Do you remember when the Vice Industry Token was going to be a SMT on the STEEM blockchain?
Along with this was the idea of air-dropping tokens upon Steemians.
Instead, Vice decided to fork the blockchain as opposed to joining STEEM. This meant no airdrop and that they would create the "adult" version of STEEM.
Now, it seems that all is not ideal in erotica paradise.
There is a lawsuit recently filed by Playboy against a Canadian blockchain developers that failed to tie in Playbot sites to the blockchain. The accusations against Global Blockchain Technologies is for fraud and breach of contract.
Of course, this is not a reflection on the Vice team per se. Where the issue gets questionable is the fact that Playboy was given millions of tokens by Vice. Now, without being part of the blockchain, the payback for Vice is nil. If something is not resolved, expect another lawsuit to be filed.
“I've read the complaint that Playboy has with Global Blockchain, and I'm really disappointed in Playboy. because we gave them millions and millions and millions of tokens, [and] they've never reached out to us once to try and get anything tokenized with their website[...] It makes me think that maybe we've got a case for a lawsuit against them, because they've taken the equivalent of millions of dollars from us, and we've received absolutely nothing and no benefit from it whatsoever.”
Perhaps this news was smoothed over by the agreement that was reached with Tube8, a subsidiary of PornHub.
It appears that this site and the 150M monthly users are ready to join the Vice Network. Since the VIT was brought to market using the ERC20 protocol, it is an Ethereum based. Since ETH handles about 15 transactions per second, there is no way to have anything substantial on that network. Hence the fork from STEEM.
There is one challenge. The fork is buggy right now. Also, the Tube8 team seems to think the transition was made to STEEM. That would be interesting to see how they did that with the token in tow. We are all awaiting the SMT protocol to be released, something that is still 7 months out. Yet now the VIT is working on the Vice blockchain?
But according to Vice Industry Token reps on Telegram, VIT still runs on the ERC20 protocol. CEO Stuart Duncan seems to agree too. “Everyone needs to understand there are a lot of moving parts to get [G]raphene as a software fork of [S]teem to run our platforms,” Duncan told VIT holders back in July.
Among other things, Duncan admitted on Telegram that one of the main roadblocks ahead of the Graphene migration is making sure the VIT-powered fork of Steem is bug-free. He also added the company is working hard on fixing certain “minor” bugs in a blog post from last month.
Whatever the case is though, Vice Industry Token is far from having a stable working product. And if history is any guide, mainnet blockchain launches can be awfully nightmarish.
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/17/pornhub-tube8-blockchain-cryptocurrency/
All I can say to this is "oops".
For some reason, my post the last few days seems to come back to the same thing: people complain about STEEM without really knowing what is taking place.
Vice, with all the money of their partnership backers, are struggling to bring a working product to market. In fact, according to the article from thenextweb.com, this could be a long way off.
This is not to say the will not get it right at some point. I am sure they will. My point here is that we have a team of developers on this blockchain who appear to know what they are doing. While their communication skills could leave a little to be desired, they seem to be pulling things together from a development standpoint.
At the same time, we also have a number of developers who are creating a bunch of different applications. This is really the holy grail of blockchain since people, ultimately, will not care what blockchain something is operating upon.
These two articles do show the power of the STEEM blockchain. It is also emphasizes the importance of having a working product. The Vice sales team obviously went out and successful got companies interested in what they are going to offer. Yet, there was one problem: they do not have anything working.
It is easy to fall victim that things are better everywhere else and focus upon the problems that STEEM is experiencing. Yet, when one truly looks at what else is taking place in the blockchain world, it is easy to see where STEEM stands. Only a handful of blockchains have any working products on them. STEEM is expanding the app base on a weekly basis. We are moving towards the release of some pretty large developments including another fork. All this while others are struggling to scale or get a testnet going.
They might have been smarter just to build upon STEEM instead of trying to become the "adult"STEEM. Thus far, it seems a bit problematic to them.
Sometimes people outsmart themselves.
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