Theres this guy that is, what you would call, a crypto fanatic from just looking at his twitter feed.
Anyways. Aggroed shared on his blog that theres a guy that will get a tattoo of something from a blockchain card game depending on which game gets the most votes.
If you vote for Steem Monsters and share your vote on @aggroed post
Ill try and keep this short. As you folks already know there is this extremely developed dependence of Crypto on crypto exchanges. This dependence is so perverse that getting listed/unlisted can make or break a crypto project.
And of course, since crypto exchanges arent regulated they completely abuse that fact doing what is basically stealing. Falsely presenting financial information based on which they charge crypto projects disgustingly large fees.
Im not well versed in financial law, but even what they are doing isnt criminal activity, its fraudulent and unethical.
Very simply put:
Out of the top 25 BTC pairs on Coinmarketcap only 2 arent massively inflating volume according to blockchaintransparency.org
Apparently only Binance, Bitfinex and Liquid are legit. How does this fit in with market analysis when there are exchanges that have actual volume at only 1% of reported volume?
1%
Bold italic with the biggest heading.
There is simply no denying that centralized exchanges are parasites that pray on new projects and take advantage of them.
Data suggests that an average project spent over $50,000 in listing fees to exchanges on the advisory list (of blockchaintransparency.org) this year. This totals over $100 million stolen in 2018 via listing fees, with some exchanges making over $1 million from this alone.
If im honest i wouldnt even trust that Binance and Bitfinex arent doing shady things when you look at everyone else. Still, the list (if you decide to trust it. Cant trust nothing nowadays) absolves them.
It simply amazes me that after 10 years of bitcoin we are so dependent on centralized fraudulent institutions. And in crypto of all things. Isnt that something we wanted to escape? Something we are fed up with?
This morning i taken a look at the STEEM price and the Steemitblog account talking about MIRA and such. While ill be dissapointed if the SMT testnet doesnt launch on 15th of March its still nice to see them communicating with the community about what they’re working on.
So i was browsing a bit through CMC and thought it would be a good idea to look into some other blockchains with Dapp building potential.
Things like LISK (39th in MC), Zilliqa (36th in MC), ETC (18th in MC). What i found out is that barely anyone is using any of those blockchains. The projects ive looked at for most part havent updated their websites for months. The social footprint is extremely small. There are probably dozens of blogs on STEEMIT that get more attention and engagement then most of these dapps reddits/telegrams/discords.
It very much showed me that while we always talk about adoption, the market rarely considers it when determining asset value.
So i went to take a look at “State of the Dapps” once again to do a bit of comparison with EOS and ETH and i have to say that for a blockchain that has its problems and has a 30 times smaller MC then EOS and 100 times smaller MC then ETH STEEM is doing extremely well, looking at the user numbers.
I mean just consider STEEM at ETH market cap. 1 STEEM = $46. Which blockchain could compete with STEEM in users then?
With all the issues facing STEEM i just have to acknowledge how incredibly undervalued STEEM is right now. And im someone that will point out every single failure of STEEM.
After that i booted up my Discord (Oh, how i love thee) and went on the discord server of another dapp listing site.
DappRadar.
Was interested in seeing when they might list STEEM or if they even were considering adding STEEM to DappRadar. The mod there was pretty nice, considering how many folks must DM them on the daily basis. lol. Which surprised me honestly.
Why would you want your blockchain added besides EOS/TRON/ETH if your dapp adoption is extremely low? Do you want to show that the most used dapp on your platform of investment choice has 10 daily users? (Just take a look at ETC dapp listing site – dappdirect.net)
This is the response i got to my inquiry.
Of course, this could be just a vague answer, but the:
“We are actively looking into it”
fills me with some hope.
I love Stateofthedapps but i still think DappRadar has more detailed Stats and is used more. Even if you look at the Alexa rankings, DappRadar is placed much higher. 60k vs 150k.
I really think that we need to have STEEM compared to “the big boys” as often as possible, even if we STEEM isnt leading in most categories, to show that what they have at billions of dollars of market cap, STEEM has at 100 mil.
So another Steem monsters season is ending in approx. 8 hours. I think i can honestly say that im slowly starting to lag behind the other players, overall.
Ive probably mentioned it a million and one time already how i go about playing Steem monsters and what my “sale” tactics are.
Unfortunately i knew that i couldnt maintain my gains at the same levels indefinitely with minimal investment in my decks. Last few seasons i would regularly finish at Diamond 1, but i dont think i will manage to reach that rank this time around.
I would even do the dailies at higher ranks then this season which meant fewer cards every day. With all that i had a streak of bad luck this season so i barely managed to sell 10 STEEM worth of cards across both accounts. (Probably the worst ive done so far) And that includes rewards from the previous season end.
Ill try and push up a bit on the ladder to at least increase my rewards a bit for this season although i dont have high hopes pulling anything big. Been having diminishing luck ever since the legendary summoners drop that treated me very well, if i may say. 😛 hehe
Oh and one more thing to add for SM players. If you do pull something tomorrow dont sell it right away. You never sell cards when a large number of them reach player collections. The price drops really low, really fast and bounces back after a day or so. If youre selling, its best to sell after the initial card dump. And yes this IS card advice. 😛
Ill see you folks around and good luck to everyone with the draw.
I busted my butt yesteday with the Dtube review for Oracle-d that turned out to be a bust since the review wasnt “professional” enough. Prolly was a bit too negative now that i think about it. haha No matter!
Today is a new day.
For those of you that have missed it STEEM has been listed on Huobi exchange with a USDT pair. Which is always nice. Thats probably why we are seeing a pump the last day or so.
If id have to guess id say that the exchange might be pumping the price a bit to get some traders hooked on the token early on. Just a guess ofc.
Id love to see STEEM and 0.4$ but its anyones guess if we can sustain the price growth. Usually STEEM drops off pretty fast after a small pump.
But im not a market analyst so im not pretending to know the movement of the market. Im just going off of what ive been seeing lately. Call it anecdotal. 🙂
The best thing about this listing is that we got a Tether/Steem pair. Thats amazing news especially in a volatile bear market when you can easily move your STEEM into a stable coin and alleviate risk easily.
Will i use Huobi?
Probably not, since i find centralized exchanges for most part being in the game of extortion and borderline criminal activity. Having a net negative effect on the crypto ecosystem. I dont deny that we “need them” right now, but that doesnt mean i need to like them.
So… @oracle-d decided to create another task for us Homo Steemiens to write about. You can read more about it here so i dont go on needlessly. LINK: https://steemit.com/social/@dapplovers/review-a-social-dapp-and-earn-rewards-ft-state-of-the-dapps
Theres going to be enough needless text below.
I was deliberating with myself for a while as to which Dapp i should choose for review. Yesterday i reviewed Trybe (EOS) and i found the current state of it, in reviewer terms (or 6th grader terms), to be “blagh”. Few days before that i reviewed the new Whaleshares look. This time i was going to be smart about my pick. Maximize what i could earn from the review by picking a dapp with a ton of Nedelegation that will reward me for being a jolly good sweet talker.. That is why i picked:
Dlive!
oh wait. whoops
No, no. Its Dtube, im picking Dtube.
The youtube of STEEM with a capital “D”. “D”, because you know they’re packing, good ideas.
Anyways… The review, um.
There are a few reasons why i picked Dtube. For one, its one of the most resource intensive projects on the STEEM blockchain that has an extremely ambitious goal of becoming competitive in the global market of video sharing platforms. This is something that i actually think Dtube could achieve.
We have seen time and time again that any video sharing platform that would even try to challenge Youtube would fail tremendously. They would fail for the simple reason of not being to take off because of the magic circle of: Creator-consumer-advertiser.
All 3 need to exist on the platform, for a platform to take off, be sustainable, but unfortunately no other platform could achieve the trifecta no matter how much they would reduce their cut of their revenue.
Dtube is different, not to go into a lot of detail, because it uses the power of the STEEM blockchain. There is no complete dependence on advertiser money and the wealth distribution is such, that while in “legacy markets” the earning potential existed only for the platform+Creator, with STEEM consumer is added to the mix. Monetizing their attention and engagement. But you already know this so lets get into something else. The user experience.
Oh boy.
Content placement.
Ok. If im being completely honest, i have never in my one year using STEEM clicked on Dtubes “Hot/Trending” page. Not one time. And im someone that (from another account) uploaded dozens of videos to Dtube and was using dtube almost daily for 6 months. Still, never once did i look at the trending page. Ill try to explain why that is as simply as i can.
When the content placement depends on vote cast by “1 person + DTube”, then what users of your site are seeing isnt “the wisdom of the crowd” on the trending page but rather the_autovoter_ preferences of a whale and the continuity rewarding tendency of the DTUBE curation team. In a way, there is more centralization in what im being told to watch on Dtube then there is on Youtube.
And this is not something that is hard to change. Dtube has control over how it wants to show its content.
Design.
There is really not much to say here. The design is basic. As i said in the intro, i made a Trybe review yesterday and i pointed out a few things that bothered me. The site itself had some terrible design ideas, was extremely convoluted and it ran poorly. Dtube does not run poorly and is not convoluted, on the contrary, but it does look extremely basic and does a poor job explaining what anything is about.. Take this for example. Dtalk-Push my Dtalk key on Steem.
A person clicking on the Dtalk tab will see this and think:
What is Steem? What is Dtalk? What conversation?
Its very unintuitive and even though you could say that Dtube is early in development, the fact remains that you can always add a few sentences of explanation. That excuse does not hold.
That is something i dont only see with Dtube but rather where ever i look in the crypto space.
Not considering what a new user sees/understands when they are introduced to new information.
I could point out a few other things but its just the same criticism that stems from us forgetting what a new user experiences once they arrive to STEEM.
Mowing lawn!
Folks would probably assume i would talk about the videos that are “gone with the wind” in a few weeks, but theres really nothing to say. @johalfiles (a whale that upvotes Dtube content) a few weeks ago pointed out in the Dtube discord that exact thing and the reply was basically: “It is as it is.”
The problem is that folks dont understand that video hosting is about the most expensive thing there is online. While there are ways for you to keep your videos online indefinitely by running your own IPFS node (my knowledge is limited there) most creators wont know how to do such a thing so providing that service on platform would be a great way for Dtube to gather some funds if they explained whats going on with your videos (when uploading) and provided an easy way for you to keep your videos indefinitely (for a fee) without having to educate yourself on IPFS hosting and every other single thing that has to do with Dtube. The name of the game is not Football, ole ole, we are the champs. The name of the game is: “How to explain complex topics in the simplest of ways”.
There is really not much else to say here. Uploading works pretty well and is about as fast as uploading to Youtube. The video quality is inferior to youtube but you dont really notice it most of the times. When was the last time you used 4k on youtube? Im assuming theres a dtube node somewhere close to Croatia since i have no problems viewing any videos.
At this point the success of Dtube is pretty much dependent on the success of STEEM. The time of the Dapps has not arrived yet and the majority of investment is still going into “infrastructure”.
Example: Projects like LISK are 38th in market cap (10 above STEEM) and i dont think there is a single person using any of their dapps. _I looked into it._ Once the market matures im certain that many projects that arent driven by hype but rather user numbers will start getting a lot of attention from investors, Dtube among them. The focus will eventually shift towards “what has real world application and what do users want” instead of
“i got this cool idea!”
Substratum had a cool idea.
And thats about it for this review. Thought i should mix it up a bit.
I think we need to be realistic at all times. We hype up everything and partake in tribal behavior without ever taking an objective look at the limitations and the potential of a project. Realizing the limitations and potential is extremely important in cases like this. @ned dropped a million STEEM delegation on Dtube.
Was that foolish?
No. Because i dont think Ned saw Dtube “changing the world”. He saw that small advantage i talked about in the beginning existing that could make Dtube a “contender”.
Dtube cant re-invent the wheel but it sure can rock the boat.
Conclusion
I give Dtube a rating of π/fleml. Read what i actually think. lol.
And there you have it folks. Let me know what you think. Was i too harsh, was i not harsh enough. Ill take it on the chin.
Few days ago @anotherjoe pointed me towards Trybe as another site where i could post my stuff and do all the fine things you do on sites similar to this. I say “sites similar to this” because today i read a comment made by @officialfuzzy on Whaleshares that said this:
p.s. you will not find blogs from me on this site (Whaleshares) as it is not a blogging platform in the end vision. once we are out of beta people will understand.
After that comment i went on to read the Whaleshares whitepaper and i still didnt see Whaleshares being something more then a social media blogging platform. But! Since Fuzzy wrote that, i will henceforth use the adjective “similar” to describe what im talking about as to stop myself from being wrong and lacking in understanding. lol.
Anyways…
I tried out Trybe and right off the bat i ran into a number of things that annoyed me. There were art assets overlapping, the screen load was choppy and parts of the window would move up and down for no reason. The page never loads all at once but rather in parts.
Two screenshots of the same page 2 seconds in-between. Art asset placement seems very different.
Looking at the initial screen and menus, everything seemed extremely convoluted and instead of me being able to find my blog right away, they placed “job board” on the front page and your blog link is placed somewhere inside the side menu. The right side menu, not the left one.
Even when you get to your blog page theres more clickable links and windows that you can watch slowly load by clicking them. Everything is just too large and hard to navigate and theres at least 40% clickable links that shouldnt even be there that are simply cluttering the UI.
Did i say how annoyingly slowly the pages load? They even change color when they load lol.
Want to see some more dumb design decision?
Here you go
Which designer (and mind you the site hardly looks like its in a alpha state) thought it would be a good idea to have so much spacing between comments that only two 10 word comments fit on my whole screen? You can literally park a bus in the space between those two comments…
Actual bus caught parked in the Trybe comment section.
Even making a post feels strange. Theres a review process so you always feel like someone is watching. The always present support window doesnt help with that feeling. I dunno, i just dont feel comfortable writing there.
When you do post, your post can be found in 3 states. Published, in review, draft. Click and wait through more page loads to find where you post is at. I counted.. Takes me about 3 seconds to load and i have super fast internet.
There are some rules to follow and im assuming they check the content before allowing you to post something. Hello censorship!(im tempted to try and see the limit of what youre allowed to write about.) You have to meet the 300 word minimum requirement and you have to put a featured image or they reject the post. Why they couldnt simply automate that the text cant be posted if those two requirements werent met so i dont have to wait for the review, is beyond me. I guess they dont want unwanted content on their site.
Browsing content itself is unintuitive as and of course its tied into the slow page loading time so i didnt even bother trying.
And there you have it. Pretty disappointing experience i probably wont repeat.
PS: Im not someone that will speak negatively about a platform because i might hold STEEM or WLS instead of EOS. I would have very much wanted Trybe to be another place to post on and learn new stuff but unfortunately the user experience is simply bad.
Lately i have been having trouble keeping my voting power from draining fast. At one point i dropped to under 60%. You work hard to build up your few cents never to see your full vote drop.
I was supporting a few folks via SteemVoter that post multiple times a day and my VP was falling rapidly.
I tweaked a few things and i seem to be recovering my VP slowly. The problem is that i cant know for sure how many times someone will post a day so i would love to see @steemvoter / @buildteam add an option of being able to choose how many times a day my vote goes out.
That would allow much more customization and a better experience overall.
Maybe you want to vote someone always 100% no matter what. Great. Maybe you want to vote someone 2 times a day for 100%. 4 times a day at 50%.
An option like that would allow us to have more control over our voting power and that is something that i would most definitely like to see.
You could even monetize added functions like this. Provide the basic service to everyone for free, but charge a few Steem a month for a more customized experience.
Im a relatively small account and my curation is just a small part of my income here, but im sure there are large curator accounts that would love having a higher level of customization and would probably pay for it. The feature i mentioned is just one among few that could be added to the payed package.
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