Third Livestream Test Tomorrow

Hi @ned. Looking forward to the livestream tomorrow.

My comment is going to be a combination of questions and feedback. Hopefully it won't get too long :)

While I am sure this is an unbelievably challenging time for many involved (especially those in the 70%), I am hopeful that this event can become a turning point where we all come together and align our priorities, and set ourselves on whatever track is going to give Steem the best chance for success going forward.

One of the biggest questions that I think everybody is wondering is: what are Steemit, Inc's priorities going to be in the next three months?

Before answering though, I will mention that it might be OK to say "we don't know yet". Figuring out the answer to that question is probably going to be one of the most important things that Steemit does as a result of what happened.

To offer some of my own suggestions, I will add the following:

One thing that has not been good about the way Steemit has done things so far is that very little has been getting delivered on a regular basis to excite investors. I don't have the answer(s) to what specific things should be the focus, but I would make it a high priority to try and identify what is going to bring the most positive investor attention to Steem which the core team can accomplish in a short amount of time, and start going for lots of "quick wins".
The relationship between Steemit, Inc. and the community is still in need of repair. It has been since the day I got here, unfortunately. While in my view things have gotten a LOT better over the past year, there is still a ways to go. I would highly suggest looking at ways that the company can shift their focus towards building and maintaining trust and confidence with the community. To me, this is the "biggest bang for the buck" in terms of where to focus efforts. Maximizing transparency and listening+responding to feedback from the community are two of the main ways this can be done.
Marketing is one thing that needs to be a LOT higher priority (IMO). The message itself is also very important. Identifying what we want to "pitch" about Steem that will get potential investors excited is the first step. Then figuring out how to get that message all across the internet (especially in front of cryptocurrency investors) is the next.
The work that was done on steem.com was a great improvement. Although I know the feedback has been mostly positive, I have also seen feedback that "While on the surface it looks like a real interesting website -- you can tell it was thrown together quickly. It wasn't proofread or checked properly... and there are lots of mistakes on it." (source) I hope continuing to update this website is not too big of a resource challenge, and I would suggest continuing to make steem.com improvements a priority.
I hope that Destiny does not take too much of a back seat either. Having a sleek and user friendly UI as a "flagship" DApp (instead of the current steemit.com) would go a long way towards "selling" Steem.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough.. I will try to wrap it up.

My only other "question" is: Would Steemit, Inc. be willing to present the community with an overview of where the money over the past two years has gone? This would be really enlightening, and also go a long ways towards rebuilding trust with the community.

My last piece of advise is don't be afraid to reach out to the community and ask for help if/when you need it. We are all on the same team, and we all want the same thing (success of Steem).

Best of luck as you navigate through the tough waters ahead.

@ned I applaud you for making the necessary tough decisions. It’s unfortunate when these decisions involve people losing their jobs, but in an uncertain climate like this the decision not to act is almost always not on the table. So, good on you for acting and you have my support.

Therefore, moving forward, I say, “if the dog hadn’t of stopped to shit, he could have caught the rabbit”. Simply stated, what happens from this point on is all that matters.

Therefore, is the launch of SMT’s and its use to support communities the single most important priority for you at this time? If not, may I ask what is?

Further, are you in a position to tell us that the resources necessary to launch SMT’s are available to you now and will you access those resources to launch, or do we need to see an increase in the value of Steem before action can be taken?

And if it isyour intention to proceed with SMT’s, will the launch schedule for March 2019 stand or delayed?

Also, since Steemit.com is settling into maintenance mode, is it your intention to launch SMT’s on Destiny and if not, on what platform?

Next, you mentioned in your statement, it is your intention while Steemit.com is in maintenance mode to search for further expenses reductions. I assume you have a redline. Therefore, can you indicate what functions are included in that redline - in other words, the bare necessities you are prepared to support to insure a functioning Steemit.com or what you see the ‘next’ to last step to be - pitchforking for example?

Next, I appreciate the role Steemit Inc. has played in coding for Steem and I thank you for that. And I understand the need to act decisively in this climate. But, if you as CEO of Steemit Inc. intend to eliminate Steemit Inc.’s coding role completely at this time that responsibility will fall onto the shoulders of the witnesses and the community. However, they too are facing the same difficult climate that is causing you to pull back within Steemit Inc. and I assume would also be unable to muster resources. Therefore, can you explain in more detail the role, if any, that the new company - Destiny - might play here? I ask because it seems to me that without a progressive transitioning support plan, Destiny’s future may be jeopardized, which seems to run counter to your stated high expectations for Destiny - of course I’m assuming Destiny is being launched on Steem?

And lastly, you stated, the second reason for being in cryptocurrency is because you believe, “it has the potential to spawn the next killer application that can rival the Instagrams and Reddits of the world”. Do you believe that this killer application will be birthed on Steem? Is Destiny your attempt at such a killer app? If not, are you alone or otherwise intending to be part of such an application with that expectation elsewhere in the crypto world?

I have other questions but I’m sure most of them will be answered through the discussion. Thanks Ned. Thanks Andrew.

I have a few suggestions/comment/questions. For those phrased in the form of comments or suggestions, you can also take them as questions in the sense that I would love to hear your views on them.

I would seriously consider rather than pouring a bunch of resources into developing more efficient deployment (thereby competing with other development, etc.), think about an orderly sunset plan for steemit.com and the steemit-run API servers. There are already many third party apps and while cutting them off immediately is not good, giving them a schedule where they need to figure out how to operate on their own is probably very healthy for the ecosystem as a whole. At the same time, steemit.com has already been declared to be in "maintenance mode" and from a market perspective it should be clear by now that steemit.com doesn't have what it takes to really take off (and would need a lot of further development). Perhaps better to not throw good money after bad and plan on a wind down of steemit.com while refocusing on support of true self-sufficient third party apps.
What are your thoughts on narrowing the focus of steemit.com/steem.com to be a minimal wallet (transfers plus password/key management), as well as a resource directory of third party wallets/apps? I'm thinking of the former being something like this: https://www.stellar.org/account-viewer/#!/ and the latter something like this: https://www.stellar.org/lumens/wallets/
In my view a more sustainable model that doesn't have Steemit running a big infrastructure with no operating revenue is to focus on the essential core blockchain development (which we are MUCH farther from anyone else being able to do compared to building apps and running servers) as well as marketing, branding, exchange support, dev/app support, etc. This is what most of the successful blockchain projects/companies seem to do. They don't run everyone's node for them. What are your thoughts on this direction as a sustainable model (and perhaps with renewed focus on blockchain messaging a marketing, more effective in terms of communicating to the world the value of Steem and STEEM, something that has not been done effectively at all up until now, to say the least).
At this point of reflection, when part of the issue is clearly the low price of STEEM (and I don't think it is useful to blame the overall cryptocurrency market when, relative to other coins STEEM has dropped out of the top ten to barely being in the top 50), maybe it is a good time to recognize the urgency of tuning the economic model so that it does something useful. The various failure modes of the current model are enough to fill another post or ten, but suffice it to say that it hasn't worked to spur growth nor attract investment.
Regarding SMTs, how do you feel about, rather than simply delaying the totality of SMTs indefinitely, to instead radically narrow the scope of SMT 1.0 to something like: a) token creation, b) token transfer, and c) token trading? If this were done, how long do you think it would take Steemit to deliver it (consider the answer with the strategy on steemit.com+nodes being either significant development and operational effort to improve resource usage vs planned sunset)? This would be enough to satisfy the needs of many devs and community projects who really want tokens and are in many cases pretty well on their way to being ready to roll them out, but don't necessary need all of SMTs richness and power (beyond a-c above). The remainder of the SMT design/roadmap can then be rolled out later as a series of upgrades.

QUESTIONS

What are you doing to continue the vision of SMTs and what is the timeline?
If you downscale steemit.com can you perhaps move password changing to steem.com ... seems like perhaps even a better place to have it. Why would all of our apps want to send people to steemit.com.
What are the plans for the steemit.api?
Is the steemit.api a large financial burden you must change?
Will you go all in on blockchain development maybe the two pronged approach of creating a dApp (steemit.com) and marketing that as well split the attention. There are plenty willing to create dApps but very few willing to make blockchain advancements.

Quick Side Note

API DISCUSSION
As creators of the blockchain it isn't nor should it be your requirement that you must run the nodes that give many people API access to easily use Steem blockchain. However maybe it is part of the expectation as being the single largest holder (or 3-4 largest accounts) of Steem that this is something that you're doing to help the blockchain. But maybe it doesn't need to be quite so all in. I'm guessing you made it free and open to the public so that you weren't seen as playing favorites with apps. But maybe you can still be free and open for dApps and applications to TRY OUT. Tell all dApps to apply and make sure they hit a couple of somewhat open criteria and say they can use for X amount of time or X amount of usage. This way you can still be somewhat of an incubator of new ideas and give them a test, either they run out of time without having proven sustainable worth... or they are so worthy they need to go and find another perhaps paid private node.

@STEEMPEAK EXAMPLE
We are certainly very grateful for steemit.api to let us explore the idea of an interface that can do everything we wanted all in one place and we rely heavily on steemit.api. We are willing to accept that we should be looking for other solutions and are in talks with other dApps looking for RPC/API solutions. However perhaps giving projects a window of grace and an expectation and still getting an ability test out our idea would be super valuable.

6 What are your Node/API options you've considered?

In fact even if you're not putting steemit.api on the cutting block perhaps this could still be a good time to test something like limitations on the API. Doesn't mean you need to play favorites just means that you put limits on everyone and thus let the open market decide which projects using the API are useful and gets rid of projects that in the end the market proves doesn't have enough worth to sustain themselves. Thus if i'm not mistaken those who remain can have a better experience. Maybe you could even do something that apps can get more API access the more users they're supporting.

i'm sure others would be willing to do RPC/API as a paid model. But as the largest holders of Steem you have the ability perhaps to help incubate projects with free access to test out their projects.

7. WHAT ARE STEEM BLOCKCHAIN BIGGEST STRENGTHS?

3 second transactions
Free transactions
Community
what else?

8 PLANS FOR MARKETING?
Love to hear what some of them are... and how can we help you in them?

A good idea and money isn't enough if all of blockchain has proven to us. They are really great to have but dozens of really under-performing token projects out there have proven they are not enough. You need an idea people actually want or need in their lives and to market it. Maybe the idea is some of our apps need to work using blockchain but the end user probably could care less it's on blockchain and maybe it's our apps that need to stop talking about blockchain and just make good apps... maybe like @steemmonsters you can play the game without having to know a thing about blockchain and maybe that has helped them.

Thanks again... I'm a big believer in steem.

@Jarvie from @steempeak and @peakmonsters and perhaps a future SMT if you keep that going. ;)

With a declining STEEM price as well as the refocus of witness role on block signing and governance rather than a general funding source that took place in HF16 (was an 80% cut), there isn't really enough money in witness rewards and especially not if the STEEM price were to decline to say its previous lows of 0.05 to 0.10.

Currently all witness rewards are approximately $800K per year (total, not each) which doesn't even cover but a fraction of the$ 2 million/year Steemit is paying in direct costs to operate nodes. That's assuming that all witness rewards went to this purpose which is obviously absurd. It further ignores the significant admin cost for these nodes which buildteam (which operates its own nodes for its business) has estimated at similar or more than the hardware costs.

If the STEEM price were to decline to historic lows then total witness revenue would drop to about 1/3 to 1/8 of that, or perhaps as little as $100K/year ($ 5K/year each!), which again is nowhere near enough for free high volume nodes open to everyone in the world.

This isn't a sustainable solution either. What is needed is not a way to shift around who runs the free nodes but a model where those operating businesses on Steem run their own nodes (ideal) or pay for a third party to run them (not ideal in terms of centralization but at least economically sustainable).

Some low volume free nodes may make sense as a community initiative where people volunteer to run nodes so people can at least run a simple wallet and access their coins, but for high usage as needed by major web sites or businesses, that needs to have some sort of sustainable funding attached to it.

It is not typical for decentralized cryptocurrencies to be run on the basis of free (and highly centralized) high volume open public nodes. Sometimes free low-volume community-run nodes as I mentioned but other than that businesses either run their own nodes or pay for a service. Steem can do what everyone else does here.

I don't believe that shutting down Steemit Inc.'s public nodes without a free replacement would be a good solution.

Then I suggest you volunteer to pay the $2 million/year. Perhaps that cost can be reduced, in fact I'm sure it can. But it could also increase if demand grows. Personally I'd much rather have Steemit spend that money on blockchain development (not to mention staying in business/survival), which they are at this point uniquely qualified to do. With sufficient funding (not a Steemit Inc strong suit at the moment), anyone (or at least many people with the right experience) can run nodes.

BTW, witness rewards are a tiny fraction of the rewards paid out by Steem (10% of total inflation vs. 75% for post rewards). If you think free nodes are a good use of reward funds, then I suggest making one or more daily/weekly/whatever posts requesting support for free public node service and if people agree with your philosophy they can vote for it. I don't rule out that this could be a good idea. But for something to replace Steemit nodes will still be very expensive (consume a significant portion of the reward pool), and the cost can easily grow with increased usage.

Again, I don't know what EOS does (simply not familiar with it) but neither Ethereum miners nor the Ethereum Foundation provide free nodes. People who need nodes run their own or pay for a service.

even right now the public nodes available are barely enough to keep up with the demand

Exactly (so whatever plans you have along the lines discussed above, you better plan to not only replace the Steemit nodes but actually scale UP). That's because this model is unsustainable. Nobody even knows what those public nodes are being used for. It could be hugely wasteful/inefficient usage or they could even be deliberately overworked by competitors. The model is not viable.

decentralised Blockchain should not be controlled by one entity such as Steemit Inc

A decentralized blockchain is strengthened by people running their own nodes. There will inevitably be nodes as a service, which hurts decentralization, but trying to fund and operate a free service that encourages (nearly) everyone to use them is actually sabotaging (by centralizing) the network. It is quite terrible that when Steemit's nodes go down, as they have on occasion, nearly the entire ecosystem crashes. This undermines not only the operation of the network at that time, but its ongoing reputation because it is clear that everything is centralized and its "'decentralized' apps" are a sham. Even before financial problems forced the question, I was against Steemit's free node service. People should run their own, and in practice, most won't if there is a free option.

For very low usage (people just wanting to use a wallet to access their funds, experiments by devs working on a new project, etc.) there can be low-capacity free nodes offered by the volunteers in the community. But there is simply no reason for a deployed and scaled-up application to expect to rely on a free service. Life would be wonderful if all sorts of nice things were free, but they mostly are not.

https://steemitimages.com/60x70/http://steemitboard.com/@ned/posts.png?201811272337	You published more than 90 posts. Your next target is to reach 100 posts.
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A Little Context

Actual Question

Q - Do you agree with the decision to get rid of more than 70% of your co-workers at once?

And, as a follow-up Q - On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your optimism toward Steem now compared to the optimism you felt when you were first hired on with Steemit Inc?

Questions