Its been a long time coming and the recent wipe of my armies really made it clear that i should just stop with wasting my time.
From day 1 i knew what was going to happen but that doesnt really matter now. A lot of time has passed and the drama has died down. Maybe it was actually drama that kept me playing?
At this point its getting old. The game itself is boring, there is no earning potential any more. Future tokens are worth a fraction of a cent and the mechanics are still dumb. I earned a few steem when steem was being payed out and im happy with that. Im done with Drug Wars, feel free to farm. :
Whats happening with games on Steem is actually a sad sight. Really, at this point only Steem Monsters holds my interest.
Even Next Colony seems like it will end badly. Something i had high hopes for and they rushed out a product that isnt really even a game.
All you do is restart timers on word rows.
Its silly, tedious and its dumb. Id wager there is more work and thought put into those textual RPGs made in the 80s then these two games.
We need to stop rewarding this silliness.
DEVS WILL SAVE US!
No they fucking wont. Not these devs at least. Our main dev team is of questionable talent and you think Highcloud, or whatever his name is will take STEEM mainstream? No.
I know no one gives a fuck and most of people out there are either brownosing, circle jerking, vote selling…. But if there are any sane people out there, stop throwing money at anything and everything that is new and makes bold promises.
Im starting to feel like i should round up everyone, line them up in a row and do a slap-by. Might actually do it the next STEEMFEST. haha
Anyways.. Keep on… dunno… Drinking the kool-aid, i guess.
I did not post anything today till now… I was preparing my typical Crypto Market report while curating and commenting some posts of my feed… But suddenly I saw some good articles written by succeed steemians I followed which were getting just a few upvotes in comparison with the usual amount they get…
Suddenly I realized that something was going wrong with Steemauto and I had a look at its Discord Channel to better understand…
Actually what happened is that Steemauto stopped wrongly for a couple of hours lately today and there was an steemian at the channel that was informing about. As soon as he did that action, @mahdiyari replied immediately.
In about 30 minutes, @mahdiyari fixed the problem and inform at the discord app.
Apparently there was a “Database problem” and all delayed upvotes, more than 30000, will be eventually processed…
Yes, you dir read well…
30000 automatic upvotes delayed !!!
That’s a lot of automatic work…
While I am an active curator I am also a user of Steemauto, I think is one of the best tools at the steem blockchain despite there are others in permanent development that seems are offering better performance right now ( Steemrewarding from @holger80 is one of them) .
In top of enhancing part of my Curation actions and earnings, Steemauto simply helps me to support effectively my followers… It is not weird that my account would upvote you before I will read your post, but do not worry, normally I read your posts and I used to interact later on with you, when I have more time… On that sense, I am a Steemauto-dependant 🙂 …
On regards @mahdiyari , as the majority of the witnesses out of the 20 first, he tries to keep running his never-failed node by powering-down the earned SP… I am sure that If he was closer to the top 20 witnesses he would not have been forced to do so…
The question is why excellent developers and good steemians totally committed to the project cannot manage to be within the top 20… In my opinion on regards @mahdiyari, any user of steemauto should vote this guy for witness and support him as much as possible. People like him supports and fixes in any condition the Steem Blockchain, sometimes by getting very little as an income of the provided work.
Again, I request you to consider @mahdiyari as witness…
*Reminder: if you feel like not having time to do a proper analysis and still think that mine is fair , you can also choose me as your proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Just, keep using your witness votes doing an important work.
This week has been a weird one. I did not find new steemians to follow, however it is true I couldn’t dedicate my time this week on a more intensive research.
I am really satisfied for having found @mrhill last week, he is posting almost every day and from time to time he writes very good stuff about Running topics as for instance this one .
Normally, I like to do my own research in the quest to find new steemians to follow, in particular I am interested on those good content creators that would need some help to grow up and build their account at least till the Minnow’s level, if you know someone who deserves to be supported, please let me know…
SBI Sponsoring
This week, besides @mrhill, I am going to sponsor @javirid and @pandorasbox with @steembasicincome shares.
About the first I already spoke about.
About @javirid I would say that, he is one of the more original steemians I met. He used to write short posts, usually in spanish despite his english language skills are outstanding. He is not the typical “spammer”, he really writes what he feels, no matter the topic or the discussion and I really appreciate his honesty, opinion and help provided in many occasions. Additionally, he is always supportive in STEEM technical aspects, as Witnessing, Coding, Development… I would like to see @javirid reaching Minnows-land and beyond in short…
What to tell you about @pandorasbox ? @pandorasbox is a MUST BE FOLLOWED steemian. Why? Simply read the following posts and have a look to her blog:
If you have been following me since some time you may know that I used to post once a month a short article regarding a simple process I do concerning my Witness Votes. I call this process “Auditing My Witness Votes” the aim of which is to assess if my Votes are used in the most efficient way so, ensuring the proper performance of theSTEEM Blockchain by signing Blocks (signal that the witness works properly) but also I try to check if the owner of the witness keeps being active and supportive for the community, posting and upvoting and also developing.
The following is my current 30 Witness List, all of them working perfectly according to my criteria:
For your information, as an average, a top 20 Witness does currently around 9200 STEEM per month . At today’s price of STEEM that means 2800 USD/Month .
Instead, Witness out of the Top 20 but within the first 50, the earnings obtained a month are around 1100 STEEM , i.e 340 USD/Month at the current price.
This number decrease dramatically if you are not one of the 50 first…
The thing here is that many of the witnesses are also struggling with the current price of STEEM, some of them have had to switch off the node because, apparently, the cost of maintaining alive the node surpasses the STEEM earned and so, does not justify to keep the equipment running or just maintaining the rent.
Thus, I can understand that many of the witnesses decide to Power Down their stake in a permanent mode, especially if they are not within the Top 20 witness List.
The fact is that I have seen many of my selected Witnesses powering down and not stopping lately, some of them as I said are Top 20 witnesses and I wonder…
Would not be good to stop powering down and stop withdrawing your STEEM to the exchanges in order to, I would not say increase the scarcity of the STEEM price but, at least, stabilize the price of STEEM in the market at the present times?
Is this not the time for ACCUMULATION?
Is it MORAL to keep feeding the exchanges with such a scarce demand right know?
Would not be better for you to sell your earned STEEM at a higher prices?
…an below the main question for the witnesses which I hope, some of them will reply…
WHAT IS THE MONTHLY COST OF RUNNING A WITNESS NODE/SERVER?
Could we have an averaged monthly value in USD about the Cost of maintaining a server/node running and working efficiently?
Thanks for answering.
@toofasteddie
By the way, many Steemians here do not have the time or maybe they are not interested in doing some research and try to Vote by themselves for the witness they like…If that is your case, choose anyone that you know he would do correctly as a Proxy, which means that your account will exactly replicate the Witness Votes of the proxy account you have chosen.
*Reminder: if you feel like not having time to do a proper analysis and still think that mine is fair , you can also choose me as your proxy that will vote for witnesses for you.
Just, keep using your witness votes doing an important work.
STEEM is experimenting a slightly increase in the Trading volume, mainly coming from buyers!!!!
It is still a shy green growth but seems sustained on the 4 Hour-chart.
Also, what I like most is the fact that on hourly of the STEEM/BTC chart, there are 3 on-a-row green candles after having touched the lowest STEEM vs BTC price ever at 4657 Satoshis, and this is happening at the same time BITCOIN is growing in price!
Lately, there is nothing better than seeing STEEM changing the direction, let’s see if we can hold this trend…
In my opinion, everything depends now on the entrance of new FIAT to the market so, we need BTC to keep growing not because the leakage of the altcoins but the TETHER and FIAT from the investors…
Let’s break that 200 Billion USD market cap to ensure the trend!!!!
Facebook, which has courted rumors over its planned entry into blockchain and payments for around a year, could launch its own token as soon as Q3 2019, anonymous sources told the publication. The company began hiring for a dedicated blockchain team last year, under the auspices of David Marcus, himself a former president of PayPal.
Now, around 20% of the team’s 50 members come from the payments platform, a situation reminiscent of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” executive group of the early 2000s.
A prospectus for a new cryptocurrency-based exchange-traded fund (ETF) has just been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The application, posted by the SEC on May 9, was created by Crescent Crypto Index Services LLC, a subsidiary of Crescent Crypto Asset Management LLC, to track the performance of a market capitalization-weighted portfolio of bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).
Dubbed the USCF Crescent Crypto Index Fund (ticker symbol “XBET”), the ETF is sponsored by United States Commodity Funds LLC (USCF), which will invest XBET’s assets in the two portfolio cryptocurrencies. The prospectus states:
“XBET is an exchange traded fund. This means that most investors who decide to buy or sell shares of XBET place their trade orders through their brokers and may incur customary brokerage commissions and charges. Shares of XBET are expected to trade on the NYSE Arca under the ticker symbol “XBET” and will be bought and sold throughout the trading day at bid and ask prices like other publicly traded securities.”
United States regulator and so-called “crypto mom” Hester Peirce gave remarks in which she expressed fears that the cryptocurrency industry has been hindered by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dragging its heels. Peirce spoke at the Securities Enforcement Forum in East Palo Alto, California on May 9.
In her speech, Peirce stated that, given the rapid development of the digital currency industry, she worried that the SEC’s hesitance to provide clear guidance would hold back its growth.
The sticking point was, according to Peirce, how to decide when issuing tokens represented an offering of securities, especially considering that securities laws do not cease to apply just because there is a new evolution in the industry.
Binance, the biggest crypto exchange by volume, was hacked on Tuesday. The hacker took $40 million or 7000 BTC.
Binance had a chance to recover these funds. They could cut a deal with the majority hashpower miners. The miners would reverse the chain and gain a share of the stolen money.
Binance this time decided not to make the deal with miners. And as time goes on, the attack becomes harder. But all it took was a private phone call. The majority hashpower lies under control of a handful of men. They can collude and reverse the chain.
New York-based blockchain company ConsenSys is restructuring its various operations to shore up its market presence as it seeks $200 million in funding, a press release confirmed on May 6.
In a move which will also see the departure of a founding executive, ConsenSys will consolidate ConsenSys Labs, accelerator Tachyon and VC operation, ConsenSys Ventures, under one umbrella investment arm.
ConsenSys Ventures, which launched in September 2017, will no longer have Kavita Gupta at its helm, she confirmed to cryptocurrency news outlet The Block on Monday.
Weekly rewards for Cointorox community members holding over 200 OROX (5% rewards). Token rewards distributed from leftover bounty tokens.
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yesterday :
Here is the current chart :
As I was saying you, after the break of the support line at 0.34$, the direction was directly 0.31$ but I was expecting that this line hold us. Apparently even this support won’t survive as we already broken it. However, this support can still be save if we are able to go upper of this line in the coming hours. Let’s hope because if the break is confirm, we will try to do for sure new lows on the STEEM…
Over the past 6 months or so we have seen steem trade within three different ranges. Recently price broke down into the bottom range after spending the first quarter of the year there.
Where are we and what now?
If you look at the chart in this post you see that price dropped below that 40 cent area support and then failed to breach it on two intraday attempts.
This unfortunately is confirmation of that breakdown and price has traded down accordingly the past few days.
Now we sit in the middle of this bottom range of 40 cents to 22 cents, firmly entrenched.
There
Bitcoin’s quick recovery from levels below the former resistance-turned-support of $5,627 (April 23 high) seen on Monday, coupled with a break above the stiff resistance at $5,780 (June 2018 bottom) seen today, indicate fairly strong bullish sentiment.
BTC looks set to breach the psychological hurdle of $6,000, as suggested by April’s bullish close, and may rise to $6,200 in the next few days. The bullish case is backed by a diamond breakout on the 4-hour chart.
Bulls still need to observe caution, as the 3-day chart shows a bearish divergence of trading volumes. A case for a deeper pullback to $5,000 would strengthen if the price falls below $5,686 (daily opening price) in the next 24 hours.
Bitcoin miners made the case for their industry as a driver of clean energy adoption, rather than the ecological disaster depicted by critics, at Fidelity’s Mining Summit Friday.
The venue for the daylong event was as notable as the talks. The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, an R&D division that has dabbled in bitcoin mining, hosted the conference at the financial services giant’s global headquarters in Boston. Fidelity has embraced the crypto markets more than most incumbents; this year it launched Fidelity Digital Asset Services, which handles custody of bitcoin for institutional clients and is expected to roll out trading in the coming weeks.
But aside from welcoming the 300 or so attendees and a brief overview of mining history by Jurica Bulovic, innovation manager at Fidelity Labs (a different R&D unit), Fidelity mostly ceded the stage to guest speakers. In their presentations, these miners and others sought to disprove the popular perception that the copious amount of electricity devoted to securing the bitcoin network – 0.26% of world consumption, according to Digiconomist – is an environmental threat.
QEDIT, a developer of privacy technology for enterprise blockchains, has closed a $10 million Series A round from investors including Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Ant Financial will also be incorporating QEDIT’s zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) tech into its blockchain projects, the companies announced Tuesday. Other high-profile partnerships applying QEDIT’s ZKPs include software giant VMWare and RGAX, a subsidiary of Reinsurance Group of America.
QEDIT’s investment round was led by MizMaa Ventures, with participation from Ant Financial and RGAX as well as Meron Capital, Collider Ventures, Jovono and Target Global. QEDIT has received a total of $14 million in funding to date, comprising the A round, a previous $3 million seed round and $1 million in grants.
Chinesesocial media giant and payment service provider WeChatbannedcryptocurrency transactions in its payments policy. Dovey Wan, founding partner of crypto investment firm Primitive, tweeted the news on May 7. The tweet contained a screenshot of the policy changes, which intimates that users who engage in cryptocurrency trading will have their accounts terminated.
Wan expressed concern that since most over-the-counter transactions are happening in WeChat, “this may impact local liquidity to quite some extent.” WeChat is a popular messaging and payments service provider in China, also featuring game integrations.
New York-based blockchain company ConsenSys is restructuring its various operations to shore up its market presence as it seeks $200 million in funding, a press release confirmed on May 6.
In a move which will also see the departure of a founding executive, ConsenSys will consolidate ConsenSys Labs, accelerator Tachyon and VC operation, ConsenSys Ventures, under one umbrella investment arm.
ConsenSys Ventures, which launched in September 2017, will no longer have Kavita Gupta at its helm, she confirmed to cryptocurrency news outlet The Block on Monday.
“HavEther Project has decided to release our Whitepaper v2, so actually within one to two days we will release.”
STEEM Trading Update by my friend @cryptopassion
Here is the chart of yesterday :
Here is the current chart :
Again the BTC is doing a nice UP but the STEEM is staying sticked to its support zone around 0.3$ and is even trying to break it. Let’s hope that this line will hold and will create a bounce because STEEM is really not funny to analyse these days and you need a good mood to stay optimist.
We should be happy that most of the first Dapps at the rank are built on top of the STEEM blockchain.
Drugwars, steemit, busy, nextcolony, steemmonsters, partiko, steemhunt …etc.. all of them located within the 30 first out of more than 2000 Dapps ranked.
But what I would like to show you is that all those Dapps are spiking down. Have a look to the right of the picture:
All Dapps are experimenting a huge decrease on User Activity and, the most important, when I say all I mean all of them, not only STEEM Dapps, also Ethereum, EOS, TRON, POA or whatever the name of the blockchain on which they are working on.
It is the whole crypto sphere which is struggling nowadays, not only STEEM.
The market sentiment on regards Altcoins is still low while on BITCOIN we may affirm that is improving…
EOS is not doing better than STEEM, neither ETHEREUM Dapps…
We are far from confirming the reversal of the market and still further away from the Crypto mass adoption…consider this period of time as the best moment in terms of accumulation and keep moving, once the Uptrend of the WHOLE market will be confirmed there will not be more regrets…everything will be PERFECT, also for those that keep complaining…
There are over a million word used in daily conversation but if a single word could be itched from the heart of every blockchain enthusiast and believer; it is “decentralization“. The word is the basis by which the concepts of blockchain and cryptocurrency foundations are built upon.
To cryptocurrency followers – decentralization isn’t just a word, it is a revolution.
Bitcoin revelation transcribes the true power of its meaning. For the first time in history, two people with mutual or distant relationship but with common agreement can send over a currency with a real-world value across long distance in a trustless manner, without the need for a third party or witness, while at the same time ensuring the safety, fair settlement and privacy of both parties.
Cryptocurrency debut gave a new perspective to which we see money.
A true internet form of money is now represented and exchanged across different domains in a seamless and trustless manner, taking on the functionality of the internet itself and at the same time providing additional vital extensiveness to the use of the internet.
As much as cryptocurrency originate to create a decentralized financial ecosystem, exchanges where the majority of these assets are traded, are with centralized design. Operating with all disadvantages a centralized infrastructure has to offer.
Some of which are:
• There is insecurity of funds.
• Users interactions are limited.
• Trading and withdrawal fees are exorbitantly high.
• Poor account management and access.
• Less control of owned assets by users which can be subjected to further censorship.
The purpose of bitcoin was to ensure the above-mentioned restrictions and challenges have no concrete roots in the proposed decentralized future.
To bring about this ultimate dream, the obvious solution is a decentralized market place.
The past few years had seen visionaries proposing solutions of various type to construct an ideal system that will tolerate the demanded trading activities.
Coming along with this, we have seen different creation of typical decentralized exchanges (DEX). Some good examples are DEXs like BitShares, Idex, Bancor, and Newdex.
Although the establishment of these DEXs brought about the realization of the initial dream, their use and functions have been way below the actual need.
Constructed with currently available fitting technologies, DEXs are plagued with many constraints and limitations.
Such as:
• Slow matching time and execution of trades.
• Incapabilities to tolerate large volume of trades.
• Unreliable system responsiveness.
• Sophisticated user interface
• Very little interface instruction for fair price placement.
• Inability to trade over the native blockchain assets.
These resulted to further constraint such as:
• Lack of good volume.
• Low liquidity from poor volume.
• Few spread across order books.
• Low rate of adoption.
With the above-mentioned challenges, it is obvious that DEXs are not yet ready to be adopted as the primary marketplace for cryptocurrency trading activities and exchange.
Despite these shortcomings, decentralized exchanges have seen some encouraging progress in their development and use over time.
Here is a write-up illustration with matching dex-like examples showing their growth with time.
The first true DEX to be created. Bitshares was the work of the veteran blockchain programmer Daniel Larimer. Dan thought of the need to create a decentralized exchange framework with no single point of failure when earlier centralized exchanges like Mt.Gox were failing, became unreliable, suffering several major hacks that almost dented the future of cryptocurrency.
Well known for his innovative Delegated Proof of Stake Consensus, Dan design the Bitshares network using the DPoS algorithm – a scalable framework that can match over 100,000 tps, surpassing the capacity of both Visa and Mastercard combined.
Despite this high matching time and efficiency, Bitshares suffers from an overly decentralized system with a sophisticated setup. There is a market for stablecoins represented in the currency like bitUSD and bitEUR, there is a market for bonds, commodities, stocks and precious metals such as gold and silver which are also represented in a form, while a market also exists for cryptocurrency as a whole.
This sophisticated arrangement rendered the exchange a rocket science for many commoners, I personally also find it very difficult to understand how the system really works.
Though the problem with complicated use is one of the restrictions, Bitshares major problems arose from improper funding and governance. Interoperability is also another important setback as blockchain specific cryptocurrency are the only available choice of trading, killing off any chance of good adoption.
Idex uses the smart contract feature of the Ethereum blockchain to matches and executes trades. Constructed under a limited idea, Idex matching engine is relatively slow but is a much improvement over its predecessors ‘EtherDelta’.
For the records, Etherdelta is reported to have a history of making traders especially the beginners lose money due to its very slow matching engine and sophisticated user interface.
Idex although suffered from low scalability in relation to Ethereum network capabilities, the dex boasts a nice user interface with other extensibility of being accessed from cold storage wallets like hardware wallet and dapp browsers like Metamask and Trust Wallet.
It is inarguable that Idex is an improvement over Bitshares, but in a much wider comparison these two are entirely different from each other, however, both provide a good overview for future design and areas to improve on.
Built initially to support Ethereum-based assets, Bancor Network gave another fresh perspective about how decentralized exchanges could operate and function.
Basically, the exchange could be regarded as an atomic-swap-like exchange. Assets are converted in real time using the market price feed instead of a limit order.
Bancor was famous for its hype with its initial statement as a ‘fast liquidity network’. After suffering its biggest hack, freezing some accounts in the process, Bancor decentralized design was put to serious question.
Going offline to restructure its operation after the hacking incident, Bancor came back with even a bigger buzz – creating a feasible gateway to enable cross-chain conversion by listing trading activities for the EOS coins, which can be converted with foreign blockchain like the Ethereum blockchain.
I purposely decided to put this at the bottom of the list because of its much-improved functionality in terms of matching time and user interface.
Although built solely upon the EOS blockchain with very limited chance for foreign cross-chain communication as with current design, Newdex is a very encouraging development when it comes to good user experience and usability. I personally did not realize I just used a dex during my first encounter with the exchange. The user interface was simple and intuitive, I was very amazed by how fast my order was place and executed.
The basic need of a good exchange is fast trading execution and awesome user experience coupled with some essential need like security and reliability.
Newdex addresses these demands to some good extent. One drawback of this exchange is that it is blockchain-specific and with low volume. As for the volume; it’s only a matter of time before more people discover the joy of the dex.
Reading through this post It should be noted that, with time, decentralized exchanges improve in one aspect or the other over older ones along with available technologies.
Innovations and developments continue to be directed at existing mechanism, therefore, it’s only a matter of time before we finally arrive at that ideal solution for operating decentralized exchanges.
More promising, the recently launched Binance chain and the much awaited Binance dex could, in fact, changed the overall adoption and use of decentralized exchanges, but the issue with interoperability remains.
What awaits the future of dex is very unpredictable but there are positives to take from their evolution over time.
Personally, I can see a future where there is a functional ecosystem supporting the exchange of multi-currency network with a fair control of owned assets by users.
The future of DEX is bright.
What are your thoughts about the general overview of DEX? I would like to know in the comment box below.
