Part of the original motivation for cryptocurrency was to help solve the wealth inequality found in fiat currencies, but it ends up the same. A tiny percentage of accounts hold the majority of any cryptocurrency while the rest hold tiny almost negligible amounts.
I’m hesitant to share this as it could negatively impact me financially and my reputation on these various platforms, but I’ve always given you the truth and all the information at face value unbiasedly and I will continue to do so.
Do keep in mind for some of those listed below, there are accounts that hold a lot that is meant for giving out rewards or for selling tokens, but they aren’t technically beholden to that by contract. Also, centralizing the sale of tokens is problematic as we saw with Minds when tokens went from $0.15 to over $1. I’m also not necessarily condemning accounts on Trybe for example for holding all the tokens in one account for reward distribution, but naturally, that is what wealth inequality is (when a small number of entities hold the majority of the wealth).
I found out the other day that only 5 accounts hold more than 60% of all the existing LBC on the platform LBRY at https://lbry.com/. You can see that the top 5 accounts hold 226,470,607 LBC. That is 63.71% of all the LBC in existence. The top ten hold 69.91% and beyond that, it starts to be much less. You can find all this here: https://explorer.lbry.com/stats
For https://trybe.one/ I managed to find a block explorer and whale statistics on https://eospark.com/token/trybe/trybenetwork. The top 10 accounts hold about 94.47% of all the Trybe tokens and the top 30 essentially hold all the tokens. I don’t really understand how according to their statistics updated as of today, there are more than 100% of the tokens held, but they have that beyond the top 500 it’s -4.8% to balance that. Either way, wealth inequality is ridiculous.
For Steem at https://steem.com/ you can see on CoinMarketCap that the current circulating supply is 351,084,363 as of writing this here: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/. We can see that the top accounts for holding Steem hold 89,281,022 Steem and 26,465,182 worth of Steem in SBD. That’s close to 1/3 of all Steem in circulation which actually isn’t too bad compared to other platforms. The thing is when you consider vested power you can see that centralized control can then take place if the top accounts work together. This is as of 1 year ago which is a bit outdated since most websites stopped updating us on this, but it still paints the picture for you: https://steemdb.com/accounts/vest. The top 10 accounts have 195.27 GV which means Gigavests. Vests are how much influence they have on the network. When we look at the witnesses who are voted in based on vesting here: https://steemdb.com/witnesses. You can see the number 1 witness only has 446.780 MV. 1 GV is equal to 1000 MV. That means when you look at the top 10 accounts, 1 single account has more vesting power than all the vests and votes given to witnesses. Witnesses determine the rules and policies and when to hardfork the Steem blockchain which is supposed to be decentralized and yet one single account can change all the top witnesses with ease. The point here is that unless you dig deep, you won’t realize that it’s essentially just as centralized as any other centralized platform with the guise of decentralization masked behind a lot of highly technical infrastructure. At least though in terms of wealth inequality, Steem seems to be the lowest compared to the rest of the platforms that wealth inequality is possible on, again the control is completely centralized. I still love Steem and this isn’t a jab at them. It’s purely to share this knowledge.
We already know that for https://www.minds.com/, it’s wealth is already very centralized in terms of the crypto distribution because you more or less can only buy their tokens from them and you can’t really sell them. We don’t need a block explorer to figure this one out. The same goes for DLive at https://dlive.tv/ where you can only buy Lino points from them and sell them back to them on their terms. This is the case for any platform where you can’t buy or sell outside of the platform itself meaning the price and everything about the currency is controlled by them and centralized naturally creating a wealth inequality.
The platform https://www.uptrennd.com/ has recently gotten their tokens onto exchanges but with very low trading volume, but since the platform starts out with all 1 billion tokens, 1 single account holds 98.12% and that can only be bought from them directly while the other 1.88% is held by users and could be traded on exchanges.
I won’t do this for every single platform, but you must be seeing the pattern here. You must also consider that many of these accounts can be owned by the same person and used to dilute what they appear to own.
What was interesting to me amongst looking through all of this was the realization that Publish0x, a platform I’ve been using quite a bit now doesn’t have this problem. Because Publish0x is crypto-agnostic meaning they don’t have their own cryptocurrency thus there can be no wealth inequality but there is also no way to stake and thus no way to exponentially gain more wealth and widen the wealth gap. Instead, everyone gets tips given freely by sponsors and the users decide how much they receive and how much is given out.
This means that in terms of wealth distribution, Publish0x is the only crypto-monetized platform that avoids this problem entirely and has the fairest and equal opportunity for people to earn from their content. The catch is that it doesn’t utilize a blockchain and it’s not very decentralized. No platform perfectly fits all the variables that would make it the best platform, but I felt this was worth looking at. The founder hasn’t even earned anything from the platform and has given away much more BTC than he has earned himself.
I believe crypto-agnosticism is the future of equal opportunity on crypto-monetized social media platforms.
You may be wondering too, why does this matter? If you come onto these platforms to escape wealth inequality, then you are surely mistaken to think the same thing doesn’t happen almost everywhere. I’m not blaming or condemning these platforms, maybe it’s just a natural consequence of economics the way they were set up. The point is that you as an individual have no control whatsoever over where the price might go so at any time the top 100 accounts could sell everything and the price will crash, and it will be worth nothing. The top accounts are holding these coins to benefit from your hard work as creators and users and the traffic you bring in the same way Facebook would. The only difference is they give you a negligible amount to make you feel better about it.
So, the reason this matters is because you shouldn’t waste your time on platforms that aren’t going anywhere in hopes you can make some money off of them because, by the time you could, it might just as easily go to 0.
Most platforms are like this, the key is finding out which platforms are really bad like Trybe with 100% essentially held by the top 30 accounts and which platforms have value that are worth your time at all. With Steem you can earn enough for it to be worth trying, LBRY is pretty good at around 70% for the top 10 comparatively to Trybe, but Publish0x is the best in terms of equal opportunity to earn. Again, you may prefer LBRY or Steem because they utilize blockchain technologies and are much more decentralized. But they have centralized wealth in the case of Steem, which really means they aren’t so decentralized because wealth equals power.
I share this to my own detriment hoping that I do not get silenced on these platforms for sharing the truth and the reality of the situation, but it’s important you are aware of what you’re involved in. I still highly recommend using LBRY, Steem, and many blockchain alternative social platforms as they are infinitely better than traditional platforms, but they share many vices and faults with them too that you might not have realized.
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