let's hope the Powers That Be use it wisely!
Excellent information, thanks.
I'm glad you pointed out the savings and decline completely options.
upvote
Please don't spam unrelated links ..:)Another one, my steemit now looks like this ;)
Not that I am complaining as I am used to Links... ;-) Anyway, good job on the update, thanks for the post.
Aaha oops css fail :P Thanks!
Deleted.
You went from thinking it was a good article that you were sharing around to just deleting everything and unvoting .. Did I miss something here ?
Cant un-resteem it at least :)
@ausbitbank.
Don't worry, i am doing some cleaning with my posts, not only here.
Sometimes, I don't like my own posts!
Nothing to do with your post.
Beside that, i don't understand all of it but what i saw in your post sounded right to me as an humble Steemit user.
You are still on top of our blog resteemed.
:))
See you!
testiclepants?!? ROFLMAO
I'm a bit confused about the Decline Payout option.
If people are upvoting the blog and they're declining payout, where does it go? I'll admit I haven't read GitHub about that particular change, but if it's going to a null account then what's the point? Might that be an option that "magically" appears once an account reaches a certain amount of vests, kind of like my ridiculous little vote slider? (which is another option that's useless to minnows IMHO).
lol just checking who's paying attention :P
I think if you decline payout it just never allocates any reward shares to the post, so nothing really goes anywhere. I would like to see confirmation that voting on a "decline payout" post doesn't waste any vote strength but I'm not sure.. You're right, some things should just be hidden until they're more likely to be used, or make the vote sliders and extra payout choices hideable at least.
As for the point - I'd like to be able to vote up and acknowledge I've read certain posts from whales, but I don't think they need even more of the rewards pie. @steemitblog I think should refuse all payouts as an official steemit inc account..
Thanks for posting this mate. I really like these updates. Especially phone verification for new accounts. Like you said, the decline payment would be really good for the Steemitblog account and maybe other announcements from Steemit HQ etc. I wonder if curation rewards are still paid out in those instances? And would the reward amount be showing next to the post?
It looks like curation rewards do still pay out, and no amount reward shows to be able to judge potential curation rewards at the moment .. but we'll know more in ~20hrs or so - see my comment here
Thank You!!!
Great post thanks for the update.
Great post man, thank you! One question, do your SBD still collect interest when held in the savings account?
Thanks! Good question..
The steeminterest thread from 2 weeks ago had this explanation from @bitcalm :
With that in mind, I'm not sure if transactions to your regular account address would trigger the SBD interest, or if you would need to add a micropayment to savings regularly to trigger it ..
But I'll be sure to experiment for science and find out now I have some funds again , thanks for the vote and resteem @ned and everyone :D
Awesome, looking forward to all those especially 304. The amount of extra accounts is out of control! Lmao. But seriously these all look excellent to myself.
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good job guys 8]
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Hi @ausbitbank, I just stopped back to let you know your post was one of my favourite reads today/yesterday and I included it in my Steemit Ramble. You can read what I wrote about your post here.
Thanks mate :)
This is really good info. I'm glad to see the phone number being used...
Great post, Steemit is seriously missing an FAQ or and update link on the right hand side bar with all the other links. Thank you for being the detailed informer on these changes for the time being, until steemit has a better way of relaying this information. Upvoted and followed ^_^
Really Great post and step. But if you can vote our post. We can earn some money for hard working post :)
This is good news for the platform. I wonder how significant it will be for the sell pressure on STEEM.