Hi guys,
Brian here from Epicenter. Thanks for your comments and criticism. I can totally understand where you are coming from. Let me try to explain.

Before the episode, I was wondering whether we should cancel the episode completely. We have never had a project on the show that has seen such widespread criticisms and accusations of being a scam. We try to be very careful at Epicenter to only have legitimate projects on the show and have received comments countless times that we don't challenge guests enough. In the end, we decided to do the episode, but with that background I felt I had to challenge Ned directly on the accusations.

We try to get to a thorough understanding of every topic before the show, but we don't always succeed in that. I did have a Steemit account before and looked around a bit, Sebastien posted some episodes here, we looked at the whitepaper, etc. But still - there is no question that I wish I had been better prepared.

In my view, Ned handled our questions very well and after the show I did feel that I had been too confrontational. I continued reading for several hours through the Bitcoin Talk threads and other articles to understand better what happened during the launch of the project. The main accusation there seems to be that the project intentionally made it hard for non-company people to mine Steem so that much of the Steem would end up with the company.

What I only really wrapped my head around after the show was that the distribution of coins ended up not dissimilar to those of a tokensale, while potentially avoiding legal issues. So I understand why this was done that way (whether or not it was intentionally made tricky for others to mine). Especially since the company didn't sell much during the bubble, I feel okay with how the Steem launch was conducted and if somebody told me today the project is a scam, I would disagree with the person. So you're right that I should have gotten to that point before the episode and I would have been more understanding.

I hope that explains a bit why this ended up an unusually confrontational episode.

There is no question in my mind that Steem has succeeded in a pretty massive way in building a vibrant community and a blockchain application that is widely used. That is a fantastic accomplishments - so hats off to all of you for that! (And this thread is the best example for it.)