So, I decided to sit down and write a Steemit post. About something. I thought that the Justin Sun/Tron thing is probably the hot topic right now. Hard to think of another one.
I just couldn't really think of anything to say, really. I know nothing about Justin Sun other than the name, have no experience whatsoever with the Tron ecosystem, and I haven't been around much on Steemit, either, for the past two-three years.
So, uhh, yeah.
A wait and see approach? No one likes a wait and see approach, though. People like it when you either spread FUD, or tell people that everything is great, has been great, and will indefinitely continue to be great. With a slight chance of things even turning awesome in the future.
But I don't know.
I guess the best case scenario is that Justin is somehow excited about Steemit and its potential, wants to put his deep pockets and marketing machine behind it, and maybe take Steemit forward to becoming something it never really was able to become under the old Steemit, INC. This could lead to a price pump and a more prosperous Steemit.
Worst case scenario, I suppose, is Justin effectively shutting down Steemit as we know it. Making what has been known as the STEEM blockchain part of Tron, leaving only a distant memory of steemit.com behind.
I don't think anyone outside of Justin Sun knows, and I'm not convinced he does, either.
Some things will change, though. I think that goes without saying. I'm mostly interested in the STEEM price myself. Not so much the "principles of STEEM" and whatnot. The price is what I care about. And how it may affect me.
I guess now is as good a time as any to throw in the old meme: "As a direct result of recent things taking place, the STEEM price may go up or down."
So, business as usual, I guess. Except not really. Until recently, there was really no reason to expect the price to go up any time soon, if ever. It was pretty clear the old Steemit, INC. stopped caring about this project a long, long time ago. At the very least Ned himself.
So, in that sense, I'm curious to see what happens under new leadership. Maybe it will actually be a leadership, unlike before. And yea, people are gonna shout "decentralization" off the top of their lungs at the mountain tops until the cows come home, but as someone who has followed the Steemit project since the summer of 2016, I have yet to see anything that really proves to me that decentralization works as well as everyone here says it does.
Since day one, Steemit has seemed like a mess. Sometimes a profitable, entertaining, fun mess that I look back at with fond memories, but a mess nonetheless.
The lack of true leadership and vision has only hurt Steemit, in my eyes. A lot of the drama and issues that have plagued this community since the get-go could have been solved by a strong leader saying, "No, this is what we're going to do, you can either like it or not".
Will this be what's going to take place now? No idea. I'd like to think no, but no one really knows. All we can do is wait and see.But somehow oddly cautiously curious about all this. This has sure given me a reason to pay attention to this place again. Even refresh the coinmarketcap site for STEEM price a few times a day.
It's my understanding that Steemit wasn't and isn't a direct competitor to any project in the Tron ecosystem, so it's unlikely Justin bought it to just shut it down. People like Justin care very much about their money, so the fact that he dug into his pockets means he probably plans on doing something with his acquisition.
What that something? I guess we'll have to wait and see.
One of the few posts on this I've read that actually sounds reasonable. So thank you for that...
Having been through a couple of mergers/takeovers in completely unrelated businesses, my thought is that Justin wants to make money. My second thought is that this deal possibly went off a little prematurely, because Justin wanted to use the news of the merger to drown out the news about Dan's "Voice" project going into public Beta on February 14th. And that mission was definitely accomplished.
The "version" of this I've been putting out there goes something like this:
Justin buys Steemit, Inc. and control of the approximately 75M Steem/SP in Steemit, Inc. controlled accounts. He effectively pays maybe 25c per Steem for that.
He brings TRON's considerable resources and marketing power to bear on the Steem ecosystem in a way we've never seen before. Maybe he spends as much as US $25M. As a result, the Steemosphere goes from floundering in the dark to becoming A Really Big Deal.
As a result, the price of Steem rises to maybe $8-10, because now everyone wants to get onboard. Even after expenses, Justin makes more than half a BILLION dollars on his investment. That's not chump change.
Like you, I am yet to see the Sacred Cow of Decentralization actually be functional. I think it's a beautiful ideal but when applied to a large scale project like Steem, the entire decision-making-by-consensus process takes on some of the less desirable characteristics of Communism... including that there's more talk and planning about "moving forward" than actual moving forward. But I'm open to the possibility that I don't fully understand how it's supposed to work...
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Yea, agree with the above. I want to hold on to the hope that someone like Justin wouldn't spend all this money on Steemit just to throw in the trash. I'd like to think he's going to try to make money with it.
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I feel similarly on all counts. There are some legit use cases for decentralisation, but social networking isn't it, or at least not in the way Steem presents it.
As denmarkguy mentions below, the real reason Justin bought Steemit has to be Voice. Tron is EOS' direct competitor, and has thus far been losing that market overall. From what I can tell, it's developing into a bitter rivalry. Tron is winning in gambling dApps though, so Justin has seen an opportunity for gaming/social type apps. No one would have bothered with Steemit - but Tron needs a competitor to Voice, and Steemit is it. I don't know how much he paid for Ned's 51% stake in Steemit Inc, but it's fair to assume it's a negligible sum for Tron.
Yeah, Steem has been mostly a disaster, but it's been a roller-coaster. Curious to see where the future lies. One thing's for sure, it can't be worse than the negligence (or even worse, apathy) we've witnessed from Steemit Inc and... the witnesses. Or could it?
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I have no knowledge or understanding of Voice. And the beta, at the moment, seems to be US only, so I'm gonna have to wait and see. I have no concept of how the site operates. Or the tokens, anything.
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You're not missing anything, Dan Larimer is still clueless about social networking.
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Excellent assessment, thanks!
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That's a nice donkey!
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Price and steem token will be fine. Justin have enough resources to pump it and even do a better work than steemit Inc.
The blockchain itself however... That is where the big unkown is.
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We're all gonna die... !
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More than likely.
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Yup. We'll all die of shock when things actually start going right for a change. Maybe. I'll guess we'll have to wait and see.
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Man I've been away so long I forgot how to reply to a post and had to look around cunfusedly for a minute until I noticed the reply button. We should get an auto reply box like reddit. Anyhow, something something, when moon? I've still got my little hoard that I built up when I first found this place, so hopefully this is good for the price. But I can't for the life of me find the drive to actually post here any more. Don't know why, I used to love it. I do lurk your page though.
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Lol yea, dude. Posting is impossible.
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