The core concepts of DTube's new blockchain
Dear STEEM community,
Following our announcement for DTube v0.9, I have received countless questions about the new blockchain part, avalon. First I want to make it clear, that it would have been utterly impossible to build this on STEEM, even with the centralized SCOT/Tribes that weren't available when I started working on this. This will become much clearer as you read through the whole wall of text and understand the novelties.
SteemPeak says this is a 25 minutes read, but if you are truly interested in the concept of a social blockchain, and you believe in its power, I think it will be worth the time!
MOVING FORWARD
I'm a long time member of STEEM, with tens of thousands of staked STEEM for 2 years+. I understand the instinctive fear from the other members of the community when they see a new crypto project coming out. We've had two recent examples recently with the VOICE and LIBRA annoucements, being either hated or ignored. When you are invested morally, and financially, when you see competitors popping up, it's normal to be afraid.
But we should remember competition is healthy, and learn from what these projects are doing and how it will influence us. Instead, by reacting the way STEEM reacts, we are putting our heads in the sand and failing to adapt. I currently see STEEM like the "North Korea of blockchains", trying to do everything better than other blockchains, while being #80 on coinmarketcap and slowly but surely losing positions over the months.
When DLive left and revealed their own blockchain, it really got me thinking about why they did it. The way they did it was really scummy and flawed, but I concluded that in the end it was a good choice for them to try to develop their activity, while others waited for SMTs. Sadly, when I tried their new product, I was disappointed, they had botched it. It's purely a donation system, no proof of brain... And the ultra-majority of the existing supply is controlled by them, alongside many other 'anti-decentralization' features. It's like they had learnt nothing from their STEEM experience at all...
STEEM was still the only blockchain able to distribute crypto-currency via social interactions (and no, 'donations' are not social interactions, they are monetary transfers; bitcoin can do it too). It is the killer feature we need. Years of negligence or greed from the witnesses/developers about the economic balance of STEEM is what broke this killer feature. Even when proposing economical changes (which are actually getting through finally in HF21), the discussions have always been centered around modifying the existing model (changing the curve, changing the split, etc), instead of developing a new one.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
What if I built a new model for proof of brain distribution from the ground up? I first tried playing with STEEM clones, I played with EOS contracts too. Both systems couldn't do the concepts I wanted to integrate for DTube, unless I did a major refactor of tens of thousands of lines of code I had never worked with before. Making a new blockchain felt like a lighter task, and more fun too.
Before even starting, I had a good idea of the concepts I'd love to implement. Most of these bullet points stemmed from observations of what happened here on STEEM in the past, and what I considered weaknesses for d.tube's growth.
NO POWER-UP
The first concept I wanted to implement deep down the core of how a DPOS chain works, is that I didn't want the token to be staked, at all (i.e. no 'powering up'). The cons of staking for a decentralized social platform are obvious:
- complexity for the users with the double token system.
- difficulty to onboard people as they need to freeze their money, akin to a pyramid scheme.
The only good thing about staking is how it can fill your bandwidth and your voting power when you power-up, so you don't need to wait for it to grow to start transacting. In a fully-liquid system, your account ressources start at 0% and new users will need to wait for it to grow before they can start transacting. I don't think that's a big issue.
That meant that witness elections had to be run out of the liquid stake. Could it be done? Was it safe for the network? Can we update the cumulative votes for witnesses without rounding issues? Even when the money flows between accounts freely?
Well I now believe it is entirely possible and safe, under certain conditions. The incentive for top witnesses to keep on running the chain is still present even if the stake is liquid. With a bit of discrete mathematics, it's easy to have a perfectly deterministic algorithm to run a decentralized election based off liquid stake, it's just going to be more dynamic as the funds and the witness votes can move around much faster.
NO EARLY USER ADVANTAGE
STEEM has had multiple events that influenced the distribution in a bad way. The most obvious one is the inflation settings. One day it was hella-inflationary, then suddently hard fork 16 it wasn't anymore. Another major one, is the non-linear rewards that ran for a long time, which created a huge early-user advantage that we can still feel today.
I liked linear rewards, it's what gives minnows their best chance while staying sybil-resistant. I just needed Avalon's inflation to be smart. Not hyper-inflationary like <HF16, but not leading to a slow death like the current real-world settings of STEEM's inflation.
The key metric to consider for this issue, is the number of tokens distributed per user per day. If this metric goes down, then the incentive for staying on the network and playing the game, goes down everyday. You feel like you're making less and less from your efforts. If this metric goes up, the number of printed tokens goes up and the token is hyper-inflationary and holding it feels really bad if you aren't actively earning from the inflation by playing the game.
Avalon ensures that the number of printed tokens is proportional to the number of users with active stake. If more users come in, avalon prints more tokens, if users cash-out and stop transacting, the inflation goes down. This ensures that earning 1 DTC will be about as hard today, tomorrow, next month or next year, no matter how many people have registered or left d.tube, and no matter what happens on the markets.
NO LIMIT TO MY VOTING POWER
Another big issue that most steemians don't really know about, but that is really detrimental to STEEM, is how the voting power mana bar works. I guess having to manage a 2M SP delegation for @dtube really convinced me of this one.
When your mana bar is full at 100%, you lose out the potential power generation, and rewards coming from it. And it only takes 5 days to go from 0% to 100%. A lot of people have very valid reasons to be offline for 5 days+, they shouldn't be punished so hard. This is why all most big stake holders make sure to always spend some of their voting power on a daily basis. And this is why minnows or smaller holders miss out on tons of curation rewards, unless they delegate to a bidbot or join some curation guild... meh. I guess a lot of people would rather just cash-out and don't mind the trouble of having to optimize their stake.
So why is it even a mana bar? Why can't it grow forever? Well, everything in a computer has to have a limit, but why is this limit proportional to my stake? While I totally understand the purpose of making the bandwidth limited and forcing big stake holders to waste it, I think it's totally unneeded and inadapted for the voting power. As long as the growth of the VP is proportional to the stake, the system stays sybil-resistant, and there could technically be no limit at all if it wasn't for the fact that this is ran in a computer where numbers have a limited number of bits.
On Avalon, I made it so that your voting power grows virtually indefinitely, or at least I don't think anyone will ever reach the current limit of Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER: 9007199254740991 or about 9 Peta VP. If you go inactive for 6 months on an account with some DTCs, when you come back you will have 6 months worth of power generation to spend, turning you into a whale, at least for a few votes.
Another awkward limit on STEEM is how a 100% vote spends only 2% of your power. Not only STEEM forces you to be active on a daily basis, you also need to do a minimum of 10 votes / day to optimize your earnings. On Avalon, you can use 100% of your stored voting power in a single mega-vote if you wish, it's up to you.
A NEW PROOF-OF-BRAIN
No Author rewards
People should vote with the intent of getting a reward from it. If 75% of the value forcibly goes to the author, it's hard to expect a good return from curation. Steem is currently basically a complex donation platform. No one wants to donate when they vote, no matter what they will say, and no matter how much vote-trading, self-voting or bid-botting happens.
So in order to keep a system where money is printed when votes happen, if we cannot use the username of the author to distribute rewards, the only possibility left is to use the list of previous voters aka "Curation rewards". The 25% interesting part of STEEM, that has totally be shadowed by the author rewards for too long.
Downvote rewards
STEEM has always suffered from the issue that the downvote button is unused, or when it's used, it's mostly for evil. This comes from the fact that in STEEM's model, downvotes are not eligible for any rewards. Even if they were, your downvote would be lowering the final payout of the content, and your own curation rewards...
I wanted Avalon's downvotes to be completely symmetric to the upvotes. That means if we revert all the votes (upvotes become downvotes and vice versa), the content should still distribute the same amount of tokens to the same people, at the same time.
No payment windows
Steem has a system of payments windows. When you publish a content, it opens a payment window where people can freely upvote or downvote to influence the payout happening 7 days later. This is convenient when you want a system where downvotes lower rewards. Waiting 7 days to collect rewards is also another friction point for new users, some of them might never come back 7 days later to convince themselves that 'it works'. On avalon, when you are part of the winners of curation after a vote, you earn it instantly in your account, 100% liquid and transferable.
Unlimited monetization in time
Indeed, the 7 days monetization limit has been our biggest issue for our video platform since day 8. This incentivized our users to create more frequent, but lesser quality content, as they know that they aren't going to earn anything from the 'long-haul'. Monetization had to be unlimited on DTube, so that even a 2 years old video could be dug up and generate rewards in the far future.
Infinite monetization is possible, but as removing tokens from a balance is impossible, the downvotes cannot remove money from the payout like they do on STEEM. Instead, downvotes print money in the same way upvotes do, downvotes still lower the popularity in the hot and trending and should only rewards other people who downvoted the same content earlier.
New curation rewards algorithm
STEEM's curation algorithm isn't stupid, but I believe it lacks some elegance. The 15 minutes 'band-aid' necessary to prevent curation bots (bots who auto vote as fast as possible on contents of popular authors) that they added proves it. The way is distributes the reward also feels very flat and boring. The rewards for my votes are very predictable, especially if I'm the biggest voter / stake holder for the content. My own vote is paying for my own curation rewards, how stupid is that? If no one elses votes after my big vote despite a popularity boost, it probably means I deserve 0 rewards, no?
I had to try different attempts to find an algorithm yielding interesting results, with infinite monetization, and without obvious ways to exploit it. The final distribution algorithm is more complex than STEEM's curation but it's still pretty simple. When a vote is cast, we calculate the 'popularity' at the time of the vote. The first vote is given a popularity of 0, the next votes are defined by (total_vp_upvotes - total_vp_downvotes) / time_since_1st_vote. Then we look into the list of previous votes, and we remove all votes in the opposite direction (up/down). The we remove all the votes with a higher popularity if its an upvote, or the ones with a lower popularity if its a downvote. The remaining votes in the list are the 'winners'. Finally, akin to STEEM, the amount of tokens generated by the vote will be split between winners proportionally to the voting power spent by each (linear rewards - no advantages for whales) and distributed instantly. Instead of purely using the order of the votes, Avalon distribution is based on when the votes are cast, and each second that passes reduces the popularity of a content, potentially increasing the long-term ROI of the next vote cast on it.
It's possible to chart the popularity that influences the DTC monetary distribution directly in the d.tube UI
This algorithm ensures there are always losers. The last upvoter never earns anything, also the person who upvoted at the highest popularity, and the one who downvoted at the lowest popularity would never receive any rewards for their vote. Just like the last upvoter and last downvoter wouldn't either. All the other ones in the middle may or may not receive anything, depending on how the voting and popularity evolved in time. The one with an obvious advantage, is the first voter who is always counted as 0 popularity. As long as the content stays at a positive popularity, every upvote will earn him rewards. Similarly, being the first downvoter on an overly-popular content could easily earn you 100% rewards on the next downvote that could be from a whale, earning you a fat bonus.
While Avalon doesn't technically have author rewards, the first-voter advantage is strong, and the author has the advantage of always being the first voter, so the author can still earn from his potentially original creations, he just needs to commit some voting power on his own contents to be able to publish.
ONE CHAIN <==> ONE APP
More scalable than shared blockchains
Another issue with generalistic blockchains like ETH/STEEM/EOS/TRX, which are currently hosting dozens of semi-popular web/mobile apps, is the reduced scalability of such shared models. Again, everything in a computer has a limit. For DPOS blockchains, 99%+ of the CPU load of a producing node will be to verify the signatures of the many transactions coming in every 3 seconds. And sadly this fact will not change with time. Even if we had a huge breakthrough on CPU speeds today, we would need to update the cryptographic standards for blockchains to keep them secure. This means it would NOT become easier to scale up the number of verifiable transactions per seconds.
Oh, but we are not there yet you're thinking? Or maybe you think that we'll all be rich if we reach the scalability limits so it doesn't really matter? WRONG
The limit is the number of signature verifications the most expensive CPU on the planet can do. Most blockchains use the secp256k1 curve, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Steem and now Avalon. It was originally chosen for Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto probably because it's decently quick at verifying signatures, and seems to be backdoor-proof (or else someone is playing a very patient game). Maybe some other curves exist with faster signature verification speed, but it won't be improved many-fold, and will likely require much research, auditing, and time to get adopted considering the security implications.
In 2015 Graphene was created, and Bitshares was completely rewritten. This was able to achieve 100,000 transaction per second on a single machine, and decentralized global stress testing achieved 18,000 transactions per second on a distributed network.
So BitShares/STEEM and other DPOS graphene chains in production can validate at most 18000 txs/sec, so about 1.5 billion transactions per day. EOS, Tendermint, Avalon, LIBRA or any other DPOS blockchain can achieve similar speeds, because there's no planet-killing proof-of-works, and thanks to the leader-based/democratic system that reduces the number of nodes taking part in the consensus.
As a comparison, there are about 4 billion likes per day on instagram, so you can probably double that with the actual uploads, stories and comments, password changes, etc. The load is also likely unstable through the day, probably some hours will go twice as fast as the average. You wouldn't be able to fit Instagram in a blockchain, ever, even with the most scalable blockchain tech on the world's best hardware. You'd need like a dozen of those chains. And instagram is still a growing platform, not as big as Facebook, or YouTube.
So, splitting this limit between many popular apps? Madness! Maybe it's still working right now, but when many different apps reach millions of daily active users plus bots, it won't fit anymore.
Serious projects with a big user base will need to rethink the shared blockchain models like Ethereum, EOS, TRX, etc because the fees in gas or necessary stake required to transact will skyrocket, and the victims will be the hordes of minnows at the bottom of the distribution spectrum.
If we can't run a full instagram on a DPOS blockchain, there is absolutely no point trying to run medium+reddit+insta+fb+yt+wechat+vk+tinder on one. Being able to run half an instagram is already pretty good and probably enough to actually onboard a fair share of the planet. But if we multiply the load by the number of different app concepts available, then it's never gonna scale.
DTube chain is meant for the DTube UI only. Please do not build something unrelated to video connecting to our chain, we would actively do what we can to prevent you from growing. We want this chain to be for video contents only, and the JSON format of the contents should always follow the one used by d.tube.
If you are interested in avalon tech for your project isn't about video, it's strongly suggested to fork the blockchain code and run your own avalon chain with a different origin id, instead of trying to connect your project to dtube's mainnet. If you still want to do it, chain leaders would be forced to actively combat your project as we would consider it as useless noise inside our dedicated blockchain.
Focused governance
Another issue of sharing a blockchain, is the issues coming up with the governance of it. Tons of features enabled by avalon would be controversial to develop on STEEM, because they'd only benefit DTube, and maybe even hurt/break some other projects. At best they'd be put at the bottom of a todo list somewhere. Having a blockchain dedicated to a single project enables it to quickly push updates that are focused on a single product, not dozens of totally different projects.
Many blockchain projects are trying to make decentralized governance true, but this is absolutely not what I am interested in for DTube. Instead, in avalon the 'init' account, or 'master' account, has very strong permissions. In the DTC case, @dtube:
- will earn 10% fees from all the inflation
- will not have to burn DTCs to create accounts
- will be able to do certain types of transactions when others can't
- account creation (during steem exclusivity period)
- transfers (during IEO period)
- transfering voting power and bandwidth ressources (used for easier onboarding)
For example, for our IEO we will setup a mainnet where only @dtube is allowed to transfer funds or vote until the IEO completes and the airdrop happens. This is also what enabled us to create a 'steem-only' registration period on the public testnet for the first month. Only @dtube can create accounts, this way we can enforce a 1 month period where users can port their username for free, without imposters having a chance to steal usernames. Through the hard-forking mechanism, we can enable/disable these limitations and easily evolve the rules and permissions of the blockchain, for example opening monetary transfers at the end of our IEO, or opening account creation once the steem exclusivity ends.
Luckily, avalon is decentralized, and all these parameters (like the @dtube fees, and @dtube permissions) are easily hardforkable by the leaders. @dtube will however be a very strong leader in the chain, as we plan to use our vote to at least keep the #1 producing node for as long as we can.
We reserve the right to 'not follow' an hardfork. For example, it's obvious we wouldn't follow something like reducing our fees to 0% as it would financially endanger the project, and we would rather just continue our official fork on our own and plug d.tube domain and mobile app to it.
On the other end of the spectrum, if other leaders think @dtube is being tyranical one way or another, leaders will always have the option of declining the new hardforks and putting the system on hold, then @dtube will have an issue and will need to compromise or betray the trust of 1/3 of the stake holders, which could reveal costly.
The goal is to have a harmounious, enterprise-level decision making within the top leaders. We expect these leaders to be financially and emotionally connected with the project and act for good. @dtube is to be expected to be the main good actor for the chain, and any permission given to it should be granted with the goal of increasing the DTC marketcap, and nothing else. Leaders and @dtube should be able to keep cooperation high enough to keep the hard-forks focused on the actual issues, and flowing faster than other blockchain projects striving for a totally decentralized governance, a goal they are unlikely to ever achieve.
PERFECT IMBALANCE
A lot of hard-forking
Avalon is easily hard-forkable, and will get hard-forked often, on purpose. No replays will be needed for leaders/exchanges during these hard-forks, just pull the new hardfork code, and restart the node before the hard-fork planned time to stay on the main fork. Why is this so crucial? It's something about game theory.
I have no former proof for this, but I assume a social and financial game akin to the one played on steem since 2016 to be impossible to perfectly balance, even with a thourough dichotomical process. It's probably because of some psychological reason, or maybe just the fact that humans are naturally greedy. Or maybe it's just because of the sheer number of players. They can gang up together, try to counter each others, and find all sorts of creative ideas to earn more and exploit each other. In the end, the slightest change in the rules, can cause drastic gameplay changes. It's a real problem, luckily it's been faced by other people in the past.
Similarly to what popular and succesful massively multiplayer games have achieved, I plan to patch or suggest hard-forks for avalon's mainnet on a bi-monthly basis. The goal of this perfect imbalance concept, is to force players to re-discover their best strategy often. By introducing regular, small, and semi-controlled changes into this chaos, we can fake balance. This will require players to be more adaptative and aware of the changes. This prevents the game from becoming stale and boring for players, while staying fair.
Death to bots
Automators on the other side, will need to re-think their bots, go through the developement and testing phase again, on every new hard-fork. It will be an unfair cat-and-mouse game. Doing small and semi-random changes in frequent hard-forks will be a easy task for the dtube leaders, compared to the work load generated to maintain the bots. In the end, I hope their return on investment to be much lower compared to the bid-bots, up to a point where there will be no automation.
Imagine how different things would have been if SteemIt Inc acted strongly against bid-bots or other forms of automation when they started appearing? Imagine if hard-forks were frequent and they promised to fight bid-bots and their ilk? Who would be crazy enough to make a bid-bot apart from @berniesanders then?
I don't want you to earn DTCs unless you are human. The way you are going to prove you are human, is not by sending a selfie of you with your passport to a 3rd party private company located on the other side of the world. You will just need to adapt to the new rules published every two weeks, and your human brain will do it subconsciously by just playing the voting game and seeing the rewards coming.
All these concepts are aimed at directly improving d.tube, making it more resilient, and scale both technologically and economically. Having control over the full tech stack required to power our dapp will prevent issues like the one we had with the search engine, where we relied too heavily on a 3rd party tool, and that created a 6-months long bug that basically broke 1/3 of the UI.
While d.tube's UI can now totally run independently from any other entity, we kept everything we could working with STEEM, and the user is now able to transparently publish/vote/comment videos on 2 different chains with one click. This way we can keep on leveraging the generalistic good features of STEEM that our new chain doesn't focuses on doing, such as the dollar-pegged token, the author rewards/donation mechanism, the tribes/communities tokens, and simply the extra exposure d.tube users can get from other website (steemit.com, busy.org, partiko, steempeak, etc), which is larger than the number of people using d.tube directly.
The public testnet has been running pretty well for 3 weeks now, with 6000+ accounts registered, and already a dozen of independant nodes popping up and running for leaders. The majority of the videos are cross-posted on both chains and the daily video volume has slightly increased since the update, despite the added friction of the new 'double login' system and several UI bugs.
If you've read this article, I'm hoping to get some reactions from you in the comments section!
Some even more focused articles about avalon are going to pop on my blog in the following weeks, such as how to get a node running and running for leader/witness, so feel free to follow me to get more news and help me reach 10K followers ;)
I don't want you to earn DTC Unless you are Human
I can see very Bright future of Dtube & Steem in this Single line :) , DTC & Steem Will definitely gonna Rock more sir 😊.
Waiting for the Day when DTC & Steem will together gonna creates Financial freedom for all of the hardworking & dedicated Steemians :) but the way the process had already been started :) .
Fuck yeah. Of course I have read it. :) some of the technical stuff like always just flow over my head...but You know already I am not that clever lol so no surprises there. But a lot of the stuff You have explained it makes sense and I am happy and excited to see the version 1.0 here and the reset of DTC to come out as a phoenix and take over. Can't wait to see all the cockroachs coming and trying to get a spot as a leader to profit because i believe they will not be able to trick the community on Dtube and they will be picking people that really care about it :)
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wow, what a hell of a post. thank you for sharing this and explaining everything. i'm happy to be a leader witness. i think you really put new life into video for me. thank you!
Yeah i got some videos I need to share somewhere! Signing up fosho!
thank you! Good4Us
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Our 'D'reams 'T'oday for f'u'ture 'be' come true ! :)
GodSpeed DTube 💙 ♬
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It was a long read but I found it extremely interesting. There are some very interesting aspects that I like a lot, such as the fact that there is no "7 days" threshold. I will definitely spend much more of my energy on dtube!
Posted using Partiko Android
I am so excited about most of the points in this article but this one is my favourite:
Unlimited monetization in time
Indeed, the 7 days monetization limit has been our biggest issue for our video platform since day 8. This incentivized our users to create more frequent, but lesser quality content, as they know that they aren't going to earn anything from the 'long-haul'. Monetization had to be unlimited on DTube, so that even a 2 years old video could be dug up and generate rewards in the far future.
I can't wait for the official launch of the new DTube and DTC!
That really enables a lot of Tutorial production and educational Videos creation. Physics does not change every week :))
I like your thinking on this and your emphasis on not repeating the mistakes of Steem. The main benefit of superlinear rewards is that early users who played by the rules had the chance to do well. If there is no difference between early users and late users then how do you attract users away from Youtube or anywhere else where popular users are favored? For example, a Youtube account with millions of followers is favored because they have millions of followers. A Youtube account like this would have no good reason to go to DTube from Youtube if there are linear rewards because Youtube probably pays much better for a user like this.
Now for the true minnows who are starting from scratch I can agree with linear rewards but only to a point. The main issue with superlinear rewards wasn't that some users were getting $1000 or $10,000 for a post as this is not unusual for popular users on Youtube if the content goes viral. The issue was that the same users were getting $1000 or $10,000 a post.
So in my opinion if you can set the rewards so there is no limit that the popular content can earn, but also set it in such a way that the trending users are randomized to a certain extent so the same users don't seem to win every game, then I think it can work.
In other words in Youtube or in any lottery you will always have some content which goes viral, which becomes famous, which can bring in thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and more on Youtube. Youtube if it offers a greater potential to win big rewards, (bigger than DTube) then people will of course focus on Youtube because Youtube simply offers unlimited reward size as there is no cap that I'm aware of for Youtube rewards.
Steem and DTube offer much greater risks than Youtube so the rewards have to be superior. A Youtuber has to share their profit with Youtube but in general the more subscribers you get on Youtube, the more likes you get on Youtube, the more ads you get on Youtube, then you can get estimated $4.18 per 1000 ads on Youtube. $0.0042 per ad view.
DTube has to offer something more than this minimum, my guess something around $5 or so for each post and then the economics make sense. Of course you would have a difficult time achieving that as things scale up unless DTube can remain profitable but it would beat Youtube for most people if most posters can earn $5 for each post on DTube or around that, assuming the posts are of reasonably high quality.
But if it is less than this, then Youtube begins to make more sense. If someone for example posts crypto technical analysis reports on Youtube and on DTube then you would think DTube should pay this kind of content much more considering the topic but if the Youtube post gets 1000+ views suddenly Youtube might earn then more. ANd how many viewers would it even take for 1000 ad views?
500 viewers who see 2 ads during the stream. 250 viewers who see 4 ads during the stream. On top of that there is Patreon which people with lots of subscribers can leverage but for some reason Steem and DTube do not have an easy way for fans to tip or subscribe to content. So in general I think if long term subscription mechanisms are added to reward content then it will have potential to be at least as good as Youtube with Patreon.
I don't know how DTube will make a profit or how the token economics will work to allow for profit sharing. If there is no powering up then how exactly will the token gain value?
This is good and something Steem lacks. The ability to have content which doesn't get old and which can profit essentially for as long as people get value from it is exactly how to provide incentive for high quality content. But how exactly will DTube create enough profit to share this with the content creators? I still am missing that part.
References
Thanks for this in-depth comment!
I agree with you on the fact that YouTube has more audience and can help popular video content creators earn money probably better than DTube right now. I just think it's possible to combine the earnings. With the 'upload a link' feature, people can use YouTube as the 'video storage' and earn from YT ads, and earn STEEM/SBD/DTC/PAL rewards on top of it.
I'm not totally against trying something superlinear in the future, but the way it was before on STEEM was way too harsh for minnows. Overall I agree that having this 'snowball effect' on rewards was nice and creating a stronger hive-mind effect, so maybe we can try it one day on DTube chain through a hardfork.
DTube still plans to monetize the same way as it always did, by taking fees on crypto-rewards, currently set at 10% (it's explained in the governance part of the article)
And having a staking mechanism for 13 weeks, doesnt increase the overall price of the token on the markets. It just delays the sell pressure for 13 weeks, but it's easy enough to see who is powering down, so I doubt it's even achieving that. Bitcoin is fully liquid and has no issue with having value today, it's all about utility. I think STEEM is worth what it's worth because some people want to have more voting power, the same holds true for DTC, the 'power-up' step is just skipped.
DTC can also be burnt to promote videos (just try to upload a video on d.tube), or reserving new usernames for accounts (once the steem-exclusivity period ends), we also have more long term plans for DTC burning around paid vod and advertising.
Do you expect to avoid DTC being seen as a security in the US? It seems to me that by tying the value to the work done by DTube the company directly will be interpreted as an unambiguous failure of the Howie Test
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Good question. We definitely believe our token won't fail the howey test because we are not offering "to invest" into an asset versus "money".
First about the "to invest" statement: DTC will be provided through first an Airdrop to EXISTING users, i.e we won't ask to join a telegram group, to create an account or require any other whatsoever marketing actions to boost DTube popularity in return for receiving DTC.
Second, about the "money" statement.
DTC is a utility token. Through the common run of the network, DTC works as a digital intangible asset as it can be UTILIZED to boost content popularity on the platform, to reward other users by voting and to access premium features or unlock specific in-app gaming features (exp. 2020). It basically follows the same principles of a free to play gaming model with in-app purchases (like candy crush for example).
The SEC considers most cryptocurrency tokens as being securities but why?
It used to be done via ICOs without many rules, and has now evolved to a more regulated version through Security Token Offerings (STO) under the Reg. A filing (the PROPS network has been granted of such this week -after a 2 year evaluation from the SEC...).
I actually like STOs, it is one of the rare use cases where the blockchain adds SIMPLICITY to an existing concept by easing investor onboarding through the sale of company shares held in a token and where shareholder's agreement is executed by a smart contract => this is much easier than having to go to a notary each time the company onboards a new investor. And it is dematerialised, no paperwork needed anymore.
DTube Coins are one of the first real utility tokens based on a sound economic cycle. Authorities and governments are going to understand this better in the future, DTube is leading the way.
Note that the SEC is one of the few regulators in the western world to consider by default all crypto tokens as securities (unlike in the EU, switzerland, singapore, etc.)
Regulated Social Media Content has the purpose to connect and entertain. Free/Decentralised and ICO based Social Media is serving different Gods.
Lot's of ppl do flee from the big platform since the Apocalypse, but they basically have been on the wrong platform from the beginning. Based on the purpose you will find them on different Sites. I can imagine that cat videos and Clip Compilations will underperform on D.Tube, while environmental, news and political talk could bloom beyond imagination. For Bloggers and classical genre-based Influencer is D.Tube a nice "One-Click" extra revenue.
It's better to think of it as a run for users, then as a battle between Platforms - cuz it isn't.
Perhaps linear rewards can work in theory but the problem was when bots started to get involved. If you can keep the bots from being involved and make sure every vote comes from a verified individual account holder then maybe linear rewards has some meaning.
But right now on Steem linear rewards isn't working out well at all. Giving more power to minnows would work if minnows actually use it to curate the content. Content producers win if human beings can review the content rather than bidbots.
Linear rewards isn't what caused the situation with bid bots today. If we switched back to the old curve now that bidbots control the majority of the stake, we would be in an even worse shape as the real contents (ones who dont pay for bidbot) would earn $0.00 and the network would practically become a racket.
The issue is how easy it is to game the distribution algorithm today, and to determine exactly the payout the vote will generate. It's 75% because of author rewards, and the rest is because curation is way too simple and flat in terms of returns for big stake holders. My intent is to try a new algorithm where bots struggle to be efficient, even on linear rewards, without having to trust the whales to maintain the system. Linear rewards is a dream we should try to make come true :)
I didn't say linear rewards is the cause of the bidbots but I do think linear rewards while it had good intentions, had the opposite effect. It seemed to work in the beginning but then somehow human beings stopped curating and bots took over. With the bots now it doesn't work at all.
Linear rewards don't seem to work unless you can prove each account is human controlled and that all curation is done by actual brains and not bots. Linear rewards without KYC level verification of accounts is what led to the situation now I think. A whale could game the system before but we could see it, while now a whale can game the system in ways we cannot see it because any small account could be owned by the same whale.
This is what VOICE is trying to do. Humans are still better than bots at many things, and I think 'video content curation' can be one of them, it's just about balancing the game and not having something so easily exploitable by bots who have the advantage of never sleeping. So I guess we agree on the issue, but not on the way of solving it. For me it's a matter of ethics to not ask my users for information that makes them personally identifiable, so I'll do whatever I can to avoid this.
Wouldn't a maximum Vote Power Cap for Steem do the same? Maybe based on the Network activity. That could break the SP Stacking in Whale Upvote Bots. Or make SP getting duller, maybe even in a logarithmic way.
I'm not going to comment on most of the information you've provided here, except to say that I appreciate the substantive information.
I do need to ask how to change the VP used to vote on Dtube, as I don't see a slider, or any mechanism that enables changing VP.
So, how do I change the VP with which I cast votes? Also, I tried to upvote tags, but every time was presented with a error message that said there was no such tag as I suggested. These things seem either broken, or so counterintuitive to use that they might as well be. I'm not particularly stupid regarding technology, but remain unable to do these things which I understand are critical to Dtube's operation. Please provide clear directions on how to change VP and upvoting/suggesting tags.
Thanks!
It's on the side menu now, linked to the logged in accounts as you can now change the voting power for each blockchain
We will improve it before 1.0 though. It's an important game mechanic now and should be less hidden
Thanks! What about the tags?
Indeed it was half an hour of good read.
You got me thinking here, I appreciate all of this explanation, reasoning and most of all, eye opening.
It's good to see that Dtube will still be deeply connected to Steem while addressing their own needs.
I'm all in for steem, and getting my new Dtube account linked to my steem account seems like a good move. I wish I could vote this higher but at least I can give it a resteem to my 12k followers (beat you on that one :P)
Hm, I'm not a fan of tone in this post. You basically describe different aspects of STEEM, say how bad it is and how perfect solution you have found for dtube. There are doubts, no discussion, just pure perfection of your creation ;)
One question though - where does the value of dtube token comes from?
Anyway good luck, I will be using dtube for sure :)
Not an easy article to write and publish here for sure, because I am biased and opinionated. The goal of this article is not to be gentle. It's about explaining my attempt to improve the concept of STEEM, so mostly only the weaknesses of it are mentioned.
If you think I'm talking trash for nothing and my proposed solutions are not working, just prove it by using dtube and showcase how any point in this article is wrong.
Where does the value of the USD come from? Bitcoin? Ethereum? Steem?
Well I guess DTC will be close to the same answer than STEEM, having no powering up doesn't mean people don't have an incentive to hold it to generate more voting power. DTC also has some burning features like account creation and the promote that you can already try. Another arguable value for the token, will be the incentive to go up in the leaders election, in order to produce more blocks and earn more rewards.
Aye, thanks for the answer. Are you planing to run ads on dtube, where advertisers would need to buy DTC to place their banners etc.?
Probably the only new token to come out of Steem I'm actually interested in, great job so far @heimindanger and the dtube team. Looking forward to see this evolve and looking forward to the IEO.
I have gone through the article. Some technical aspects are not too clear, hopefully, a live discussion on dtube discord channel would help clarify and simplify certain things.
From what I get, dtube might be slightly centralized, that might bother a lot of people. You also mentioned issues regarding multi-purpose blockchains and how they are not scalable in the long, so my questions regarding this are:
Is there a chance in the nearest future that dtube might break from steem? What measures are been put in place that it remains financially viable?.
Some of the guidelines in the new steemit delegation scheme necessitates that any project requiring delegations from steemit should work on steem blockchain and that is not the direction dtube is moving towards. So peradventure dtube loses its delegation, how does it plans to incentivize content creation because that's the main reason most vloggers use the platform and its decentralized nature.
Asides an ICO, what other means is dtube planning on generating revenue to run their platform?
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DTube's chain is not centralized... lol. Well technically you can consider it centralized whenever someone holds more than 1/3 of the stake, which is the case on the current testnet, but won't be the case for the main-net. This blockchain is ran by multiple elected leaders, exactly like STEEM, and @dtube can lose control if leaders created a fork. But @dtube earns 10% of the DTC rewards, and should be able to keep a comfortable lead and stake in the system, but far from enough to be able to control everything on it's own.
DTube has no intention to break from STEEM, the only purpose would be to simplify the UI, at the cost of reducing the rewards of our users (as you said). Also the work in the UI to make it compatible on both is already done, so it would feel like a waste now.
DTube follows the guidelines for the new delegation scheme, we totally use steem. If you don't have a steem account there's no way you're ever gonna post a video on dtube today. Might change in the future, in which case DTube can create about 100 STEEM accounts / day if we used our RCs for that. In my opinion, cooperation can yield greater results than fighting. The dlive event was a bad outcome for steem and dlive in my opinion. Other blockchains profited from the conflict indirectly.
@dtube will keep on earning 10% from STEEM rewards, plus also 10% from DTC rewards now, plus the curation rewards from all the tribe tokens we hold... We also make a bit of money when someone wants a ScotTube (500 ENG). We also plan to have some official dtube merch for sale soon ;)
Thank you for explaining things. I think I get a better picture now.
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Didn't read all of this but I learned few things about STEEM system while reading. I agree with many of the weaknesses. Since DTube is going to be its own blockchain I'm interested in how this will play out.
👏👏👏 Death to the bidbots! This is the best thinking I've seen on these topics. I was failing to understand some of the aspects of the new DTube so this was very helpful for me. This makes me even happier to have the weedcash version of DTube. Thanks for this update. I will be following very closely.
U know who u remind me of...
I always hear his voice now
whenever I read ur comments
I used to think he was cool
now the sound just makes me...
want to vomit! 🤢
so squeaky and clean...
that is he
oh poor altcoin...
Jesus!
lol
omg
!
All I am saying is this is who you remind me of! For some odd reason, i don’t know
Like the guy from the show “Bones!”
That is all!
back to work for me
see ya soon
just wanted to let u know
I was just thinking about ya!
k
OMG earth to the bidbots, Richard Dick You are one big hypocrite! lol
https://steemit.com/weedcash/@coininstant/omg-my-weedcash-wallet-down-again
I think this is very ingenious. Does the voting power of the first voter influence the amount of rewards that an author receives later on?
Yes, just like any other vote, if there's multiple people who are rewarded from a vote, it gets split based on the VP spent.
That's not 25 minutes but i will admit to glossing over the parts i didn't understand. So 4 minutes later.......
I can see where you're coming from and a lot of it is good. One of the biggest for me was a part i saw in the original post and had talked about for a long time which was the payout window for serious creators. Especially video creators who post content that could last for years. It was a serious drawback to the old system.
I hope it works out for you and will be following with interest to see how this new chain and new approach works out.
4 mins? Thats hella fast readin
Wow this is going to be bigger that I expect. Although I didn't understand everything I found this a great read and loved the way you have thrown the established rules on their head and reinvented a more
tailored, humane Blockchain. In particular I like the continuing monetization which I sure will be of grea interest to established content creators and the cat and mouse game to combat bots.
Wishing you and all of us success with this.
That's a very impressive and thorough outline. I login via Steem because trying to create an actual Dlive account wasn't working. I'd create an account and either the Name or Password would not work.
dlive is not dtube ?
They are two different platforms. Two separate logins.
Dlive: https://dlive.tv/
WOW THIS IS A LOT OF INFO! But dam very well laid out. Thanks @heimindange I'm going to do my best to understand this. Much respect.
@steemium purchased a 50.87% vote from @promobot on this post.
*If you disagree with the reward or content of this post you can purchase a reversal of this vote by using our curation interface http://promovotes.com
Can steem benefit from this in any way if dtube takes off? Either directly or indirectly?
If succesful, the steem community would be the biggest benefactor considering 50% of the starting DTC distribution will go directly to them (or at least those who used dtube in the past)
Also, we'd create a bunch of new steem accounts on a daily basis, as we want to maximize rewards for our users we'd likely want to create at least what our RCs permits us to.
Lastly, if some of these concepts are interesting, they could get coded into the steem chain. It's basically about what I said in the first part of the article. STEEM shouldn't be so blind to what others are doing and refuse every new idea. This chain is like a cousin of STEEM, so applying any principle I listed here is doable for STEEM, I just didn't have the influence to convince a crowd that doesn't listen (top witnesses). If some of the stuff I said in this article is true, steem can benefit directly by copying it.
So that is the only way? The vast majority of accounts on here don't use dtube, so no benefit there for most. Doing an airdrop to those that haven't used dtube in the past is probably a good way to grow your user base... you would be bringing in new users instead of ones you already have...
Just a thought.
Regarding the witnesses not listening... well perhaps they are more open now? I mean they did just approve a change that the majority of the community seems to be against. I think a lot of what you are proposing makes a lot more sense than what we are doing by just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic with the EIP.
nice i used dtube in the past, at least in @coininstant account!
Here is where I don't believe you: when you say you didn't have influence to convince (read my comment below). What you should have done is put in the work while they don't listen, post about it regularly (not more than once a month), and people would naturally gravitate towards your ideas if your work is good. STEEM can get exponentially increasing amounts of contributions from devs as the chain grows.
In my opinion, what would have been better for both Dtube and Steem, would be to accelerate the SMTs development process using your help and implement the features you needed as optional for any SMT. Dtube was the main candidate for an SMT, and SMTs are not necessarily clones of the current version of STEEM, they might have changes in their protocols which are not directly implemented to STEEM coin.
The contributions we are getting from developers are systematically centered around making money themselves. Either get top witness, or extract a fee or beneficiary reward from the mass of users. It's a sad game that most developers have been playing on here for a long time, creating a huge competition.
Why would I spend a year of my life working on an open-source code used by people who will actively try to hurt my business with the tools I built? I suppose that if DTube was really considered as the true partner for video on steem, instead of seeing the majority of the community going to DLive when they offered candies, and seeing them doing the same with 3speak now, I would be less salty.
Also finally, to answer your point more pragmatically, I'm just going to link to you to ONE FILE of the steem chain codebase. Just this file has more lines (5600) of code than avalon in its' entirety. I'm a developer, not a garbage man...
No power-up would require a lot of work, similarly to the new proof-of-brain part.
No early-user advantage is impossible on steem because fuckd up in the past and resetting it would be robbery (proposed recently by an ex steemit inc employee).
One chain <=> one app would require me to make a fork of steem so you'd still be crying here.
Perfect imbalance is unachievable on steem because each hard fork requires exchanges to replay the full chain, and afaik that would be very hard to change steem's code now that we've done 20 hardforks like that.
The only concept that you could easily put in STEEM, is removing the limits on the voting power, allowing megavotes, and getting rid of the manabar's maximum.
Okay let's say I want to start working on that concept. Let's say I code it into steem on a separate branch. Let's say I make a pull request and propose it with a steem post, and on the private slack where all witnesses are. What would happen then? First, more than 2/3 of the witnesses wouldn't react to it. The rest would combat it, find irrefutable arguments on why it shouldn't be merged, or just distract the conversation away onto less focused topics. I've seen it happen more times than I can count. More than 1/3 of the witnesses are profiting from bidbots and there are 'risks' around hardforking steem (e.g. exchanges going maintenance mode during the replay that takes days). Even if somehow steemit inc pushed for it and convinced everyone to merge my changes, it wouldn't get in production until the next planned hardfork. And, to hit the nail in the coffin, feel free to check out the publish date of the hardfork we are currently on, and now imagine having to wait that long to make changes happen to your website.
You focus on the negatives of staying with steem. What about the positives? What about the negatives of starting you own chain, getting adoption etc... I don’t know honestly if you start providing value to steem and post about it I don’t see why you wouldn’t have become a witness yourself. Also, 3speak is not any kind of partner to STEEM and you were treated equally to Dlive. If people decide to post somewhere other than Dtube, it’s their own choice. Maybe it’s because oracle d and theycallmedan give everything to steem? All they do is provide value, so people want to help them. Play their game, and don’t focus on useless witnesses. It cam only get better with time.
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Will D.Tube create Steem Accounts / or promote Steem Accounts creation in a special way?
So it's basically a sister-chain?
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What do you mean sister-chain? It's two separate blockchains with totally different codebase.
Avalon just shares many similar concepts like the proof of brain, the account ledger, the dpos-like consensus, the ressource system instead of fees for transfers, etc.
@steemflagrewards bid bot usage
https://steemit.com/steemleader/@mysearchisover/steemleader-abuse-stats-140790-23-638
I have read through this very carefully and have to say I like what I see. Yes it is a smart course to differ from Steem/it where there have been obvious flaws. I totally respect you for not doing a DLive as that was not good business and has tarnished that platform in my eyes.
I am proud and happy to be a part of the Dtube community, and look forward to seeing this chain grow and succeed!
If you think about it in the end, DLive and DTube almost did the same and I mean that with no disrespect but the big difference is DTube just explained all the multiple reasons why it has to leave, DLive left quickly but for the same reasons DTube is leaving it's not the action that matters it's the reason behind the move that counts, in business if you don't move quick you risk losing it all if it's too late.
DLive had to leave because the business model was killing their platform and with the jerking around with SMT's that were suppose to be released a while ago, imagine they would've stayed? It would just be a full circle jerk of bidbots. No Famous content creator from another platform would've ever gave it a chance 100% under those circumstances.
DTube has to do the same as it needs to think about it's survival and future, @heimindanger is just doing what he needs to do, to keep his platform alive and growing and as you can see he's put in a great deal of effort trying to do that, but his efforts trying to help move steemit in a better direction obviously didn't work because of the odds stacked against him.
When platforms leaving becomes a trend it's time to stop pointing fingers at the platforms and it's time to look at the corruption and bad business models making this trend happen.
I hope everything goes well with your platform @heimindanger !
You wouldnt believe how happy i am that you said this. This is something i was saying about Dtube content from day one. People were simply incentivized to do the bare minimum, to reach the threshold of quality good enough for a dtube upvote.
It is unfortunate but i cant remember any content creator on Dtube doing something more, investing into a single piece of content that can stand the test of time.
And its really not them to blame. I can understand them. The name of the game was "consistency and quantity."
I will be honest and say that i was extremely annoyed by this. (as you might know :) )
Since consistency and quantity was what made you win, quality was considered less and less.
Even i just gave up on trying to create anything greater because i knew that the videos where i spent hours and hours, where i would get a professional producer ( I made only 3 of those) werent worth making when i could make 20 lower effort videos in that time and make more money. I did try my best to improve but my editing skills were never top notch.
The system in place never encouraged focusing on quality and without quality you cant really have a successful Dtube.
I contacted you a few days ago on Discord (now i know why you are busy. :) ) and im happy to say that i managed to scrape up the 1000 USD i needed to make the type of content i always wanted to make.
Still, because this is Steem i know that i could have made at least 15 videos in the time it took to make this one and based on my previous payouts i know i would have made at least 200-300 USD from them.
But i decided to give that up and take a loss because it is time we changed our mindset. We are taking but arent giving our best. And we are all guilty of it.
Amazing news and i cant wait for newdtube to take off. I know it will. :)
The problem is, that anyway, all my DTube videos didn't work anymore after some weeks, so that I always had to save them at another place, too. So even in case they were good they had no chance anyway to "stand the test of time". :) (Concerning the quality, all my videos are precious for me to remember certain moments, and I want to keep them forever, even if I am not a skillful video creator at all.)
Many ideas in this post above sound very interesting and innovative, but as long as videos don't last long on the platform, DTube isn't a real option for me.
Run your own IPFS node and store your videos there. Then as long as your IPFS node is online, your videos are available. If your videos are good someone like me might even save a copy of your video to my own node. The network then has 2 more places to find copies of it.
You can use a raspberry pi and a 6TB hdd all for under $300 USD.
I am super stoked about these new changes.
I more or less stopped using d.tube because of the 7 day payout limit. I wanted to make tutorials that that could collect on votes even 20 years out.
With this new d.tube and my own IPFS node, now I can! Woho! Good job, thanks and I look forward to posting a bunch to d.tube
I am new on D.Tube and was wondering what this IPFS was. I am a veteran YouTuber with over 30K minutes of viewing time a month. I just uploaded my second video, and the entire process is still new to me. I would love to look into this Pi and HDD build. Is there a required ISP or recommended monthly bandwidth? I am so pampered with the Google video servers but I have never received a nickel from them! I am already into another PC build so a Pi server is long overdue.
Screen Shot 2019-08-22 at 10.53.11 PM.png
(Caution: Talking out my butt. The comment below is from reading, not experience)
No ISP requirements that I know of, just internet access. And the bandwidth calculation would be based on how much outbound traffic you expect to serve at one moment. 5 people watching 5 viedos in 24 hours, my guess is a 2 to 5MB upload would be more than enough, unless all 5 hit at the same moment.
100's of people watching all day long obviously needs more upload but the data will also start caching on other nodes so it will spread the load a bit too.
The IPFS also caches your videos on some nodes and allows me (others) to create a local copy of your data. Then, if it's more efficient to serve the data (closer, faster) for my IPFS to server, it takes it from my server first. Thus reducing the load on your internet connection. But it doesn't automatically replicate your data to other nodes, it does that based on how much it gets accessed.
This is my current understanding I could be wrong but not on purpose.
Didn’t take me 25min to read but will probably take me a few days to understand 😅
I like no early user advantage and no limit on voting power (somewhat currently biased as I had to dial back a bit the last few days as i have pathetic vp and like doing min 1c votes which means higher percentage votes which runs it down faster and then eventually can’t do 1c votes anymore so time to stop), though the mega vote thing is simultaneously terrifying and a really cool sounding option 😆
Also really like the unlimited monetisation time, that’s been a thing that’s bugged me somewhat here (and on the other two platforms I’m playing on).
The voting system also sounds interesting. I think I got it but will have to watch it work to see if I did 😅
Think you may have built the kind of system I want. Now all I have to do is get to a state where I can make videos to play with it 🙃
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Wow, got me interested! I have to read this whole thing through! Can’t wait to hear about running the witnesses! I want it, sounds like from what I’ve read so far! All these great points you bring up, some if which I didn’t even realize until now! Sick News! Upvoted!
Is this another currency?
Don't understand probably 80% of the techie stuff in article. But safe to say wherever Dtube goes I will definitely Follow :)
Seems like a pretty solid setup. The mega upvote might lead to less spreading of power as people save up to vote on only their content. Is there any system in place to stop this?
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how do you get dtc tokens? i didn't get airdrop - or not that i can see anyway
atm its a testnet everyone gets 100 DTC for creating the account with the same username as you have on steem. But mainnet is scheduled to open at the end of the IEO period, and the airdrop will be released then. Right now, its just a testnet with worthless DTCs but you can still try to play the game and get a feel for it before it gets live.
thanks
Going to need to finish this but this stuck out.
I've mentioned dynamic inflation to another user but what I didn't do was base it on active stake which I think is really slick that you chose that way.
I was thinking it adjusting to market value but now that I consider, that is a poor metric to use as it is something that could be manipulated.
Hmmm. I get the distinct feeling I've heard about something like this before.🤪
I just can't put my finger on it.🤔
So, the idea is once I post is zeroed, folks get rewards from getting to that point? I plan on perusing the GitHub and getting a better feel.
I still need to rebuild my box but am interested in what you got going on for sure. I would like to run a leader and contribute more.
Btw created a new video to dtube. Think it has its moments. Premise was someone tweeted about one being as cool as the # of network interfaces on their system. Long story short. Found the loophole in loopback adapters. Hope yall get some shits and giggles out of it. :)
Dynamic inflation is also the way I call it. I believe it is a necessary feature for a social blockchain trying to distribute rewards as fairly as possible, and trying to make it work 'forever'. The goal is to have a stable monetary incentive for people to join or stay active. On STEEM, we saw this incentive going down a lot through time as more users join, and the reward pool declines (even if you look at it in STEEM, not $), then reward_pool/users (i.e. the average incentive) goes down even faster.
About downvote rewards, it works just like upvotes. You cannot 'zero' a DTC content. If you downvote, the content payout will actually increase, because your downvote will reward past downvoters. What you can lower (even lower than 0), is the 'Voting Power' spent on the content by just downvoting enough. For example if you manage to keep the content's VP (upvotes_vp - downvotes_vp) in the negatives, then the author of the video would stop earning rewards even if someone upvotes his video, because the popularity is currently lower (<0) than what it was when the author voted (0).
For a long time in 2018, YouTube did the same, Videos went super-viral if they had tons of downvotes. As long as they did not violate the rules, obviously. Maybe they still do, I dont know, I dont can't make a case for it.
Sorry it was 2016 :))
I rally love it you taking a new approach to social networking and rewarding. as you mentioned, Steem has been quite static with the model they use, while competitors around the world are trying new ways. We need to experiment with different approaches to determine what method works best to grow the service(s). I certainly will test DTube as it is now to determine if I like it. Cool it is possible for content creators to post on YouTube and have the same post at DTube! I'll be more a curator than a content creator, since I have no skills in video editing. But maybe someday, I'll try and learn more about producing videos :)
DTube enhancement Idea
Would you consider to add an extra channel to DTube? A channel which shows content in a random order? I've seen this at some other social media not related to Steem and at SteemHunt, and really like it. Such random post channel provides some additional exposure to any content creator whilst nobody is favoured. It certainly appeals to people who like to discover content of any kind, like myself and offers the opportunity for content creators to be discovered whilst not having to buy into the system with a lot of money.
We want to add more ways to filter contents in the UI soon. Original contents, livestreams, nsfw are good examples. Worst contents or Random is also a possibility.
This new DTube is about curation. We want everyone to use DTube, even people who don't create videos, but just want to watch them or comment on it, so feel welcome :)
Thanks! Already started my curation and engagement activities :)
I don't understand. You are proposing small and debatable improvements, with the only major change being the fact that there is no power up. Why not use all the energy you put into Avalon to improve the Steem blockchain instead, getting voted as a witness in the meantime by doing 4 or 5 posts with updates.
Yes, STEEM was very slow and disappointed you, but the whole point (especially with the SPS) is that talented devs like you should carry it forward. If you are capable of creating a blockchain, you are certainly capable of getting us SMTs faster.
Also, I know that @ned and most people at Steemit, Inc really respect you. You could have endless discussions with them about Proof of Brain when designing SMTs, getting the features you would require for Dtube coin.
I fear that creating your own blockchain was bad for both STEEM and Dtube, and I hope that if Steemit, Inc starts working a bit faster you might come back and create an SMT one day, even help with the development of STEEM.
I already answered most of it in your other comment. But yeah, I also wish things went faster, starting 2 years ago. I can still remember in Lisbon (SF2) @ned telling me how the SMTs would be on the testnet in january 2018!!
Now it's a bit late in my opinion, and releasing SMTs now won't really do so much considering we're in 2019 and all other decent chains have similar solutions. We even have community-built solutions like steem-engine to do it without leaving steem chain. That's what I told SteemIt Inc staff recently in a call where they questioned me about SMTs.
SteemIt Inc said this year was about survival and focusing on a specific part of STEEM. For me it should be the economics and pob. There's tons of research and experimentation required to achieve a truly fair distribution, which is the ultimate goal. It's the interesting part of STEEM, the one which got us the most results (most users are on steem because of this feature in the first place). Yet, instead, devs prefer working on yet another UI that does the same thing as the previous one, or finding new concepts (games, exchanges, gambling) to connect into STEEM and profit. NOBODY wants to do the blockchain work for free, if it benefits everyone.
SPS will be used for syphoning imo. The same people currently acting bad in the network will exploit it. It will pay for a few people's vacations in bangkok basically. HF21 should be just the EIP. Instead we force the SPS in it, because we know people are all dying for the econ changes, so they just say yes. Also, the SPS will take rewards away from the contents reward pool, so you can imagine how I feel about it :))
Yes, all people want to do is siphon rewards, and this is precisely why they will work for free on blockchain development. Once you get addicted to earnings on STEEM, you will do everything to keep the blockchain working and improve it. First build a business, then improve the blockchain. People will do this eventually wether you believe it or not.
Anyway, I’m angry we lost you and hope you come back when things get better.
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You didn't lose me, I've always believed in the plurality of blockchains. I believe multiple chains can co-exist, and maybe even cooperate to create value, in some kind of win-win situation. That's what I'm trying to do here if you check the work done on the UI...
And I don't think the community would be able to take over the blockchain's code. As I said in the article, I believe we will witness the fall of the shared blockchain model in the next few years. At the moment you could easily squeeze all the crypto transactions (btc+eth+eos+everything) in the same DPOS chain (would only fill 2% of the 18K tx /sec). Once people realize we can't technically fit the total crypto transactional volume in a single chain anymore, mentalities will evolve and maximalists will have to concede, and every single project will go for customized and dedicated chains like we are doing. Marking these words on the chain right now
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of that. On aother note, why not create a proposal for the SPS and fix some issue you find in the blockchain code? I would be happy if you tried to syphon funds out of STEEM ;)
I am serious though
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Currencies and crypto-currencies value is about trust. Would you trust the DTC if the guy who created and designed it was a 'black-hat' hacker who syphoned or scammed another chain? Even if you do because you respect this form of active challenge, do you think it would increase the trust in DTube for the average person? I don't think so, at least not if you think long-term.
I will create proposals for the SPS, but not with the goal of syphoning.
I'm very happy to hear that.
I finally understand your Icon, you might actually be the real Snowball (aka Snuffels) with a huge Batteriepack on his back.
Thank you very much for this thourough explanation, I have read it once, and will have to read it a few times more to process it all, stay awesome.
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Also you see contributions to STEEM as waste of time... how?!?! Your investment?? Your coin. Invest more and make it better
Posted using Partiko iOS
i am lost with this one. so there is no author rewards and only thing author earns is his own vote? i feel i got this wrong, or at least i hope i got it wrong.
Yes there's no author rewards directly.
But the author still has an 'edge' in the curation algorithm for being the 1st to vote. As the content remains >0 in terms of popularity (upvotes-downvotes), the author will keep on earning curation rewards on each vote, while this won't be true for all voters 'in the middle'
sorry i am lost with this. so i vote 1dtc on my content, and then i have 10 votes after mine that are all upvotes , what are my earnings on that other upvotes?
you vote with the voting power, not the DTC. DTC generates VP at the rate of +1VP/hour/dtc you hold.
When people upvote, it converts the VP of the current vote into DTCs, and splits it between curation winners, it depends on the activity of the network... If people start voting more, as the number of printed DTC is stable, then you need to spend more VP to print DTCs.
so i theory (removing downvotes) as long as someone is voting on something, everybody that voted before get a part of it?
No, it's based on the popularity of the content at the moment of each vote. The algorithm is explained in details in the 'New proof of brain' part of this article.
over my brain thing. i will just have to see it in work.
thanks for trying.
haha that works too, you can check DTC rewards in 'My Channel' -> Rewards tab
I really tried to read it all... i was very interested to begin with and liked a few things.
Also i appreciate that you put a lot of time and thought into it.
However as I read through it I realized this is a huge test, maybe even a big long shot... and so I probably didn't finish it. Not because I don't respect you for trying to shoot for the moon with something different. But because it really is a wild theoretical experiment with little basis in anything else done. Which is part of your excitement I get it... you're seeing yourself as pioneering. While many of us are just like... welll I guess we'll see how long this lasts.
You also kinda threw the baby out with the bathwater with the steem system and didn't really chat about what helped it last for years even with it's flaws. I would have liked to see a bit more of that.
POB stuff I'm seeing on steem-engine is rampant with some big issues of creators printing themselves tons of money for doing something that is Crazy easy. Scot systems are not hard at all so makes it just too easy to create a low level white paper and people seem to excuse the creators for giving themselves 10%+ of the pie of a potential economy that needs so much more work on economic stability.
You didn't mention too much of your economic model. Maybe it's somewhere else.
But best of luck to you i suppose. It's not terribly interesting to me on the theoretical area, but i will be watching in the practical area. And maybe i'll bookmark this paper and re-read it when my brain isn't fried this late.
Nice username & nice comment :D
The whitepaper has more info about the economic model of the token
WOW! I'm impressed at just the time and thought you've put into that whitepaper!!
Holy crap if steem-engine pob tokens even put in 10% that ammount of time maybe they'd have something solid instead of creating economically unstable systems that will get them into hot water by rewarding themselves tons of money and use a 50/50 curation system to keep their money continuosly outpacing everyone else.
With that said i'm still presently more a fan in the steem system... but i'll try to read through what you wrote and see what elements seem nice.
Anyone can sell anything at the Price he wants, as long as there is someone to buy it. We make up the Value of things all the time in our lives. The Scot Systems and the Steem-Engine are just a technical and easy way to make the transactions. You just need to understand the Tinkerbell Effect.
Maybe this Video will help you:
Congratulations @heimindanger!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following categories:
This is definitely really interesting and you know that I'm already on board and will continue to upvote. Does this mean the DTC's are now not in "test" mode?
they are still in testnet. The real ones will be after the IEO, and it will be written in big and bold in the title :)
Is there a minimum buy-in for the IEO? And when will it begin?
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Thanks man!
Highly rEsteemed!
This all sounds reasonable, and well thought out. Good luck as you continue to develop dtube. Its good that you are continuing to support STEEM, and still growing out in your own way at the same time with your own unique chain.
O'Right!
I just finished reading the article, now I will read ALL the comments, let just upvote this real quick before :))
Thank you for doing a hell of a job with your project. Will the double login issue go away once you migrate off of the STEEM blockchain?
Will DTCs be available for purchase?
I still continue getting errors on mobile browsers with "error private posting key" when attempting to do the DTube login.
No issues on mobile browsers with STEEM log in.
Ideas?
Posted using Partiko Android
We arent migrating off the steem chain, the double login will stay.
Tokens will be for sale, we will have a subdomain token.d.tube explaining everything when it happens.
Are you sure you are using the right key to login with dtube chain? Its the one your backed up on step 1 of the account creation. It was saved in a .txt file normally :)
The earned DTC on the Testnet will be deleted and you Airdrop again with the V1.0, right?
Yes, I tried using both private posting and the private active key with no success.
I'll try again with the keys on the .txt file.
Thanks.
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This is all pretty great, seriously.
However, I just want to be able to post 5 tags again. I hate not being able to post in multiple tribes at once because of this.
so you want more shitcoins to earn, but not more tags. Noted!
Hahaha if tags stay the same I’ll still use DTube, it’s the best video option on Steem by far
I like this article very well because there is a lot to learn in this article
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STOPVote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
This made my day, and it is also so true. People have this misunderstanding that it is somehow important for an App to be built entirely on Steem, as if that somehow brings more value to STEEM. Yet, everyone would be out of their mind if a big tech company were to only incorporate a tiny bit of Steem into their product(s). It would imo make more sense to focus on what particular value proposition Steem can bring to social apps and online businesses in general, including complementing projects built mainly around other blockchains. It's all about maximizing the pie, not insisting that every inch of the pie states like Steeem.
Great, i resubscribed, good to see my one video back.
If i may suggest something, make a seperate part for music videos, youtube is killing thiscwith their youtube red service, and to much commercials
Innnteresting. I really like this voting/rewards model and am eager to see how it plays out. Almost makes me wish I was more interested in video in general.
Very intriguing! I have signed up to claim an avalon account the same as my steem name, and am now publishing videos on d.tube!
I think you are on to something with only curation and the author votes first! Can't wait to get data from this great experiment :)
Hope this new system will fire up the users moral and steem will pump up soon.
Avalon, well the 25 minutes stipulated ain't enough but 8 did manage to have a not so bad first read.
Some of my random highlights: misuse of the downvote power which ends up yielding nothing and the ugly point is - evil usage.
People with bigger stakes feeling like donating (what is branded as upvoting) their hard earned stake to tiny peasants who might not have been present for a longer period.
Let me dive in for a thorough read, I do love the concept at large seeing that am supposed to be working in the blockchain ecosystem soonest.
So d.tube is under the Avalon blockchain now? Oh man, time for my nose to bleed again when I check on using d.tube... 🤣
!tts2mp3
your post got gtts'd by me - klick to play
I like the way you think! Every change you've made is an improvement and I'm interested to see how the curation will work on your platform.
Once the system is running well, will the current tokens be switched to "real" ones and where they can be bought?
Will it be possible to have different voting weights, when voting on a dtube video for example, give a 100% vote in dtube, but only 5% in steemit, for the same video? I would like it to be able to do it, to save some VP in Steem.
Nice and informative article
That was a very detailed post and I’m glad I read every word.
Although I actually only understood about 75% of it - which is a actually a testament to how clearly you have written it, because I’m quite thick when it comes to anything at all technical or mathematical.
I feel like your team has learnt a huge amount from your experience on STEEM and I will be around to be a part of dTubes IEO launch.
Exciting times ahead 😎
Posted using Partiko iOS
thanks
I didn't post for a few days, had a lot of VP saved up and posted a video. It used all my VP but I didn't have any DTC on the video?
Can you not self vote at all?
You would need two accounts to self vote and print yourself DTC.
Everything is 100% curation rewards and we force you to self-vote when you publish, but this vote always generates 0 DTC because there are no previous curators to reward.
You will earn on future votes though, and based on the used VP (the more VP the bigger share of rewards from future upvotes)
Ah ok. So save my vp on my vids unless they will be big? Thanks mate
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Followed. Wish you success on this project.
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I didn't understand everything here but I get the gist and if @old-guy-photo thinks it's a good thing then that's good enough for me.
Thanks for the post.
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Sorry for putting this here but you don't seem to have any links for contacting you.
I was just playing with your new Captcha for tokens website and got the attached when claiming. Firefox on Mac.
Fun idea!
Hello Dear, i want to ask you when the Avalon blockchain will be usable ?
and when the dtube coin airdrop will be ?
thanks a lot for your huge work !
Avalon's public testnet is already available on d.tube since a month and running smooth :) That's where the DTC 'points' are coming from currently.
The mainnet is still not announced, check our whitepaper for more info on the schedules.
I'm a little late to the party but I must say I'm very impressed and this was an extremely interesting read. I became frustrated with DTube and stopped trying to use it back in March but I read this entire post and all the comments and I'm excited.
There were a lot of things that you mentioned that I'm seriously 100% on the same page with. For instance not having the Power UP or a dollar pegged coin. I can't even count how many times where people were super confused with the difference between Steem Power, STEEM, and STEEM Dollars even after they had been on the platform for 6 months.
I'm with you on the thinking that Powering Up the coins actually provides a very negative reaction for investors. SCORUM has a 12 month power down cycle and that is simply way too long. 3 Months on STEEM is too long and provides absolutely no value. If there was a staking procedure I could see 3 days or a week or something but if you can solve it by just keeping it liquid then that is awesome.
Also I'm with you on not wanting to fight over resources on a shared chain. That has been one of the biggest issues with EOS and Ethereum. The advantage is clearly liquidity and and already built in on ramp. Like you said though, this couldn't be built on STEEM or EOS.
The part about the rewards continuing for indefinitely is HUGE. 7 day payouts just really kills things. I'm still getting paid from YouTube videos I put up in 2012.
Creating a moving target so bots can't just take over is another big thing I liked about your post. I have said for a long time that Steemit Inc could have at least kept mixing up the trending page. They could have said the number of upvotes by accounts with over 100sp, the amount of comments by accounts with reps higher than 50, the amount of views, and amount of resteems would rank higher on trending or some way of mixing up the trending page to take the power away from the bidbots and then keep changing and tweaking it but they just kept it as stake weight for 3 years and ran their own investment into the ground. To me it was insane.
Also I like your approach of not utilizing KYC to determine if a person is a real person. Block One is shooting themselves in the foot by trying to use that method for Voice in my opinion. It is unlikely I will even sign up for it.
I'm super excited to see how all this works and how much demand is driven to DTC. I'm still a little fuzzy conceptually on if this will allow the best content to rise up and get paid the most or not. Just because people could vote at all different times. Sometimes I'm watching a video and it could be a couple minutes in and a person can say something I like and I will like it on YouTube. Also I'm imagining someone can still run an auto voter on this chain for creators they want to support.
I guess my thinking is if the algorithm doesn't take into account how long a person watches the video for , how many views it gets, and how many comments it gets then it is hard to determine if it is someone really engaged or not. So much of YouTube's algorithm seems to be about engagement to where even if someone hits the thumbs down and says the person is a complete idiot it is still engagement and YouTube still rewards that.
I have thought a lot about the subject of how it changes a person's behavior when the curators are getting paid and whether they genuinely see value and like the content or if they are just jumping on board because they know other people are piling on the upvotes and so they do to so they can get a piece of the money. Where as on YouTube and Reddit the people aren't getting paid to currate so it is a totally different value exchange. They are exchanging their time for entertainment or knowledge with no expectation of a monetary kickback.
It is kind of like when I'm talking to a woman. I have to gold digger test her by acting like I'm somewhat broke to see if she is still interested. If she still wants to hang out thinking I'm broke I know she is really into me. If someone on YouTube watching my video and thanks me and tells me how they trust my opinion with no expectation of getting a monetary kick back I truly know they really liked the video.
I just think that dynamic is going to be hard to tell through this type of curation system. Only time will tell how it works out.
I'm excited to see what happens though!!! Great job!
Wow, as amazing as all that content was, what really impressed me was not so much the depth of the content, but the fact that I could actually understand it. Despite having been here on steemit now for around 18 months, I am still quite slow on the uptake, when it comes to crypto geek code speak.
I have tried to learn as I go, but when reading tech stuff, I find myself having to re-read the same paragraphs over and over and still suffer the DFE (Dead Fish Eye - also known as the Homer Simpson look). The fact that someone as genius as yourself, can write a post this long, and not lose someone like me 1/3 of the way through it, fills me with confidence, that any project you take on will be worth backing.
Mucho respeto.
Peace.
thanks @heimindanger Thanks @dtube Peace & Brain
Shame, shame, shame on you...
December 16, 2019... 10.5 Hollywood Time...