Yesterday @stevescoins and I both commented on Dr. Jerome Corsi's youtube channel about joining steemit and D.Tube after youtube censored him and many other people.
Here is what I said.
Dr. Corsi come and join us on D Tube, steemit, and other places. I don't know if those will be censored by a filter here or not. The first you can put your videos on and they are decentralized and people like me can up vote them and get content creators money without some corporation dictating whether we can or not. Steemit is the more written side tied to the same blockchain and has been going strong for over two years. If an ordinary person like me can make about $100K just writing there in the past two years you and others I am sure can do even better. Decentralized. Blockchain based. Open Source. Brilliant. No brainer. If enough people come then those of us that don't want to come to youtube will no longer need to, as we only still come here for people like you. EDIT: To add to what 333333sd was saying if you do come over there I am @dwinblood. Feel free to drop a reply to anything I post and if I see you I'll definitely announce your presence to my followers, and I know Steve will too.
@stevescoins was keeping an eye open and noticed Dr. Corsi had responded to me and asked me to email him with more information.
I did this...
Here is What I Sent
Dr. Corsi,
Thank you for responding to the reply on youtube. I likely would have missed it but Steve who was watching told me you had replied. I'm not surprised youtube didn't tell me you replied. This makes me wonder how many other people I have missed when I was trying to get them to move to steemit.
This may take a bit, but I am going to try to be detailed for you. Steem is kind of a new paradigm, and is odd for a week or so and then it is probably the most liberating thing to ever happen to me personally. I am NOT affiliated with the company that created the platform.
Steemit.com is the first of the social media sites to exist on the steem blockchain and it was created by the people who created steem. It isn't as flashy as many sites.
One of the things that takes people longest to realize is that all of the data for the platform is on the blockchain. Steemit.com is just a viewer or if you prefer input/output web page for that blockchain. It's code is open source. It is not the only viewer.
Busy.org is another viewer that is a bit nicer in view. Yet it is developed by a community member so it may lag a bit behind the latest releases on the back end.
The Steem blockchain operates with two crypto currencies.
One of these is Steem. It is very much like any traditional crypto currency.
It also has a second crypto tied to it that is known as Steem Dollars, or Steem Backed Dollars. In crypto world it's symbol is SBD.
When you post something on Steemit, Busy, D.Tube, or other sites you have the option of doing it 100% powered up (I will explain this in a moment) or 50/50.
What 50/50 means is that 50% of what you earn will go to what is known as Steem Power. This is a delayed liquidity form of steem. By delayed liquidity I mean you have to intentionally state you wish to power down. In power down mode it will convert 1/15th of your Steem Power to Steem which is then a liquid currency per week. So to completely liquidate your steem power would take 15 weeks IF you are not doing anything that earns yourself more steem power during that time.
The other 50% is awarded as steem backed dollars. These are immediately liquid. Currently coinmarketcap.com has them listed as being worth $3.69 per SBD. They were as high as $10 a month or two ago. In the past they attempted to keep them pegged as closely to $1 dollar as possible, and though they pegged it to the dollar the creators said they could easily change that to peg it to silver, or something else. They just wanted it to FEEL familiar to people.
Steem Power is important. The steem blockchain can be viewed as a large company of which we are all stake holders. How much stake you have depends upon how much steem power you have.
So there are a lot of people that do 100% power up posts because they believe in the new paradigm so much. I have done that myself.
You can reverse the power down process I mentioned above and actually convert liquid steem to steem power at any time.
Why would you want to do this?
Well when you up vote (or down vote) how much your vote is worth depends upon your steem power.
Steem is not created like bitcoin needing to have tons of electricity and machines crunching problems. It still depends upon machines and these machines are what are known as witnesses. I will get to that.
It is a Delegate Proof of Stake blockchain and as far as its ability to process blocks. It is based upon Graphene 2.0 and is one of the fastest blockchains out there. The only blockchain I am aware of that is potentially faster is EOS and it is another project by the same guy that created Steem, and Bitshares (both using Graphene 2.0 tech). His name is Dan Larimer.
It is way faster than bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, etc.
It also doesn't charge you a fee for moving your currency, sending it to someone, etc which those other chains do.
The witnesses are people WE vote for that have setup machines to be nodes for the blockchain. They are monitored for being up to date, etc. You have 30 votes as a user and how much your vote is worth depends upon how much steem power you have.
People will do campaigns and get votes as witnesses. People you see that are witnesses that you do not like their approach to the community. You need not vote for them.
The top 19 witnesses are LIVE and ACTIVE nodes and they receive a portion of the steem that is produced every day. The remainder of that steem is sent to people based upon the weight of the votes they received for that day. So as more and more people join that spreads out a bit more.
So there are plenty of things to share about this. Yet I'll simply tell you how I made over $100K in two years.
I started using steemit I think around July 7th, 2016. I was looking into mining some ethereum when I noticed a currency steem was increasing about 200%. I asked what is that.
I ended up at steemit.com where it said you could get crypto for voting, commenting, and posting. It didn't cost anything. In fact, they were giving people $10 worth of steem.
When I joined that gave me a whopping 10 steem power. :)
I tried posting some things and I had one post say it was worth $300.
So pretty soon I had more steem power, and I had this steem dollar currency I had no idea what to do with.
I learned about sending steem dollars to exchanges and converting them to bitcoin or any other currency I wanted. It isn't that difficult, and in reality it is more convenient once you get used to it than going to an ATM, an Bank, or something like that. In fact, the slowest point was the bitcoin. Bitcoin was slow and I'd get charged a fee when I bought something with it.
I got a bitpay visa card which I no longer use and it enabled me to charge that card up with US Dollars converted from Bitcoin. Yet I had to pay the bitcoin miner fee every time. It usually was about as expensive as a very expensive ATM fee. It got ridiculous in December when bitcoin hit that $20,000/coin mark. That fee was $30 - $100 or more to move bitcoin. I had $138 worth of bitcoin in a bitpay waller and it wouldn't allow me to put a dime of that on the visa as it said I didn't have enough to pay the fee.
I began looking for alternatives. Coinbase.com allows you to use bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, and litecoin at the moment. It can direct deposit to banks, you can also purchase any of those things with US Dollars if that is your desire. They are affiliated with a shift card which can connect directly to your bitcoin account there and doesn't charge fees. That is my current avenue that I use.
I have also begun investing in numerous crypto currencies. I've learned quite a bit in what almost seems like osmosis just from using the platform.
(yes I can tend to ramble)
Anyway I have never actually spent a single dollar on steem. All the crypto I own, and all the purchases I've made over the past two years are 100% products of me posting on steemit.
As you post and get a reputation for quality work you will attract followers (much like subscribers in other places) and they will see your posts in their feed when you post.
As you get more followers who have more and more steem power your posts will begin to earn more and more money.
At the moment if I just vote on myself I could earn $4/post. Yet there is a limit to that.
Each of us have a maximum of 10 votes at 100% per 24 hour period. Yet you can vote percentages. I will vote on my posts, and other people's posts generally quite high. Yet I always leave some and vote from 2% to 4% on a lot of the people that reply to my posts and engage me with dialog in order to encourage discussion.
It is a lot like reddit with a couple exceptions. You make money, and the troll population is low.
I've noticed with money in the picture people being jerks and trolling don't tend to last long or make any money, so for the most part people are decent.
I've had good conversations with people when we disagree almost 100%.
With that said there are some problems, as human nature always finds a way to produce, but they are better than any alternative I've found.
Those problems are basically that there are some people that mined steem early in the process before I started using it and when mining was still a thing. When Steemit launched they were already pretty powerful people. The community refers to them as whales.
In July 2016 there was some woman that made $36,000 on a makeup tutorial video. That didn't last, but it was insane.
Some of the whales out there are sometimes called "bad whales" and there are not many of them. I've seen them down vote people they disagree with, etc.
It was a verbal and post war I fought for some time. It doesn't happen often, but it is important to know that it can happen.
The key here is perseverance.
Steem is like a new world, and it is wonderful and amazing with the occasional blemish.
So I have made what I have by trying to publish regularly, have good dialog, and try to offer things of value.
I could make more, as I've seen what is popular. I don't do that. I write what I want to write, when I want to write, and literally about pretty much anything though I tend to write in philosophy, politics, history, and music the most.
I am a guy that was an unknown to this community.
You are not.
Alex Jones is not.
I would expect if you join you would get some haters. That's the state of the world. Yet if you let me or steve know you joined we'd start driving traffic your way.
You see steem also has a feature known as resteeming.
It is like retweeting, reblogging, etc.
When I do it that post shows in my feed to all of my followers. It doesn't award me anything for doing so, but it does get you more traffic.
D.Tube:
D.Tube was created by a community member who takes the main post and basically what from a programmer/engineer perspective I'd consider the header information. The video information is stored on the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) which is a distributed file system.
Steem blockchain entries cannot be censored, neither can IPFS. It would require taking down all of the nodes simultaneously and then making sure they can't come back up. I told you there were 19 live/active witnesses. There are more than 100 and growing on stand by ready to pick up the work if something happens to any of those nodes. Anyone with the desire, and ability can create a witness node.
There is a beauty here and it is something that people like yourself and infowars could take advantage of.
Steemit displays the blockchain data one way.
D.Tube another.
Busy.org displays it another.
Yet you are looking at the same data from ALL of these places.
I honestly think an infowars like frontend that is an alternative to steemit or anything else you want could be created. It just has to be able to view, and submit to the block. It can even be setup to filter and show only specific people.
Why am I saying this?
The future.
I see Newswars and Infowars regularly. I also look at them and say... "Too bad that isn't on the blockchain" as then every single news story posted, etc on those sites could be getting votes from community members. Both supportive and hateful.
Yet it can't be censored.
There is a caveat to the censoring.
Steemit.com is controlled by steemit, inc.
They could alter their web front end and make it block your post. Yet it would still be on the blockchain and visible on busy.org, or any other blockchain viewer.
So being able to hide things might be necessary if you want to recreate something like newswars and infowars and have it only show certain authors so it is more a catered visit.
Yet the blockchain itself would still have everything.
So occasionally some jerk will come along and vote a persons post down so it is almost not visible (on steemit, I don't believe this is an issue on D.Tube).
This ties into a reputation system. I have a pretty good reputation so often I can reverse these actions even if the person doing it had more steem power than me. Reputation is built in other ways. It was created for a reason...
and yes I could go on and on and on
suffice it to say. I earned what I did by posting a lot, engaging with other people in their posts, and just trying to get better at it.
I am an ordinary guy.
People like you with an audience could take off like a rocket ship.
Is it perfect? No. Will there be problems we can't see yet? Surely.
Yet it is a new paradigm and it is beautiful, and those people CAN'T STOP US. :)
I hope to see you there...
https://steemit.com/@dwinblood
I hope this wasn't too overwhelming. If you have further questions please don't hesitate to work. You do great work and I definitely want to support your further efforts.
Also feel free to share this communication you want with anyone you think might be interested.
End
Whether he will take me up on that and join us here or not I cannot say. @stevescoins recommended I turn this into a post and share it.
Thus, I have. :)
I did send him a short follow up correcting those confusing last sentences. I promise you, that even though I am long winded the follow up was short. It could have easily fit on a Twitter post.
EDIT: March 1st
We have not had further communication with Dr. Corsi. @stevescoins and I were trying to get him up to speed. We are not going to bug him in email as we know he is in the middle of a storm of activity at the moment. I also don't want to be one of those nagging salesmen. :)
Here is the final email I sent to him just now and I do not intend to send any others unless he reaches out:
Dr. Corsi,
Steve and I will leave you be now and you can reach out to us when/if you want to proceed. I did want to tell you that we have reached out to other community members and we also have a gentleman by the name of Rich (@richq11) and he would be glad to help and mentor you through the process.
We reached out to him as he is elderly and he is sole source of income comes from his work on Steemit. He is a veteran, grand father, etc. I also am certain he is a fan of yours.
He had to learn this tech, and how to turn it into money and such and it was very alien to him. You may actually be more technologically adept than he was.
So we thought if you do move forward he would be a great guy to help you out that can come at it from a less tech speak approach than someone like myself.
I of course would help you as well, but I'd like it to be as smooth and comfortable for you as possible and get you up to speed way faster than those of us that had to learn this new paradigm by poking and prodding at things.
I've seen Youtube back pedalling some with you specifically being named. I know you are in the middle of a hornets nest and have a lot going on. Steve tells me you joined Gab. That's a good first step.
We will not email you and bug you. If you need us, we are here. Keep up the good fight!