Steemit community initiates fork in attempt to bring in new users
The blockchain social news website, Steemit, will hard fork on 6 December to make it "more accessible to more people". According to its CEO, Ned Scott, the community recommended improvements such as the hard fork to stabilise the platform and attract new users. The new structure, which lowers the inflation rate, will be more inline with Bitcoin's. With 9.5% annual instantaneous inflation, Steem Power holders will receive 15%, witnesses and miners 10% and content creators 75%. CoinMarketCap rates Steem, the native currency, as the ninth largest cryptocurrency.

Steemit, a social news website designed on a blockchain, will hard fork on Tuesday, December 6, thus changing the Steemit blockchain’s economic model. The platform is looking to bring on more short-to-mid term investors.

“With this hardfork the greatest portion of the community feels the ecosystem will be changing for the better and will now be more accessible to more people,” says CEO of Steemit, Ned Scott. “The hard fork request was initiated by the community, and once we reiterated the recommendations, we received an overwhelmingly positive response. The reason we built Steemit was to create not just a community where people could get rewarded for their time, creativity, attention and effort; but one where every user has a voice. The community has recommended improvements to the platform and we responded to help us all. We’ve always encouraged two-way dialogue with our user base and we feel that this will benefit all current and future users of Steemit.”

Community members and Steem programmers hope the economic changes will increase stability of the Steem platform and thus inspire many new users to adopt the social news website – the first website based on a blockchain. Other than the inflation rate, many of Steemit’s features will remain the same.

“Steemit’s value and growth has been phenomenal, but it was hindered by a reliance on long-term participants,” says Steemit in a press release sent out Monday. “The new structure of Steem lowers the inflation rate and adopts a model much more similar to bitcoin, which encourages participants who don’t want to lock up their cryptocurrency value for long periods of time to have influence in the social network. While all Steem holders will have increased liquidity, the allocation of new Steem tokens to witnesses, content producers and creators won’t change; that figure still sits at 9.5%.”

Per the new 9.5% annual instantaneous inflation, Steem Power holders will receive 15%, witnesses and miners will receive 10% and content creators will receive 75%.

“The change has to do with a change of the financial aspects of the platform,” Mr. Scott told CCN.com. “The community has asked us to try a new iteration of the experiment. It will be interesting to have the changes implemented.”

Users of the platform were apparently looking for a more reliable system that was easier to explain.

“They were looking for a system that had less of a completely new experiment behind it,” Mr. Scott said.

The platform’s native currency, Steem, is currently the ninth largest cryptocurrency according to CoinMarketCap. It is well off its summer highs (.0064 BTC per Steem)- the site at one point was the third largest cryptocurrency, according to CoinMarket Cap – and currently the price is .0002 BTC.

After a recent appearance in Rolling Stone, it could be that the cryptocurrency space creates another medium darling a la Bitcoin and Ethereum before Steemit.



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