The Great Steem Debate: Berwick VS Sovryn - Steem Discussed for Hours on National Radio!

in steemit •  8 years ago 

On Sunday's edition of my nationally syndicated talk show, Free Talk Live, a caller brought up Steem and we talked about it for several minutes.  The caller was inspired by Jeff Berwick's posts to Steemit and so Jeff offered to come on Free Talk Live to discuss Steem in greater detail.  We've had Jeff on our show before so of course we welcomed him back for what turned out to be more than an hour of discussion about Steem and Steemit.

After half the show had gone by, we wished Jeff a good night, took several calls, then brought on "Sovryn Tech" host Brian Sovryn to hear his critiques of Steem.  Pretty much the entire show with the exception of a few callers was focused on Steem and Steemit.  I hope you get some value out of it.  As always, please share, edit, or do what you want with the archives - I don't believe in intellectual property.  Here are the video and audio archives of tonight's show:

Here's the audio archive of the show via Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/freetalklive/free-talk-live-2016-08-08

Here's the YouTube version:

And the Facebook Video version:  (due to facebook's limitations, they are broken into one hour blocks)

Hour 1, Hour 2, Hour 3

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  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Subjectivity, a subject's personal perspective, feelings, beliefs, desires or discovery, as opposed to those made from an independent, objective, point of view .... *wikipedia

Very true @noor

Yeah, I think so! That's just his character.

I really am not a fan of his. I've done a video on YT describing how his "debate" with Sam Seder made libertarianism look like a joke. I will say he has a good radio voice when he's reading promos. When he's talking, he just interrupts like mad and gets hyper-excited and seems to speak without any careful consideration of what he's about to say. He had all this negative stuff to say about Steemit and he never once had his facts straight, even when he was reading from the white paper. He was taking things out of context and not understanding the underlying purpose of any of the checks and balances that are in place to actually protect the platform. SHEESH!!

fully agreed,
a few years back Mark seemed to be getting dumped on a lot. Nightly.
It really bugged the fuck outta me. It seemed timed with Darryl being brought up from Alabama.
Giving his the cred by having him on the show has created in Darryl's head a fall sense of intellectual value. I HAD NO IDEA he debated Seder! OUCH! I can't imagine that going well, AT ALL.
I really wish they'd send him back to Mobile. And he reads the news in that cooker cutter old fashioned newsman style, super annoying. Years ago, I mused the notion that the best example of Darryl's capabilities was the inane commercial he put together for his creative commons site, the music sucks, the voice over lacks any motivation. Every time the jingle came on it made me turn the channel... hadn't listened to the show regularly for a few years, turned it on recently.... ITS STILL THERE! UNCHANGED! If he had even the SLIGHTEST idea how goofy that promo sounded, he would've changed it LONG AGO.
Not sure if he is able to notice the crappiness.

It was a FULL ON DUMPSTER FIRE (the debate)

PS- I followed you. Us anti-Darrylers need to stick together...

followed right back Sir!!
Stick together we will.

yes, he's not smart.
But everybody there seems to think so.
He's a BIG negative for the show. Ian can't see it.

Ian is a cool cat....Darryl is afraid

I stopped listening to FTL when Darryl started out as a regular. I agree. He lowers the intellectual quality of the show. Ian and Mark make a much better duo. There's a ton of articulate people out in Keene....

be patient ... stay cool :d

...He almost seems afraid....I would assume its just his nature

haha :-)

Jeff Berwick is the man.

I've sat and listened to this entire thing (the soundcloud link), and by the time it ended, Darryl had reached such a level of fervor, hair-splitting, and even purposely using terms that he knew did not qualify (multi-level marketing) with his objections that it truly seemed like he was speaking solely from a position of someone who was absolutely terrified that this might be a competitor to his precious Bitcoin.
He didn't seem to be coming from a position of someone who was skeptical, but someone who was actually angry that the currency and system even existed.
It was just very strange and even surreal, the level of vehemence he had.

@hoopatang - I agree. I find Darryl quite nauseating. I thought @ftlian was open minded. @dollarvigilante did better than I would have done under Darryl's blah blah blah... But I think that a more knowledgeable representative like @piedpiper (if @ned and/or @dan can't do it), would be a better guest on FTL.

@freedomengineer I agreed with your view. Even though @dollarvigilante did a great job to the best of his abilities to expand on some concepts/features related to Steem & Steemit in the course of the show (considering that he has been around barely a week now). I will like to ask @ftlian to consider getting someone who has been around much longer and has much better understanding of Steemit like you suggested.

He reminded me of a child defending the existence of Santa Claus. Or this panda

Lol

it was getting silly

Great points. On the anger piece: I listened to the entire episode as well and it occurred to me while listening to Darryl that people who are concerned about their ability to create meaningful, insightful, entertaining and / or engaging content will fear Steemit because it really is a platform that aims to reward valuable content whereas Facebook just promotes whoever engages with you the most onto the top of your news feed. Steemit is more of a meritocracy and less of a troll-fest. It definitely seems to threaten Darryl.

great show overall

for brian I would start by clarifying steem rewards are not tied to steemit inc nor investor rounds. bitcoin does not pay miners by soliciting investment capital

Ian I liked that you were trying to learn. for faster route to BTC, send SBD to Poloniex and trade using the pair SBD/BTC

Ah - that's helpful info. Thanks!

I just noticed that this comment from @bobsunday has the most $ amount and the most qty. of votes, yet it is not at the top of the thread. I guess I still have a decent amount to learn about how the nesting / ranking is set up here.

Liberty in Our Lifetime: STEEM (and The Free State Project; and FREE KEENE!!)

Great to be on the show with you tonight @ftlian & @dollarvigilante! I'm excited to see where Steemit goes!

I look forward to reading more and connecting more with the community here! Here's my intro post for anyone interested in learning more about me: I'm one of 20,000+ libertarian/voluntaryist activists moving to New Hampshire to stop big government! I'm also the author of 3 cookbooks! Now, I’m learning how to write/talk more openly about my feelings & beliefs

Its amazing to see how quickly steemit is catching on, and im proud to be a part of such a new and revolutionary platform. This talk answered alot of questions I had about steemit, and lets me see how so many people are coming to their own understandings of this new economic fire called crypto currency. Keep up the great work!

Thank you for listening - please share it around!

Will do, showing my family and posting it on twitter as we speak :D

👍amazing video and discuss @ftlian

After watching this Podcast I made a video showing how this works from an average guy that has made money from Steemit.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@tim-johnston/video-how-to-make-take-money-from-steemit-com-and-exchange-it-for-bitcoin-proof-that-it-works-and-is-not-a-scam

Because you were able to cash out your steem is not proof that its not a scam.

It's showing proof that a lot of the accusations being thrown around are not true. Most people that are talking shit just have no idea what they are talking about and are jumping to rash conclusions.

Free Talk Live on Steemit for 3 hours?
I knew this insomnia was good for something.

I found the show fairly one sided with a lot of skepticism against steemit and the cryptocurrency steem in general. The hosts were using the white paper as gospel and every time there was a delta such as the current price of SMD compared the the white paper states, they attacked it.

It is our belief that these rules will give market participants confidence that they are unlikely
lose money by holding SMD purchased at a price of $1.00. We fully expect there to be a
narrow trading range between $0.99 and $1.01 for SMD under most market conditions

There were many aspects of steem and steemit that they did not understand and unfortunately, there was no opposing debaters to challenge/help them. The few call-in's they brought on the air were cut off before they could make any corrections.

They say that any publicity is good publicity ... but without proper information, the public will remain weary of anything blockchain.

@gikitiki, thanks for the TL;DL :)

I'm just about to give it a listen but, from what you've said, it sounds like these folk are barely comfortable with Bitcoin and just aren't ready to accept yet another coin. Or they're just Bitcoin maximalists. People who don't like ground floor opportunities are weird...

Actually "these folk" have been long-time boosters of / evangelists for Bitcoin in particular and cryptocurrency in general, including the more leading edge stuff like blockchain tech as law, etc. There's a reason why their advertisers include entities like Jaxx, Shapeshift and Purse. That reason is that they spend a LOT of time talking about this stuff. The multiple segments on Steem weren't the exception, they're the rule.

Yep, I discovered Bitcoin listening to FTL back in 2010 or 2011 I think. That said: I had an especially hard time listening to this entire show, mainly because of Darryl. Oh man.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

OK then, why does SMD trade in a 40-50% range... and not the projected 2% range (in terms of market spot prices which is what matters)? And why is the interest rate on SMD seemingly always stuck on 1% after several weeks of underpriced SMD (though I've never received any actual interest payments ever)?

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Oh man, Free Talk Live in on Steemit now, too? I knew it, this is how all the ancaps are going to get rich :D Hope to see you all in a private community in Chile one of these days, boys!

Or, you know, wherever... I hear Chile is nice, though!

I hear Panama's nice.

For me it'll be Argentina. ;)

I'm going to Mars just saying...

I was one of the callers that gotcut- off. The other point I was going to make was about selling Steem Dollars. You don't have to do the conversion and wait 7 days. You can transfer your Steem or Steem Dollars directly to an exchange such as Poloniex and sell them for BTC. The conversion uses a 7 day average rate price. You would choose this option if say the price of steam shot up dramatically. Instead of paying the higher market rate, you could convert at the 7 day average and get a more Steem for your Steem Dollars. This helps smooth out the volatility of the Steem price.

Exactly! He selected convert to steem instead of transfer..this has happened several times today.

@ftlian thank you for posting all the audio and letting us know about the show. @phoenike thanks for the further explanation. That's one good thing about platforms like steemit, we get the opportunity to post comments about the show and get the chance to fully explain what we meant .

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

ah, I did that last week. Got them released this morning.
I would rather have transfered them to Bittrex, and if I'd known that, the transferred value would've been a bit better than the $ amount I got. Not much though...

Ok, so I'm watching it, but an hour in, highly annoyed by the host who has not a clue about Steemit and is pretty damn smug. I'll get through it for Jeff though.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

It's getting late here so I'll watch it tomorrow. Thanks for making this.

No doubt Berwick will be interesting to listen to, but he only recently joined the platform so I'll be surprised if he can take on the common technical questions that take place in those kinds of debates. I guess I'll see tomorrow! I might edit this if I can with some feedback/comments if I have any. Cheers!

After watching the first 30 mins:
At ~15 min you talk about the discussion tags. Those heavily change day-to-day and anarchy related tags were there mainly because of @dollarvigilante's posts.

At 24:50 you have two options. You can either trade your SBD directly on the market (instantaneous) or get them transferred to Steem by the network (takes 7 days). That's how SBD is pegged to the dollar, if market price is too high, arbitrage opportunities become available and you can use network conversion.

~35 mins. The blockchain is used for transparency, decentralization (and transaction verifications). It's probably one of the first platform that allows you to have different interfaces to access the same database (blockchain in this case). This means you can have a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit or Medium all backed by the Steem economy.

-Gotta run will continue later.

@owdy consider doing a new blog post called 'Last Night's Free Talk Live Corrected Line by Line' or some better title. I am not a whale but i will vote for it.

@ftlian I was that caller.
Come on man, show me some upvote love!

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

It hurts, please make it stop.

Seriously.

I do not know yet whether Steem is a great idea, or a utopian fantasy, or an elaborate scam. I'm hoping it's a great idea.

But when I see Darryl called "shrill" and "pretentious" and "hair-splitting" for expecting real answers instead of cotton candy fluff, I have to lean hard toward it being one of the latter two.

The key question, as phrased by Daniel Imbellino at Medium:

"How does a platform that has no source of revenue of other than investors afford to pay out millions of dollars to its members when there’s no money coming in?"

Until I see a convincing answer to that question, I hope people -- including Darryl -- keep asking it or variants of it.

Apply the same logic to Bitcoin. Answer your own question then get back to us.

Lots of people keep asking that same question yet it seems very few want to apply that logic. I tend to believe that this platform is starting to cause fear among the bitcoin evangelists. Bitcoin does not have to be the only revolutionary digital coin to come out of a revolutionary technology. In fact it will be replaced some day in the future by something better, faster, and easier to use.

Well, I'm not a Bitcoin evangelist by any stretch of the imagination, and I firmly agree with you that Bitcoin does not have to be the only revolutionary digital coin to come out of the block chain idea.

I'm about as wary of Steem right now as I was of Bitcoin, say, five years ago.

As far as the question is concerned:

Bitcoin has value because its users have decided it has value.

Ditto Steem.

Move back on the tree a little bit to the origination ideas, though.

The investors in Steem are handing over a cryptocurrency redeemable in another cryptocurrency which people already believe has value. And what the investors are buying with what they hand over is the content on this site. Yet they do not seem to be monetizing that content in any way.

To put it a different way, at first blush Steem appears to be operating on an Underpants Gnomes profit plan.

I'm willing to believe that that's not the case ... if someone wants to provide a reason to believe that other than "I'm going to darkly hint that you're a frightened Bitcoin evangelist if you don't."

Bit coin doesn't promise to pay out anything to users. If you send someone 1 bitcoin for goods or services, they get 1 bitcoin. Yes there is an emission schedule for miners to bootstrap currency distribution, but its well-understood.

And that is all Steem does. There is an emission schedule for miners (blocks) and in time it will be well understood.

It works the same way Bitcoin pays miners to secure the network --- seignorage of tokens combined with their market value, which is based on speculation

Not exactly. The Bitcoin protocol allows a miner to create a coinbase reward for solving a block. That takes a lot of work, hence proof of work. When I upvote someone and hence, give them steem power, I did no work what so ever. I think THAT is the different twist that has people concerned. I literally give value out of thin air, no work required.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

For someone to write or up-vote a post there IS work required. Subjective work (e.g. content curation, AKA up-voting, and creativity) is work too. Steem supports rewards for subjective and objective work, and from a blockchain perspective, the token supply operations are analogous.

I still use this explanation and it seems to work really well on newcomers that already know a little about bitcoin. It's super short and easy to understand. It's just prize money in a blogging competition instead of in a math problem-solving competition.

The Bitcoin blockchain gives coins to those that calculated a hash. The Steem blockchain gives coins to those that wrote an article. Both is work.

I'm glad to see more people joining steemit, especially after the success Berwick has had most recently. I honestly think that anyone who puts in the time and energy here can achieve some financial reward for his/her efforts, even more so if they're already an accomplished writer or blogger. Myself, I enjoy what I've seen here on this platform thus far and look forward to engaging in further dialogue with other steemit users. It's worth a decent try, at least!

Yea, the key is building up your Steem Power. So don't worrying about cashing out time you get something(unless you really need the money). Let it build up. Soon you can make as much commenting as you do for a an ok post.

Nice, debate means that steemit is famous platform

Another Bitcoin "maximalist" vs Steemit "enthusiast" debate ... and the world keeps on turning. The markets will dictate the truth of the matter all the debaters can do is speculate.

Nope, debaters bring challenging questions to the table and new users to the site. Markets are driven by user adoption.

So, should we expect another influx of users tonight and tomorrow? Things will certainly get interesting. I guess we'll see how well Steem can handle rapid expansion.

We're not that big of a show, but you can expect new users after the video makes the rounds.

Love for Jeff

very good

i like debate,
nice soundcloud for listening, !

go for it

Yikes, that's an absolute epic! I'll have to watch that over a few sittings. Great to see Berwick totally on board. :)

Steemrolling over all the lies. :)

Taxation is theft!

thank you ftl crew!

Berwick is a really cool guy. He is so relaxed and calm when he speaks, and he never gets angry. I kinda like his personality, it is truly anarchist.

Steemit compared to other social media is a clear win.
The one aspect people can't get their head around is this.
If Reddit or Facebook is the model and they have millions of posts, whats the payout for the average post and how does steem monetize that while also being pegged to the dollar?

Is there a way to view the daily handouts of steem dollars at Steemit compared to its market cap?

There are three currencies, Steem Power, Steam and Steem Dollars. Think of Steem power as vesting shares in a start-up, steam is the shares you trade day to day and the steem dollar if your paycheck. The reason for the Steem Dollor is because everyone knows what a dollow is and what it is worth( capable of buying). As Steemit adds features like a marketplace or craigslist, people will be more comfortable spending in a form they are familiar with. If I say something cost 50 dollars you know what that means, if I say it cost 24 steem, you have to first convert that to something you know and then hope steem's price stays the same until you make the purchase. Too much effort for people to need to do all that.

Personally, I'm loving this concept. Journalists have traditionally been defined according to their employment by a media organization, by affiliation to a professional association or union, or by completion of an appropriate course of training. There are so many skilled and creative workers on here. I feel at home. This has all of the tools and components to become the fastest growing community in the profession. Increasingly the term “journalist” is used to include all those who regularly engage in collecting or disseminating information to the public with a journalistic purpose. This is the perfect place for people who have no formal training, who are not members of a professional body or who are not employed by media.

Jeff Berwick @dollarvigilant is such a cool cat and i appreciate his optimism.

it was nice to watch

6:20 in is when the interview starts. I forgot why I never listen to this show. Too much filler.... modeled like a mainstream radio show.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Huh, maybe that's because we're on the RADIO? Here are 170 AM and FM affiliates nationwide: http://affiliates.freetalklive.com

Good news, the audio version of the show, doesn't have the full radio commercial breaks:
https://soundcloud.com/freetalklive/free-talk-live-2016-08-08

Jeff always has given information that has been right on target, this seems to also be good advice! Thanks Jeff

good stuff.

Thumbs to this......

thanks to the live talk

Very good show. First time I've seen them focus so much on one topic :P

Nice sharing debate @ftlian

STEEM do the STEEMIT :)

Look forward to listening to the whole interview

For me, while it might seem impractical, ironically, money is of second importance to functionality.
Money follows functionality but is always secondary to it.

Facebook is "supreme king" because it's always had a base level of consistent functionality.
The various other social networks I've tried have never reached such consistent functionality.
Yes, fb is also famous for fascist censorship.

But you can use it. (steemit needs to work on spacing for italics)

I was enjoying the hell out of steemit my first day of using it.

Now it's a different story.
Thankfully, comments retain (mostly) the delectable hyperlinking and other nice tidbits
(like instant previews of what you wrote so you can see whether it's the way you want it).

Thus, for commenting, steem is supreme.

wow amazing !!, @ftlian

excellent, listen to them!

I don't get all the fuss... It here, there's plenty of passionate users and its expanding daily. If anything they're debates on this matter is spreading the word faster than any positive advertising. I really enjoyed the video and hope they continue. Maybe all the haters will one day see that it helps Bitcoin more than it hurts it.

Are these guys related?

Jeff, long time listener, long time learner...
Long time follower of your content.

I almost never comment online for understood reasons. (I hope that is the case for limited meaningful comments online around you)

Anyway, I saw your post on this steemit shiznit, and by my first post, you can tell why I don't care about the NSA anymore...
Im sure Im on the list.

Well thank you for your thoughts, and more importantly, your kind time.

John.

Jeff Berwick is the man.

Very nice debate @ftlian

Free Talk Live - thought I would be interested in this show for a while, but Darryl...his voice..attitude..and dbaggishness has turned me off. Great job with a tough crowd Jeff!

@ftlian Thanks a lot for the interview!

Hmmmmm this is going to be big.

You can read my lame articles here :/ @johnnyyash

so true

So just to summarize the critics complaints on Steem. It's too complicated for them. They think it's a scam. They think it's marketed deceptively. They just don't think it's possible.

Imagine what people said about the first automobile while sitting on their horse and wagon!

I will give them their skepticism based on the history of the developers with bitshare. But after listening to the three hours and the unGodly amount of commercials. The only good points in the second half were made by the caller in the last ten minutes.

Adding followers helps to make money on steemit. Add me and I will add you.

Steemit will only truly succeed if the product here is good! "You add me and I'll add you" only dilutes the product.