Steem

Driving home from work I blew a coolant line that goes to my heater core and when I popped the hood I accidentally took a breath of the steem. Not a big breath but enough to know I messed up. I backed away into fresh air immediately and exhaled as to not get any of it further into my lungs. Was able to crimp the lines and limp home. But now I'm home and a bit paranoid that I may have poisoned myself. I run the Preston universal coolant for reference in this situation.
How bad is it that I took that breath; and should I go to urgent care? I feel fine and it's been about half an hour.

Edit: it's now been several hours and I feel plenty normal. I would figure with how much faster bodies react to stuff inhaled that I absolutely would have felt bad at something by now. Thankyou everyone for the help feeling better and the laughs.

Steem

With the recent increase in price and many here maybe holding onto it or having FOMO'd in recently I figured I'd write a post with some info about Steem and what else you can do with it than just hodling on exchanges (which kind of penalizes you as there's ongoing inflation).

So this is more for you long term holders/traders who might feel safer holding Steem in your wallets instead of exchanges. Also this info is written off the top of my head of what I think might interest you, to find out more about Steem and things I may not mention here check out the page, although some stuff may be outdated there as the chain is in constant development.

Account creation and keys

Steemit.com, the flagship front-end of the Steem blockchain offers free accounts, to avoid abuse of account creation they ask you for phone number and email. There are alternatives though such as and users with stake (Steem Power) can claim accounts through the new resource credit system in place which they can use to create accounts for others through websites such as steemworld.org or steeminvite.com. The main difference between creating your account through Steemit.com and steeminvite.com is that the former offers account recovery if your master key gets copied/hacked, where you then can use your email you signed up with to verify you're the original creator and get your key reset. Losing your key, though, means no one will be able to help you, much like with any other cryptocurrency address. My advice when you create your account is that you store your master and owner key off-line and only have easy access to your posting key (used for voting, posting, commenting, following, etc) and active key (used for STEEM transfers, delegations, power ups/downs). If any of these two keys get copied/stolen/hacked you can use your off-line stored keys to change them to lock out the hacker. To make holding liquid STEEM even safer on your account there is a "savings" feature which takes up to 3 days to move your stored liquid STEEM back to your wallet. This gives you time to reset keys in case a hacker attempts to do this and to avoid your liquid STEEM getting stolen instantly.

Steem ecosystem and economic improvement

Anyway, enough about keys, let's get into the specifics of Steem. It's delegated proof of stake where text based content is immutably stored on the chain. When you write a post/comment you can allocate rewards from the inflation pool and they have 7 days to reach consensus on how much rewards the post should make before they are paid out. Since a recent Hardfork you can edit posts and comments even after payout but the original one will always be traceable on the chain, hence be careful not to post something you don't want to be on the chain forever.

Other things you should know about Steem is that there are witnesses/block producers that are scheduled for signing blocks in accordance with the stake supporting them, they receive about 10% of Steem's new inflation for keeping the chain running. Another 10% now goes to the @steem.dao which works similar to witness voting where you use stake to vote up created by anyone who is looking into funding for projects. Of course something that's in the best interest of the Steem ecosystem and having some reputation helps getting funded.

Steem had a linear reward curve for 2 years which brought the rise of "bid bots" where stakholders were selling their votes, since hardfork 22 a few months ago the whole economy has changed and bid bots are now frowned upon and seldom used, here is why:

The new Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP) added a separate downvote mana pool up to 25% of your usual upvote mana to be used for overrewarded content. In the past barely anyone used their downvotes as it cost them upvote mana which meant curation rewards/steem inflation. This addition disencintivized many to use bid bots on garbage posts as the ROI was not there anymore when downvotes followed. Now users either buy votes when they really want a post on the Trending list or if they believe the quality will perform well and not cause many downvotes to occur. Along with this change curation and post rewards are now 50/50 from the previous 25/75 and there is a new curve that incentivizes higher rewards if more voting stake lands on specific posts. This makes "hidden" low reward farming get taxed and those posts that get more rewards often land in the vicinity of others to determine if they agree with the rewards or not. This has effectively brought an end to a lot of leeching/leakage of "free rewards".

Content discovery and curation has never been better on Steem than it is today. Most previous bid bots are now curating along with other curation projects effectively trying to find good quality posts that have not received a lot of rewards. They then promote them to other stakeholders/their followers as they get compensated for it with higher curation rewards for having cast their votes early/first on the posts. I run a curation project personally as well and I can tell you it's not easy finding under-rewarded quality content anymore.

Communities is something that has been planned for Steem for a long time and is now finally available on the . Anyone can create their own immutable communities (think similar to subreddits). On top of that Smart Media Tokens are now on the testnet to be deployed in the next hardfork, along with possibly a shortened timer for power downs (unstaking your Steem Power back into liquid STEEM) from 13 weeks down to 4.

I'm gonna try and keep this short even though as someone who's been involved with Steem in the past 3.5 years it really is not easy as even at a 98% price decline from the top so much is happening on the chain constantly and still so many people involved.

Pros and Cons

Pros of Steem: The DAO is new and with a higher marketcap of STEEM could help fund a lot of things, including development of the chain as to not only rely on Steemit Inc in the future.

Inflation is now down and the swings in prices have caused for much better distribution. Inflation is set to decrease 0.5% per year until a constant 0.95% in ~16 years at around 800 million STEEM in existence.

Easy way to get an account, will become even easier in the future with "guest accounts/light accounts" and with many front-ends and projects also offering temporary accounts so users can "earn their account" through being active. Low account cost of only 3 STEEM or being able to claim a free account once every 5 days as long as you have around 7k Steem Power staked.

Easy introduction to blockchain technology for non-crypto folks. Many are already familiar with Reddit so the jump into Steem is easy for those not caring about the specifics but just wanting to blog, share, interact, etc.

Better user retention rate due to the new economic improvements. Voting is less selfish, those attempting to increase their ROI through constant self-voting/vote-trading get penalized by downvotes from the community. Many have stopped attempting though as it's not worth it considering doing good/early curation is more rewarding and they realize it helps the ecosystem by empowering proof of brain and content discovery. Along with that, distribution has improved drastically as a lot of stake is actively curating or delegating to curation projects that take a cut of the rewards for their work.

Steem is a great application specific blockchain that realizes not everything needs to be decentralized for it to work. For the lack of smart contracts it makes up for it with a very scalable chain which is catering to all kinds of dapps. If you prefer smart contracts there's nothing stopping you from creating a side-chain that uses Steem to validate the code, the same way steem-engine.com does. Steem Engine has already started creating a lot of smart tokens, including NFT's.

Steem has had the advantage of being one of the first to move into the social media aspect of blockchains but with first mover advantage comes also first mover cost where everything is still so experimental and every move you make wrong. There is always someone to fork the code and start their own project stating how "they will do things right". Many have attempted and forked Steem but any have yet to pose a real threat.

Cons of Steem: Steemit Inc being the main developer of the blockchain; although they have made sure it will scale well many functions such as Communities and SMT's were delayed by a lot due to the harsh bear market and corporate operational issues.

Early hyperinflation caused very bad distribution and the initial 2 year powerdown lock up caused many not to invest in Steem. On top of that, some early miners who found out about Steem managed to get a lot of stake early on. That includes Steemit Inc itself, which engineered itself to be the prime miner with the majority of mined stake. With hyperinflation, it didn't help.

Dan Larimer being involved early on and his reputation.

Ending thoughts

Steem is a really cool experiment that survived the bear market and kept on building. Social Media needs a certain amount of users that know someone in their circle who are on there to really pop but with a robust blockchain that is ready to scale and maintain it's userbase with a very high TPS throughput I am confident the future of Steem is bright and the protocol will only keep improving over time.

PS! We also have a subreddit where we post some news now and then if you wanna stay up to date with Steem: although not much happens there since most Steemians prefer Steem rewards over Reddit karma. :P You can request for a free Steem account through steeminvite.com in the subreddit as well, check one of the pinned posts.

This DPOS chain was something I focused on from the very beginning and attempted to see past the bads remembering how shitty reddit was early on as well. Little did I know it was meant to never succeed in the first place, only to enrich the ninjaminer, cofounder Ned Scott once he sold the stake he had promised the community for years to be used to grow the network to Justin Sun. I'm sure you're all sick of all the news about Steem and the Hive hardfork and move by now, but a quick tl;dr: witnesses/block producers had not had a chance to discuss the sale at all and many investors still held his word that he was not just going to dump the stake in a secret deal. They added a softfork so the Steemit accounts holding over 30% of the supply would not be able to use it for governance voting until we had discussed things with the new buyer since our blockchain was at risk. Instead of talking he goes behind everyone's and the entire cryptosphere's imagination and "tricks" exchanges to stake their liquid Steem so they can use all of those to overrule the governance instead. They overtake it and a war ensues where every normal stakeholder is starting to use their voting rights to vote in normal community elected witnesses instead of these sockpuppets all operating from an alibaba box in China and Justin Sun literally starts buying more Steem and staking it to not be overthrown on the account @dev365, little does he know this was not the war just a decoy battle to make out how much of the coins were his so we could not airdrop him the new Hive hardfork. So eat shit Justin Sun. At this point he stops talking Steem altogether on Twitter where he has his clickfarm followers and witnesses and stakeholders on Steem who tried to play both sides or negotiate with centralization for their own benefit who also end up losing out on the Hive airdrop cause they voted for obvious sham block producers get mad so they start blocking 10 other big accounts from being able to sell their Steem one of them being an instant swap exchange.

Alright I realize I said that was gonna be a tl;dr but it really is impossible to get it shorter. So yesterday they entered a new hardfork that would just literally zero 64+ accounts balances and send them to an account called @community321 and these idiots are so useless that they even manage to get that account get its keys compromised and some white hacker sends the funds to Bittrex instead. Now they did another softfork to block that account from using it's funds until I guess they'll do another hardfork to steal coins from exchanges next? Yep, this is Steem today, how the fuck it's still listed on any exchange is way beyond me.

So after 4 years of volunteering to moderate and grow the subreddit I was wondering if you guys have any good ideas of what to do with it, let me know in here. Cheers.

Best idea gets 1000 moons, if they are transferable yet, if not I can send you 10 Hive.

For users not aware of what happened the past couple days, this post written by a lawyer explains it really well:

I hope the moderators of this subreddit get fucked for what its worth. Eat shit losers and fuck your loser ERC20 token secured by a bunch of cocksuckers that like to powertrip over Reddit functions.

Longtime steem user here, I always found that platforms that incentivize content creation brings many users out that just spew nonsense to earn points.

At least with reddit, upvotes were already inherently worthless, but now this changes things.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there will be mechanisms and users in place to downvote as needed. Steem was much less developed than Reddit, so it's possible the community can keep it in check.

Either way, it's exciting to see that every reddit user is now 2 clicks away from getting an eth wallet.

The community is coming together and voting up their witnesses to surpass the Justin Sun witnesses that are using Steemit inc ninjamined stake that was never meant to vote for witnesses and take over governance. Binance and Huobi backed off and unvoted the witnesses after pushback on Twitter, is still voting. Basically anyone on this list with 0 missed blocks belongs to Justin Sun/Tron: and if you look at the top witness: you can see the amount of witness votes coming in from all the users on Steem.

If you want to help, do a bankrun on Binance and withdraw your liquid Steem to your Steem accounts, no need to power up if you don't want to wait 3 months to liquidate it again but this will prevent Justin Sun from buying more to vote in his witnesses which he's doing on this account:

Bittrex has not colluded in witness voting and is one of the only exchanges left with liquid Steem right now, the other 3 have close to no liquid Steem left.

History in the making of DPOS governance and the community fighting back vs Tron forcefully taking over and wanting to push a hardfork to reduce powerdowns drastically that might break how voting on posts works and possibly break the chain due to 7 day reward payout from the reward pool.

Feel free to ask if you want to know more!

Block One is building a hardware wallet. It will be the most secure in industry. But because they are not launching the chain, it is not their job to provide any web interface. There are 3rd party wallets that can be trusted.

This is a community launch.

Let's not forget that.

It takes time....

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

While there wasn't an issue with blocks being full there was some kind of issue with a formula based on the blocksize. To quickly work around the issue witnesses decided to just increase the blocksize. When I went to bed last night it was still being discussed, when I woke up a majority (including myself) had made the switch from 64k blocks to 128k blocks. If you think that's small steem has blocks every 3 seconds.