100 Steem Bounty: What is the solution to a lack of SMT development?
So now that we know that SMTs may not come at all or maybe in a limited way, my question really is: what do we do if we need SMTs but they are not coming.
I see the following possible solutions:
1. Development Fund
Steem rallies and comes up with a way to pay for operations and development. This would require some type of fund that can pay for developments and a way to distributes such funds. They could then be used to pay for teams to built certain things. I could see this work with a HF that distributes some of the inflation money for development and a way for SP holders to vote on who shall receive the funds for what projects.
This decentralized way of doing things may lack leadership and not work for truly big development tasks such as SMT's.
A better way may be that the witnesses suggest a distribution of funds for a project that then gets approved or rejected by other stakeholders i.e. by requiring a x% of approval vote.
2. Other blockchain
Use some other blockchain token in conjunction with steem? I can imagine that if you were to run a project on steem and wanted to have a token with it, to simply use a different blockchain and manage the token in parallel. I can see how this may cause some technical issues because we now need two blockchains that understand each other. This could be done via a centralized party in between, that may work for many projects. Maybe there is some
3. What way do you see?
I would love to know your opinion especially if you are running or had planned to run a project on top of steem.
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Adding another blockchain to the equation can complicate things way too much.Working with Byteball or possibly for interoperability is cool. If it's like news sites embedding Twitter/Instagram links onto their pages and news sites sharing their content over social media, that's great. But if they start depending on each other too much, that will add too much complexity, moving parts and more things to understand for the DAPP builders.
As per one of the polls I had on dpoll, taking beneficiaries or having few ads is the preferred method.Some have expressed that theyare simply happy about Steemit Inc self voting themselves for funding purposes. @steemchiller is already using this method to fund steemworld.org
Steemit Inc is also in a position to pull off something like what Brave/BAT is trying to do. I first bought this up regarding @dlike https://steemit.com/dlike/@vimukthi/will-dlike-replace-voting-bots-in-future-a-modest-proposal-for-rewarding-content-discovery-and-incentivized-curation Steemit could ask users to opt in for ads and share 10%-20% of their ad revenue with users. Steemit.com Alexa rank is at 3,790 and in South Korea it is at 569. This is much higher than most crypto news outlets. Steemit can also vet for the quality of the ads creating a high quality ad ecosystem.
They will gain their revenue in fiat. So there won't be any added sell pressure on STEEM. Revenue sharing with STEEM users would mean:
You might find this interesting: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@bobinson/use-cases-for-steem-blockchain
@dragosroua made a post saying that we could be seeing a demo version of SMTs between 3 and 6 weeks. Let's hope this will actually happen.
@steemmonsters have shown that we can do a lot on STEEM without SMTs or even smart contracts. There are some other great projects around too. This may seem like a crazy idea. But a slightly re-designed UI and a solid marketing campaign could help both the short term price and long term user base and business interest. Even stupid rebradings have created lots of hype in some projects. I don't think our marketing message is loud or aggressive enough. Nobody really talks about STEEM outside of STEEM. Steemit Inc should try to fix this.
I think it would be good for steemit to actually take some beneficiary fee, as this would allow others skins to compete with steemit and a better UI to evolve ultimately.
To me not taking beneficiaries and minimalism are the two main selling points of Steemit.com for me. Even 10% beneficiaries would only mean a small portion of the reward pool as @akomoajong mentioned. But I do agree with the UI competition thing. Most people just use Steemit because they are just used to it like how people use Google for their searches.
I think it is hard to conpete with steem ui because what is the business model. If you can have some of the rewards then there is a model.
So i think this could create income for steemit and strengthen the ecosystem by creating better UIs
I totally agree with your points 💯 but I will choose having ads over taking beneficiaries because the beneficiaries wouldn't yield income with the current low prices of Steem.
Yeah, Steemmonsters too another great influence. We need more of such initiatives.
Thumbs up man!
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Hello good afternoon Steem-bounty I still do not understand very well how is the process of profit with you vote as Witnesses. and I will be supporting what they bring to offer to the Steemit community regarding the rewards of steem I also wanted to carry out a project on this platform, it really lacks a lot of support from the community but I think specifically I am pointing my finger with you the steem and according to that in steemit they reward contents that are not original but little by little it is seen that they only have skills for competitions to win steem easily and not to undertake in the life of the steem. I'll be glad to read them.
Because I don't feel that SMT's are going to be the end all be all anyways and only offer support to a very limited amount of use cases based on the white paper my current project has decided that we are going with issuing our own coin on another network. We will sort of be doing what you are suggesting with #2, but not exactly.
Currently the biggest issue is everyone wanting to use the reward pool to fund their little projects is a real issue. To much of the reward pool is needed to fund these apps and more apps added ends up spreading the pool to thin. Even at $3 steem it's still an issue as the developers need fiat to pay the bills and will create constant downward pressure on Steem. With this in mind I started trying to come up with a solution.
I am in the process of working on something that will not pull from the rewards pool in the least, but instead add value to the blockchain by bringing in outside fiat on what I imagine will be a daily basis. All bills will be paid from our fiat revenue and no need for steem for funding. This will be a real live company that will also lives outside of steemit, but use Steem as a payment option for those who want to earn Steem. The other option will be our own coin, but as that coin will be treated as a stable coin I'm guessing that many people will opt for Steem for the upside potential. These coins will need to be purchased by the company to then pay those who earn them.
A key point is this will live outside of steem and attract new people to Steem. People who never before owned steem will be exposed to free lighting fast transactions. This should help bring in new users to Steemit and more important for value new holders of Steem.
Not going into to much detail on purpose, but giving enough to hopefully let you know there are things in the works that can potentially be game changers for Steem and it's purely about Steem being a currency without worrying about the reward pool in the least.
This is a flawed circular argument. If STEEM is at $3 that means that buying support is in balance with selling pressure at that price.
Regardless of who gets it, a lot of the reward funds get sold. It really doesn't matter, in terms of selling pressure, whether that is developers or bloggers. If people think that developers getting reward funds is the best way to make Steem increase in value then it should be done. Let traders worry about selling pressure, which will happen anyway.
The biggest issue right now is that the reward pool is dysfunctional and a huge and increasing portion of it is going to nothing but SP holders voting for self-enrichment.
Trust me I get the economics that are required to reach $3 and how that would include the selling pressure from app devs. But there is no question that app devs that are relying on income from the reward pool to pay the bills will always be pulling value from the system. We need cash to flow into the system each day just to stay even due to the inflation and reward pool.
With an approach that allows for outside money to flow into Steem and Steemit there can be real value growth.
I'm all for outside money flowing in. But you missed the point I was making. As long as we have a reward pool that is usually turning into selling pressure we might as well give to devs who create selling pressure and add value by building a better ecosystem rather than give it to people who create selling pressure without building a better anything.
This is what I dispute. If there is a reward pool then the selling aka 'pulling value' happens regardless. It doesn't only happen when you award the money to devs.
If your proposal is to shut off the reward pool in connection with some other changes to improve the overall economics, I'm open to looking at that.
We have ventured way off topic here. But in terms of outflow of steem creating downward pressure on the markets I'd be really curious to see where it's coming from. I'd guess there is way more downward pressure from those running apps trying to pay the bills then from individuals who currently are trying hard to power up before the next run in price.
When you have to pay bills with the reward pool money each week you will be selling no matter the price to cover those bills. As the price has dropped the required amount of selling pressure has increased as it's constant in terms of dollar amount needed to pay the bills.
Next you need to look at the upward pressure created by the devs and individuals. Who do you think buys and powers up more steem over the last 90 days. Also would love to know that.
Wonder if someone that is good at pulling data can figure that out.
Anyways I believe that by allowing more accounts to grow faster we would be far better off then subsidizing apps with very little user base.
Problem is the key point to any social media site is that the People are the Value. All the apps in the world mean nothing without users. So those people that you feel aren't building a better anything...they really don't need to as they are building a better steemit just by being active (assuming they aren't content thieves, spammers, or scammers). If people want steemit to become mainstream they need to get over the idea that posts need to be amazing long form content, it's not what people want to produce or consume. If long form content was what people wanted twitter, Instagram, facebook, and all of the other social media sites out there would look a whole lot different.
Definitely not in favor of that.
The actual value of an individual social media user is quite low. For example, last I looked Facebook generates revenue of about $40 per user per year. So yes, I think it is reasonable to pay people just for being active, but not unlimited amounts. In fact on Steem a very large portion of the reward pool goes to a small portion of users. Most of them are not building anything of enduring value, and they are being grossly overpaid for being active.
Yes that describes a lot of them in broad terms. Or simply overpaid.
I certainly did that a long time ago. In fact I never believed it.
I think you and I are on the same page. Just about the wording more then anything. Everything you just wrote I'm in complete agreement with.
Not looking for people to be over compensated, but feel many times the wrong people are being compensated.
We do need to figure out how to let new accounts come online and actually function. I run @pifc and we do a weekly curation contest (week 35 now) and it needs to be people who are reputation score 55 or under that get featured. So we see a lot of newbies come and go...and see the issues they deal with. RC's have really messed with the ability of a new person to actually use steemit.
Some have speculated that there will be pools for RC's down the road where a community can allow it's members access to the use of the RCs it has to help smaller members function. This would be great if it happens as any account with over 500sp probably never needs all of their RC's and they go to waste.
There has actually been some development on the RC pools, so it is a little more than speculation, but I have no idea if or when it will be completed and released.
I'm aware of the comment thread that follows between you and @thedarkhorse. Though I'd like to butt in and give my crypto-newbie opinion if that's at all considered.
It sounds like we're taking the assumption of "just sell it in the exchange" for granted. Has the possibility of using Steem/SBD as a medium of exchange been totally scrapped in the zeitgeist of major Steem holders?
What if I one day offers a fiverr-type service to be paid in Steem and only steem, would that sound positive or laughable?
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Not laughable at all. If a fiverr-type service that used Steem as its currency got big enough that would be great. In essence that's what all the Steem-based apps are trying to do in their own ways.
I daydream about people using Steem/SBD (maybe not SBD yet until it's a properly functioning stablecoin) for real-world interaction. While I'm code illiterate, I still want to find ways to make myself useful to Steem not just as a hodler. Otherwise the thought of "Steem is only valuable by selling on exchanges" is depressing af.
I couldn't agree more. The mechanism of incentivizing search for good content via the prediction game + curation rewards never really worked. Very small fraction of (arguably) good content gets rewarded, which in turn makes looking for it unprofitable. We at Steeve are trying to change that.
Here we described how. What do you think about this approach?
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
I welcome new tools and initiatives but I don't think most of this issue can be addressed without changing the core incentivization model that is built into the blockchain.
Why is that? Where do you think is the problem with curation or what do you think would have to change?
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
The incentives for self-voting and vote selling are too strong. Without addressing this, much of the inflation as 'wasted' and we end up with the perceptional and market disadvantages of high inflation without the benefits of a large treasury going to uses that actually help improve and grow Steem. Community initiatives (that I've seen so far) can only address this to a relatively small extent around the edges but don't get at the core issue.
You're right, self-voting incentives are too high and it's a big problem. On the other hand, curation never really worked even before the introduction of linear reward curve and consequent spread of self-voting.
So even fixing this wouldn't fix curation. For that, I argue, you need 1) better content discovery, so that people are able to actually find the good content even from unknown authors - this is a necessary condition for curation which has never been satisfied on Steem. Without it it's just circle jerking of known authors who have no competition and thus no incentive to continue writing good content 2) start rewarding the good content, not just good authors - this will incentivize both the creation and curation.
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Introducing linear isn't the only reason for self-voting and vote-selling. In fact incentives for high stake accounts or for methods of paying to concentrate votes were even higher under n^2. Making the payouts linear flattened the incentives but it really only did so by moving the too-high incentives from one group to another. They remain too high, but perhaps in a somewhat more fair manner (i.e. too high for everyone).
There have always been methods of finding valuable contributions, such as sincere efforts by large curation guilds, paid curators, and individual stakeholders interested in doing it. Maybe these would break down and/or need to evolve if the volume increased say another order of magnitude or more, but that has never been the issue we have seen in practice. It still does no good if the incentives don't support finding and sending rewards there once it is found, and they mostly don't.
The only method I know of that could possibly address the incentive issues (outside of a complete structural redesign) is strengthening and normalizing downvotes. You can't usefully downvote yourself and you can't really concentrate the rewards with them either. It is a bit like giving an executive a line-item veto but not the ability to spend money on his or her own. I can't say for sure it would work but it at least has a chance. There is a good deal of opposition though (in part because the 'normalizing' part requires a painful shift in cultural norms).
Unless we can try something (arguably) radical I don't really see curation having much of a future on Steem. Hopefully Steem can evolve into something else useful, like a neutral substrate blockchain for communities and tokens with their own methods of distribution.
Well, I think you have made cited out brilliant ideas but below are my points and suggestions;
I had been thinking that maybe Steem Inc should consider implementing a cut on payouts rather than implementing ads (which is the suggestion of many) but I have come to realize that Steem seems to be a dead bead at the moment and would not generate much income that is needed. So, maybe ads might helpful and preferable.
Moreover, Ned did transfer all his Steem holdings to an exchange, I think bittrex. I am kind of wondering the fate of that huge amount of money presently.
Also, With some witnesses already talking about disabling their witness thread due high cost of operations and maintenance, I feel it is time to make some adjustments to the rewards for witnesses located outside top 20. As an example @fbslo did complain with this post
Talking about a consensus voting on which project to support and how much money to be allocated to a project sounds a brilliant idea and might be for those who are running a project or those who plan to run a project on the steem blockchain. I think Ned and Steemit Inc cannot accept to be part of this because they might feel hard done if their project is not approved. Taking his project "Destiny" as an example, he is yet to reveal what it is all about and how he plans to go about it.
Moreover, when you mentioned other blockchain, Tron comes to my mind and this is definitely because of the recent Twitter blast. I cannot my place my hands on how Steem can operate in conjunction with another blockchains without having disruptive problems in future. But if all this is possible, this might just be a perfect solution to this SMT stories.
Thank you for this opportunity to express myself.
I am in the same boat as a witness that cost me $200 a month and generates less than $30 a month.
Oh! That's bad and yeah you (@steem-bounty) occupy one of my slots.
Also, I stumbled on this article and I think it will interest you based on the purpose of this post.
https://steemit.com/steem/@daan/seriously-considering-leaving-steemit-reaction-to-ned-s-responses-to-paulag
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I don't think you necessarily need a separate blockchain in conjunction in parallel with Steem while you wait for SMT. With the recent announcement, I am currently working under the assumption that SMTs will show up eventually. I guess we'll just have to wait until January to figure out if SMTs are just empty promises.
Assuming SMTs are coming, then a simple database level tracking of each Steemit's users tokens can work. Obviously, the trust will have to be there since we'll have a lot less visibility into what is happening behind the scenes of these tokens or what will happen upon SMT conversion. A couple of examples of systems already using this are Actifit.io and Partiko. Both have an internal token tracking system without an attached blockchain. Both tokens don't directly have value, but provide some type of benefit to users. Actifit's "tokens" seem to be factored into individual votes while Partiko's can be spent to get upvotes on a post. I feel investing in separate block chains at this point would be a poor choice for the limited time. If SMTs get put off indefinitely, then the whole block chain is probably in trouble.
I know it's probably not the most exciting solution, but the intermediate step of tracking tokens and waiting for SMT to come online seems like the safest choice.
@fulltimegeek has just posted that he has a solution.
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Dear @knircky, the situation in Steemit is total confusion and after @ned say they are firing 70% of workers the Steem price is continuosly falling down. With such price it is very appetible to buy some, but the main problem is that @ned is making a lot of shit to the community with his behaviour. People like you, @crypto.piotr and many others are trying to make Steemit better, but if there will be no a connection between whales like you to try to convince @ned to sell Steemit to someone who can drive it better, we will be destined to loose all our saving. I hope you can do something with some your friend to avoid it...:(((
Hi @intellihandling
As always very supportive! :) I cant wait to get to know you in person buddy (ps . what is your real name?)
It's very kind that you mentioned my name. Appreciate.
Have a great weekend ahead,
Yours
Piotr
Dear Piotr, my name is Marco!
I support you because you became a member of @steem-bounty family and because i like what you are doing for Steemit, of course when you will be in Poland somehow we will meet...:)))
I know we will @intellihandling :)
I can't wait to get to know you in person.
I think there should be a split in the rewards pool at some % which is specifically divided into three parts-developers,advertising and then comes stake holders, incentives and blah blah blah.
I always feel that any company or project cannot succeed without advertising. I accept it that the rewards pool should be much more minute than the other two but just tell me how often do you come across advertisements while browsing or watching videos. Really rare or mostly never except some shit ICOs and some good ones as well. I think a temporary referral system will also be helpful. If you think advertising companies don't like it. The point is we need more roots to the Steem ecosystem. Yep it is true people add value to the ecosystem. No need to connect to other side chains and stuff. We also have to help developers by opening up a donation dApp. @knircky has created Steem-bounty to increase interaction just like that we need something through which we can directly donate to developers and I also wish developers can be helped in promoting their posts so that they get the whole support and also criticism from Steemians about a project. I think increasing the payout period from 7 to 10 or 12 will help cut down Steem outflow. These were my opinions. I welcome criticisms and appreciations equally. Thank you!
Bi
So ... @ned doesn't want to spend the bank on SMT development ...
but a lot of us Steemians want it ... and would benefit from it ...
do you think @ned would be mad if we just got it done??? He would benefit from it too...
Aren't there a bunch of devs on the platform ... and a bunch of whales?
Couldn't we just use @fundition to raise money ... ??
Step 0: Create group of individuals passionate/committed about creating SMT's ( ... Council of Elrond style)
Step 1: Create framework for dev. of SMT's
Step 2: Define cost basis for creation
Step 3: Launch crowdfunding campaign w/ checkpoints based on dev. milestones
Step 4: Crush it??
Now ... I'm not a dev ... so I have no idea how complex this would actually be ... however I can assume that there are a semi-fixed number of steps between now and having SMT's on the blockchain. I also know that there are a lot of people that want to see SMT's happen for various reasons. I can then safely assume that there are potential future scenarios where we successfully work together to accomplish said goal.
Why don't we try it?? I'll throw some Steem and labor hours.
Plus ... if we accomplish it we will all make a lot of money and then we can throw a big party!! Boat's and hos for all!!!!
Lol I kind of wonder the fate of the huge amount of Steem he transferred to an exchange with message "hiding my Steem from public view" lol
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did ned do that?
Why would you need SMTs if they don’t yet exist? Why are projects making plans for SMTs when 1) they have not been created and 2) they have not been approved by witnesses?
I’ve seen people claiming to have one of the “first SMTs” since they were announced well over a year ago. It’s just not smart to plan a project around them when we have no actual reliable info about what they’ll do and we’re relying on them being delivered by a company that consistently fails to deliver.
And in my opinion, SMTs are not needed and will in fact do more harm than good. There are bigger problems that need to be corrected instead of fixating on ICO hype that peaked a year ago. I think it’s time to give up the pipe dream and move on to more practical things.
While on the one hand I like the potential upside of SMT's. This is also a good point. If magically SMT's were released tomorrow in all their glory, the only thing we'd be depending on still is hype. There wouldn't be some sudden inflow of EARNED cash. People would still need to then build solid and stable businesses which if they REALLY wanted to and had the ability to, they could do right now with STEEM.
I think people have convinced themselves that SMT's are the second coming of STEEM, but I think we might be better off just focusing on creating a coherent user experience that can be sustained and maybe I dunno...earns some money?
What a novel concept! To use the Steem currencies and blockchain to build things instead of trying to cash in on ICO hype from last year!
Where do I sign up?