seems that then new payout regime is starting to bed in a bit... it takes a bit of getting used to the minute-by-minute scheme of the old 24 hour payout window changing to 7 days... so many pending payouts still coming through...

But by the looks of the current situation with the steem price, that maybe some of the efforts to market steem might be starting to work:

Unfortunately I personally am very pessimistic about the likelihood that the management team is going to recover their face and not continue to be a very hated little group. But, good for them if they can progress. Steem is an amazing piece of technology, aside from it's really dumb flaws.

I and many others have been agitating for a really long time to get them to make changes, and it seems to me it takes about 6 months for them to get the message through their thick skulls. Sure enough, the changes that myself and many others have petitioned for for a really long time, when they finally got implemented, BAM! pump!

I know quite well, from having buried myself so deeply into blockchain tech over the last few weeks, that they very well could probably just throw away the current C++ codebase and retool and have a complete platform up and running in a couple of months that resolves so many of the performance issues... but with the historical record of getting anything done right, I'm not holding my breath.

At this rate us at the Dawn group are going to have a competent competitor that takes everything that is right about Steem, fixes what was wrong, and we'll have our own launch... before they get their shit together. Yes we will continue to sit here at the sidelines and tell people about the nice warm water in our pool.

And bear in mind, I don't have the greatest confidence in my own ability to buckle down and dig the code hard enough for this timeline, but still... I have one notch in my belt, I built some simple code, no, not very complex, but it creates a tor hidden service connection to enable one part of our planned 3 layer p2p transport system, and I know once I bite the bullet that I will have the ipv6 and libp2p transports working within a couple of days.

Progressing the development process

The continuous learning process, my distinguished colleague (haha, yes, I have my tongue in cheek), @faddat, has been successful in getting me to actually look at all the thingies he goes on about all the time, and today we started working on a roadmap/checklist, and through the discussion it turns out that a lot of elements are simple integrations of existing codebase, we don't actually have to write much of the stuff that actually does things.

We are using a lot of the existing work done by the Cosmos people, with their Tendermint blockchain toolkit, but we are putting our own spin on it, like for example the 3 pronged peer peer discovery system that I am writing (I've done a big part of one of the parts), this will be augmented by tendermint's libp2p but we are going to add a Tor hidden service protocol layer and a 4to6 IPv6 tunnel so that our Validator nodes (and the whole network) has at least 3 ways to route around damage (ahem, filter firewalls, and such as busted undersea cables) in the network.

Turns out that apparently, IPv6 routing bypasses the Chinese Great Firewall... I wonder if you can see evidence of the GFW from space the same as the 1000 years in the making stupid wall across the border to mongolia. Basically, there should be nothing short of extreme catastrophe (like Niburu dragging some big asteroids into a collision course with earth) that can stop our nodes from finding each other. We will be adding more protocols but these 3 are the initial planned and between them should bypass every kind of nonsense between users and the internet.

What distinguishes Dawn from all the other shit out there?

First of all, we are not tying the business model to any kind of government sanctified registration of being their peons. Ok, I may need to register a corporation or nonprofit to get my residence permit here in Serbia, but it's not going to be something that I actually put any money through, until the extortion department demands some report of our taxable income, or they deregister me. Well, I'll just play it by ear, but my friend Mike, an american java coder I bumped into at the Rookies Hostel I stayed at for my first place of residence here, told me about how he got the right to stick around in this lovely place, and I'll be emulating it.

Serbia is not quite so connected as Bulgaria or Romania, but it isn't an EU member and unlike too many non-EU eastern european nations, they are dissolving the barriers from bringing new labor and, well, gametes, into the place, to ensure that there is an economic future here. Russia, by comparison, is struggling with its bureaucracy and really not cognizant of how imperative it is to get people to migrate. They are doing some pretty neat stuff though, you can get a free parcel of land in Siberia if you attempt to get citizenship (marrying one of the dateless russian ladies is a good way to do it, 6 months living there, with an immediate relation (eg wife) who is citizen, makes you eligible for this scheme).

But I'd prefer to stay here. Being right next to some of the biggest transit routes between east and west, and with a more progressive government and people who rightly see it as an error to join the nearly bankrupt EU, when the shit goes down in the eurozone, we are not gonna be in any trouble here. In fact, just look at a price chart of the Serbian Central Bank currency of the last 12 years of the exchange rate against the euro. It's moved up 25% in that period. I think originally they intended to peg 100 dinars to 1 euro but clearly that was impossible:

Of course because the ECB has been doing their best to try and peg 1.2 dollars per euro, and thus inflating their currency in lockstep with the FED.

I loved Bulgaria but Serbia just gets my juices running so much better. It probably also helps that they had the gall to put a nobody of a scientist on the 100 dinar note... my hero mister Nikola Tesla... Talking to serbians, I have also learned that every physics student in this country knows who he is, unlike in Australia and most of the West, apart from the one ISO standard measurement that is named after him (one of the possible choices for magnetic flux density, most people would not know how it relates to Gauss, who is the more famous scientist in the West in the field of magnetics).

Tesla actually invented a number of other theorems that have continued to be vitally important to modern science, but most of them have been ignored. A lot of people don't know he also was savvy with fluid mechanics and designed a reactionless pump that can be made nearly vibrationless, and the absurdity is the device is so goddamn simple. Yeah, you want to see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine

Why this is not the standard pump mechanism for refrigerators, and even internal combustion mechanism, one might speculate, but I used to own a book that was dedicated to discussing and explaining this device, and I can assure you, if I am setting up any kind of pumping system, I would prefer to use this one. It probably can run for centuries with good bearings.

anyway...

I just got the pique to write a rant here on Steem for my loyal fans, to entertain and edify them, and I hope they enjoyed my rambly screed. I need to get back to finishing this peer discovery protocol!

(note, I wanted to but decided not to rant about some amazing bugs I have found recently in steemd, but I decided not to... but I really despair the competence of the steemit devs. We are going to, at a lower priority, ensure that we can proxy to the Steem blockchain and eventually detach it and fork the bastid. It's just not a priority because working with steemd is painfully difficult and every new version introduces more bugs than improvements...).