If you haven't heard, www.palnet.io is live today. You may be wondering what it is or why we're launching it now and I'll share some of my thoughts about these topics today. First and foremost, it's a new front end for the STEEM blockchain, with one major caveat, Palcoin determines the stake of your actions and ability to distribute and earn curation rewards.
Why do we need a new token? Well, I think that most people that have used steemit over the last three years can see the problems that are created by the initial distribution. When the majority of the stake on the platform is used to fund vote selling and perpetual self payments, it makes the platform very difficult for new users to ever gain any foothold unless they just show up independently wealthy and buy stake.
The skewed distribution and the way that rewards are distributed compounds this issue dramatically over time and makes it extremely difficult to have a content driven platform, which turns Proof of Brain into Proof of Stake, and that negates the entire distribution mechanism of the original vision put forth in the STEEM whitepaper. So the question, when looking at the proposed changes coming to STEEM in the next hard fork, would probably be "Why Now?"
I think the track record of actually delivering on proposed changes and developments to the chain coming from Steemit Inc speaks for itself. Why wait for SMTs when we already have a more versatile product with a different name? Why wait for fixing curation rewards after most of the stake has been pillaged by ninja-mines and selfish voting? Why settle for half-measures and appeasement after the fact?
The great thing about PALnet is that we're not asking anyone to leave STEEM. We aren't forking and taking any of the community with us. Our posts will still show up on STEEM and work like normal, which means we can aim to correct the distribution problems without negatively impacting the STEEM community or expecting anyone to "give up and start over." In short, we provide an alternative token and front end that removes what many of us feel are the problems and allows for users to grow and earn stake, which ultimately allows the community to determine what content it wants to support.
