In this instance, heavy inflation might actually be a plus for STEEM. This is because it doesn't appear to be intended as a store of value, but as an influence market.

As far as I can tell - and I'm sure there's a lot I've misunderstood - STEEM is essentially a market for on-line influence. You gain STEEM for upvotes etc. and the more STEEM tokens you have (STEEM Power), the more influence you have in terms of who gets STEEM tokens.

Now, this sounds kind of pyramid-y to begin with, but without significant inflation, such a system would seem doomed to form an oligopoly of a few users who, by virtue of their "STEEM Power" would gain an ever-increasing share of the tokens minted, pushing everyone else out and probably killing the whole ecosystem. Of course, that may still happen even with inflation.

> Now, this sounds kind of pyramid-y

Unlimited money creation is never sustainable, history shows. An online attention coin can't change economics. The future of television probably is not build on a high inflation economy or destructive hyperinflation. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=high+inflation+~economy

It sounds like they're not trying to create general-purpose money. They've made a token to track influence. They use inflation so old stored influence loses half its value every year. You can't rest on your laurels, if you want influence you have to have provided value recently.

You are completely wrong, and the above people, about steem doubling every year for the total amount, it only increases by something like less than 10% per year.You or someone above you linked an article from 2016 that has very outdated information.

I figured people here might actually do any amount of research instead of just saying vague statements like "resting on your laurels". You have no idea what you are commenting on because it is 2 year old information, but you are acting like an expert. Pathetic.

I’ve been a fan of half-life based ratings/reviews because they allow improvement by increasing the weight of recent input - this feels somewhat similar.

It's interesting to compare this with HN karma. Karma is similarly inflationary, for the same reason: HN would incentivize a very different kind of dialogue if you only gained karma that someone else lost. The difference of course is that there's not a market that I know of for buying into or cashing out of karma, although it's easy to imagine how this could emerge.

Karma is inflationary, but not in the same monetary sense because karma-as-a-signalling mechanism is more valuable precisely because they cannot be traded between accounts. I guess using the popular blockchain buzzwords of the day we should be calling karma a type of "proof of valuable comment history".

It is proof of mind, and there are no miners anymore. By posting and someone upvoting you they are allocating the rewards that the steem witnesses generate. Witnesses all run servers and are chosen by democratic votes from all steem users to represent steem. The list of current witnesses who have power changes from time to time. Someone who was in power last month might not be in power for a few months as it changes between witnesses, giving an actual chance of getting rid of bad actors, whereas in proof of work mining there is 0% chance of taking out a bad actor as the miner owns their equipment and there is nothing you can do.

There is a lot more you need to read and that is ok, you barely have any understanding of the fundamentals.

People are able to allocate their steempower to other users. If large accounts are misbehaving, small and medium sized accounts band together to make it stop, it is mutually assured destruction. Anyone can band together with anyone else and allocate power from their account to someone else. The super majority of people are good natured and want free speech and band together to combat against abusive/bad actors, of which there is only a handful on steemit and there is no issue at all

Just curious...how do they implement inflation? Do they just double everyone's wallet every 2 years, or do they introduce the new coins through mining?

It's mining but most of the mining rewards are distributed to content creators and only 1 out of 20 blocks are going to the actual miner while 19 go to the witnesses (Delegated Proof of Stake).

The STEEM blockchain is not centralized, and the governance is done through voting witnesses (people running the steem source code). There are hundreds of people running it => https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Also the supply is not set to double every year, this source is completly outdated. This model was changed more than a year ago. Current inflation rate is 9.5% per year, reducing by 0.5% per year until it reaches 1% per year (I believe)

The coin isn't worthless at all... It's publicly traded at around 3$ today on many exchanges.

Lastly the quote about IPFS is mine, and I actually believe we will be able to make people seed the video they are currently watching through our embed player soon, thanks to the progress of js-ipfs.

The coin is far from worthless - the way Steem's blockchain is structured (DPOS) makes liquid steem constantly disappear from the market, since a vast majority of users that actually generate a significant amount of steem invest in their account - freezing their Steem in the process (effectively removing the coins from the market).

Also, I don't think I need to mention the fact that Steem is not a coin for trading (even though it has 3 sec transactions and literally 0 transaction fees thanks, again, to DPOS), so the big initial inflation that will slow down by a big margin every year is potentially good for the coin.

Is there a link to your project?

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki "Tribler: an attack-resilient micro-economy for media", first code April 2005

Very neat project. Since you are one of the contributors, I'd like to ask a philosophical question:

The wiki has this quote (emphasis mine)

>Tribler is a Bittorrent-compatible alternative to Youtube. It is designed to protect your privacy, build a web-of-trust, be attack-resilient, and reward content creators directly. We are building a micro-economy without banks, without advertisers, and without any government

I see this sentiment in almost all blockchain/crypto circles, including a lot of government funded research groups.

1.) How does that get unified in the mind of contributors? How does working to abolish the very thing that enables you to do your research without having to make bank doing it 2.) It seem to me that in general people want government. See Thomas Hobbes et.al. for studies in academia, or whichever region descended into anarchy most recently. Whenever things are "improving" you see government emerging. Why is so much rhetoric directed against government, when really what everyone is talking about is abusive government?( Which is a much messier problem to even define, but seem to me to be ultimately the correct problem people are trying to solve. That might be be done through building decentralized government -I think so -, but there are cases where centralization makes sense.)

What a side trail this could be!

I'd like to dispel the "anarchy == chaos" sentiment. Anarchy as a political philosophy has a long history of deep thought behind it. I personally see it more as a direction than an end goal. Anarchism is a desire to abolish all unnecessary and/or involuntary hierarchies. As Noam Chomsky puts it in [this interview][1], "it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but anarchism is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none."

In fact, a functioning anarchist polity exists in the world right now: the [Democratic Federation of Northern Syria][2]. Other such political arrangements have existed for brief periods in the past (one other example is [Revolutionary Catalonia][3]). Why have none of them lasted? It seems more to do with traditional hierarchical nation-states attacking and re-subverting them than any internal failing.

I don't know of the Thomas Hobbes studies that you reference when you say that _people want government_, but I would question it. I find it self-evident that "shared resources require _governance_", but I see no reason that such governance needs to look like a traditional nation-state. People don't want _chaos_, people don't want _mob rule_. But again, the problems of chaos and mob rule can be solved without traditional nation-states. I'm sure societies that trend toward anarchism could also find (voluntary, non-coercive) ways to fund basic research.

So yes, I say. Let's find ways to build economies without governments. Let's find ways to offload some of the centralized work of governments to decentralized technologies. Money, for example. Keeping official ledgers, for example. Let's think about how we can restructure society so that power is more diffuse, rather than being so concentrated. Governments already exist, and will continue to be a useful (if fraught) tool for governing many things, but maybe they don't need to micromanage all of it anymore.

  [1]: https://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Federation_of_Northern_Syria
  [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

I am familiar with Rojava (which in my opinion is not a good showcase if you want people to reevaluate anarchy, since it is still an active warzone with a common uniting foe, teters dangerously close towards cult of personality and has yet to prove that it would retain it's anarchic qualities after the survival struggle) and anarchic political theory. I'm mainly interested in understanding perspectives. So already thank you for sharing yours.

>Why have none of them lasted? It seems more to do with traditional hierarchical nation-states attacking and re-subverting them than any internal failing.

Different perspective(slightly provocative): people in a competing anarchic polity who had chosen to centralise more to be more efficient wiped out a competitor. It just looks like a nation state to you, because you frame it that way. Really it's people acting in what they perceive to be their best interest.

>But again, the problems of chaos and mob rule can be solved without traditional nation-states.

Sure, I mainly agree. But I think the next step is scaling the swiss model upwards, or making organizations like the EU more democratic. Anarchy is basically the equivalent "rewriting the whole codebase from scratch" in software: simpler in execution, but throws out the baby with the bathwater(and then not thinking through things properly and relying on "charity" and other notions).

>So yes, I say. Let's find ways to build economies without governments. Let's find ways to offload some of the centralized work of governments to decentralized technologies. Money, for example. Keeping official ledgers, for example. Let's think about how we can restructure society so that power is more diffuse, rather than being so concentrated. Governments already exist, and will continue to be a useful (if fraught) tool for governing many things, but maybe they don't need to micromanage all of it anymore.

Agreed. How do we deal with taxation? This is the elephant in the room: lots of people don't like taxes (even though they payed for starting almost everything good in this world, including the transistor and the internet), so how do we replace that system for funding common goods in our decentralized world?

> Since you are one of the contributors

Good to hear we are still nicely under the radar:-) We are the oldest and largest ledger research lab of Europe. (117 contributors for all repos, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/graphs/contributors)

> 1.) How does that get unified in the mind of contributors?

Fascinating question. Universities have all sorts of measures to shield the actual researchers from providers of funds. Academic independence is deeply culturally and procedural embedded. For instance, as a tenured professor, I can't realistically be fired for creating "illegal innovations".

> 2.) It seem to me that in general people want government.

In my opinion, an economy is too important to leave to governments to run and tune. Sadly we don't have an alternative to government-led economies. Self-governance and self-regulation indeed leads to abusive behavior. e.g. Google "moral hazard banking".

>In my opinion, an economy is too important to leave to governments to run and tune.

But isn't that decision itself a governing decision, just one where we decide to tune for competition (for example)? It seems to me you can't avoid governance, as soon as there is power, there is either governance by the strong (robber barons) or by a system which tries to balance and - as you called it - tune things (e.g., an elected government enforcing anti-monopoly laws to improve competition)

Think there would be substantial interest in that "Blockchain Engineering" Masters program if you put it online ;)

Most material is covered in the most recent Stanford talk listed here: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/3472

The following Github issues all contain the detailed class project descriptions, as first item. Engineering projects are creating a storagecoin, fully self-replicating bots, self-sovereign identity. All for 4-5 engineers to do in 10 weeks. Last post is the final project report. https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A... Key lesson of "Blockchain Engineering" class: blockchain is 1% hashing/crypto and 99% Engineering. (thank you for clicking around on our website!)

FWIW the high inflation in Steem was forked out well over a year ago. Its inflation rate now approximately matches that of bitcoin.