For over two week, the price of Steem had a straight fall then suddenly it rose again. Steem's fall and recovery are not due to Bitcoins rise and fall, they have their own little secret.
The fall
The primary cause of Steem price's fall was because of the rum ours that the upcoming Steem fork will no longer support users being able to upvote their own post.
Obviously most people could not think of any other use of Steem power if they cannot upvote their own posts, they were powering down and investing into other cryptos.
The recovery
Suddenly Steemit Inc comes around and announces the Smart Media tokens. Suddenly everyone realizes that they will need Steem tokens to create and finance Smart Media Tokens.
This is the story behind the rise and fall of Steem, now here are the questions to ask.
Who initiates a hardfork?
For Bitcoins, we do know of the following fork initiation schemes:
- User Activated Hard/Soft Fork
- Miner Activated Hard/Soft Fork
On Steem who initiates the forks? Is it the developers, Steemit Inc or the Witnesses?
Where do we learn about hardforks?
There is no place to get information about Steem hardforks. On explorers like SteemDB.com, we can find out about the current "block number" and hardfork version, however the rest is all JSON data that makes no sense.
The DASH example
DASH is one of the most praised crypto-currencies out there and that is because it has mastered the act of open source development.
First of all all DASH users know that a collective body is incharge of the development of the protocol. On Steem we have no idea who the developers behind Steem are - except for support from Steemit Inc.
Again with DASH all new development proposals are posted to a forums and are voted upon. That way users know all new proposals and they also know who it is that is campaigning for it.
On Steem we do not know what the new proposed changes in the upcoming hardfork are and we do not also know who it is that is calling for these changes. And certainly we never get to vote on which proposals get implemented!
Steem is open source - yes the code is on Github, but the development process of Steem is NOT! Consider this:
- no one knows who is developing Steem,
- what new features will be added to the next hard fork
- what existing features will removed from the current fork
- when the next hardfork will happen
Sure some people do know, but its only the witnesses, a few whales and Steemit Inc insiders. The average Steemians has no idea of these developments and there is no place to access this information.
On by scavenging the whitepaper, the bluepaper and a few random posts by Steemit team will we find part of our answers. It would be great if we could just visit one single website and find out about:
- all the previous forks and all the changes made in them
- all the developers actively working on Steem
- all new proposed changes in the upcoming fork
- the people who propose new changes in the upcoming fork
- and perhaps the change to vote on which new features should be implemented
There are rumors that the next hardfork will take away the ability to upvote our own posts yet not everyone is aware of this.
If this lack of information on development continues, we may soon wake up one morning to find our Steem Dollars gone - only to find out that the new hardfork which happened during the night does not support Steem Dollars!
If you know the answers to these question please enlighten us and other Steemians who need answers to these questions.