STEEMFEST: Video, Summary & Review of The 1st Day's Presentations - Room 1: Tech Stuff, Steemit Inc, Jeff Berwick, Charity, Korea & More!

I am really appreciating being able to watch the Steemfest presentations in near realtime and I have a much better sense now of who I am dealing with and where Steem / Steemit are headed. Thanks to all involved and for sharing your passion with us all.

There were 2 rooms, which were loosely split up so that room 1 was more technically oriented and room 2 was more people/social oriented. You can watch the video from Day 1, room 1 below.

I saw at least two people I know and recognise in the crowd there, including @dannyshine. :)

Room 1 is of more interest to me as someone who is intending to be involved launching an SMT and also who is now a witness for Steem too.

I was surprised to learn that after CEO @ned's introductory talk (which is well worth watching btw) that the first topic was that of the upcoming infrastructure changes and how they will affect witnesses.

Witness / Infrastructure Changes - Michael Vandeberg

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@proskynneo is a lead developer for Steem/Steemit and spoke in some detail about how they intend to handle the ever increasing load that will be placed on Steem's infrastructure and the Witness hardware too. I had presumed myself that some kind of clustering would be implemented to make the requirements on individual witness servers less intense and that is effectively what he described. He stated that other changes would be made to allow nodes to be able to effectively use trusted snapshots of the blockchain so that they don't need to reprocess the entire blockchain from start to the present moment in certain circumstances, lowering overhead and processing costs.

For me, the only point of controversy in all of the technical presentations that I have seen so far was something that Michael said about the witnesses and it is exactly the issue I have been personally focused on for the last couple of days.

At around -1:20 on the Youtube timecode, he states words to the effect of -

Witness nodes are to be changed so that they can validate their own data – so that they are now ‘trusted’ to be telling the truth instead of them all needing to agree on the state of the data.

“Specifically you are trusting the witnesses not to lie to you”

“The witnesses become the final judge of what can and cannot get into the blockchain”.

This is being done to lower the processing overheads for the network infrastructure, to increase efficiency.

The statement is made that ‘attacking’ steemit will therefore require 51% of the Steem Power or to have 11 witnesses colluding to lie to everyone else.

The claim is made that this “isn’t as dangerous as it seems” because “50% of the Bitcoin hash power is controlled by only 4 mining pools”.

The problem with this is that currently 15 of the top 19 witnesses for Steemit are receiving a massive vote from 1 single account called @Pumpkin which can effectively choose who the top witnesses are. That means that one account is largely responsible for ‘funding’ (with witness votes) the witnesses that process roughly 75% of Steem’s blocks.

It is a strawman position to state that there is no problem with trusting witnesses to be completely reliable 'because Bitcoin has a similar situation' since:

a) Steem is not Bitcoin and has a variety of different architectural characteristics.
b) Steem’s witness nodes are effectively determined by 1 single ‘donor’ at present – which is actually worse than the Bitcoin situation of having 4 mining pools dominating.
c) There’s no guarantee that there is no corruption on the Bitcoin network anyway - as far as I am aware.

I am not in any way implying to know that the top witnesses are untrustworthy or doing anything malicious and have no evidence that they are anything other than honest. I am just making the point that if I understood Michael correctly and if I am not mistaken, his logic is flawed.

Michael went on to state that it will still be possible to run nodes in the full, non 'trusting' mode – So as long as we don’t blindly 'trust the trustfulness' of the witnesses, then any ‘funny business’ can theoretically be detected... BUT, this REQUIRES active detective work from the community of a kind which has already been shown to be uncommon in equivalent situations in governmental settings – such as is demonstrated in the BBC documentary that I included in my post from yesterday (amusingly around the same time that the talk was given in Lisbon) about bringing balance to anarchy and witness voting.

This is quite a big deal for the integrity of the network and definitely not just a back-room technical decision that only effects the tech people. This decision means that someone like Marc Zuckerberg or other 'super wealthy' people could literally buy out the top witness positions and/or the Steem Power in the network and then actively manipulate the data that runs Steem! It is counter to the principle of anarchy and I suggest reading my post from yesterday for a deeper look at that.

The coding of Steemit and Steem

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@sneak also spoke and gave a nice presentation about the technical experience of coding Steemit and the philosophy and feel that his team experiences and cultivates. The open source and anarchic nature of Steem appears to be resulting in a very pleasant working environment for them and it is a pleasure to see.

He announced an iphone App for Steem that will be available soon and made clear that the various technologies they are developing that make Steemit possible are all available open source so that we can all benefit from Steem's development when making our own websites - presumably whether or not they engage the Steem network, although he stressed their value in making sites that form part of the Steem ecosystem.

Appics

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@mrs.steemit spoke next about Appics, a new app and SMT based on Steem that she explains has significant marketing power behind it and that aims to bridge the gap between the more tech oriented and aware users that are currently supporting Steem and everyone else on the planet.

ICOs & Democratization of Finance

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Next up was Jeff Mazer, who is Steemit Inc's CFO - who spoke about the current explosion of new cryptocurrencies and some of the key factors that are effective the cryptocurrency space today. He particularly highlighted the need for some kind of self regulation within the 'industry' to avoid governments coming in heavy handed to attempt to control everything.

He stated that despite all of the failed cryptocurrency launches, if an investor had invested in all of the ICOs they would still have made more than 1000% profit overall!

Passion & Creativity Gets Rewarded

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Next up in room 1 was @surfermarly who shared of her journey on Steemit and some of what makes Steemit a great place to express creatively and get rewarded in the process.

She spoke about her charity program for disadvantaged children that was started from funding generated from Steemit and that. Dreams of the Ocean is a scheme that takes kids to go surfing to help them access the majesty of our planet's seas - which was born out of a passion to help and it was made possible by Steemit!

Jeff Berwick - The Dollar Vigilante

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@dollarvigilante was up next and gave a recap of his experiences with Steemit. He mentioned that he sees one of the barrier's to Steem's growth as being that Steemit has some issues with the signup process (this actually already has a solution, which I explained recently).

He made the important point that Steem and Steem are lacking in marketing and that once that is resolved - along with some of the technical issues, he imagines Steem/Steemit will explode.

He comments on the price of Steem and why it is undervalued - again highlighting the well known need for Steemit to equal or better existing social platforms in terms of accessibility and functionality.

Steemit Tech Team Panel

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A full team presence was brought forward from Steemit inc. to deal with issues relating to numerous aspects of Steemit, including performance, branding, DDOS protection, login issues and the needs of external developers.

The conversation went through each of the developers’ own areas of specialisation and their own most exciting aspects of the project.. plus how the team responds to the needs of the wider community.

@dannyshine asked about the problem of people being downvoted and having their power/payout destroyed and the upcoming feature of ‘communities’ was pointed to as being a possible way to resolve this and other governance issues that affect the posting experience on Steemit.

Specific Community Created Steem Apps

Various developers for popular, emerging Steem apps - @noisy, @good-karma (Esteem), @heimindanger (Dtube), @prc (DSound), @busy.org, @utopian-io and @philmesnier spoke about their projects for Steem that aim to enhance the Steem experience – from front-end apps through to specific tools that solve common needs that we face as we use Steem based apps.

Michael Lee on the Korean Steemit Community

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@hansikhouse gave an enlightening tour of the Korean experience of Steemit, explaining that the Korean userbase has exploded on Steemit in the last year. Several important and moving projects have come about from the Korean whales that have apparently started the snowball effect in Korea, whereby the highly regimented structures of society are being reshaped to allow a free-er sense of movement and creativity. I found this presentation to feel very inspired and passionate – it felt a bit like I remember feeling when the Soviet union collapsed – with the aspirations of an entire nation daring to surface after so long being undercover!

Video of Room 1, Day 1

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Wishing you well,
Ura Soul

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