There are a lot of things that have initially impressed me with Scorum in comparison to other STEEM clones. In some respects we can't exactly call it a STEEM clone because it seems to utilize a BitShares asset kind of like what WhaleShares did.
When I say STEEM clone I mean a similar mechanism to basically power up stake weight to gain influence in a blogging platform.
Initial Positives
Functioning Product - A lot of ICOs didn't get a working product to market because they were scams.
Good Design - I feel like the interface on Scorum is probably the best out of all the other clones and Steemit.com itself.
Additional Revenue Sources - One of the main things I have brought up several times is that sites like Steemit need an internal revenue source that gets shared with content creators and an external add engine to generate revenue that will both fund development and give creators additional revenue paid in STEEM Power. This would allow a company like Steemit Inc to not have to sell their stake to fund more development and would be creating buy pressure on the exchanges because they would be utilizing USD collected for ad space to STEEM and distributing it as STEEM Power to qualified accounts. Scorum does have an add engine and they aim to have an ad revenue sharing model.
There are a couple places to trade Scorum Coins (SCR)
Mechanisms To Fight SPAM - Each post is checked to see if something already exist out there. Keeps a lot of the copy and paste people off the platform.
Initial Negatives
No Power Down For 1 Year? - It kind of seems that you get paid all in Scorum Power and can't power down for a year. So I'm not sure how that much SCR got on the exchanges in the first place unless it was the Scorum Team who had liquid coins which they put up for sale on the exchanges. I'm not really sure how that took place. Does anyone know?
Unsure What The Yearly Inflation Rate Is? - STEEM is reducing its inflation by 1% / year and is approximately at 8% I believe. Does anyone know how fast the supply is inflating with Scorum?
Ranked 604 On CoinMarketCap - It is hard to keep people's interest in a project if it is so far buried on CoinMarketCap. If you slip off the first page it is rough clearly but on page 6 of CoinMarketCap is pretty far out of sight.
Expanding On Positives
The interface makes sense and from a design perspective is way more visually appealing than Steemit.com in my opinion.
The additional revenue model is critical in my opinion because as we have seen with STEEM it ends up being this weird game of "don't get dumped on" and the platform becomes very little about the content.
The advertisements don't seem intrusive and it is clearly marked that it is sponsored. They raised $5.63 Million in the crowdsale but they will need more than that to keep going so it is imperative to have additional revenue streams.
Using a BitShares asset gives you the advantage of at least being able to trade it on BitShares. They also got on HotBit which looks to be a Chinese exchange. The liquidity is low but again I don't know exactly how much liquid SCR is out there in the first place. A lot of the people in the crowdsale appear to have paid $1 for each SCR so they have lost 90% of their value at this point. This could be a great buying opportunity for someone or it could spell trouble if things don't turn around for the project. Anyone who invested in Golos to buy power there is likely in trouble. The trading volumes are so low for Golos that even if a person wanted to make a big move and become a whale they would have to do it over such a long time frame and risk the coin getting delisted from Bittrex.
Another disadvantaged to not having raised more money is the ability to get on more well known exchanges. It could cost a million dollars to get on something like Binance so it suddenly becomes an issue.
Expanding On The Negatives
If people can't power down they are investing a lot of time and effort into something that they don't know will survive for that long. (Someone confirm if that is correct?) If the trade volumes go so low that people don't feel like they can trade in and out it suddenly becomes a huge time risk to keep blogging there.
6 months is an eternity in the crypto market so a year is double eternity I guess.
The current market cap is only $3.3 Million at this point. Does that matter? Yes and no. The fact is if there were five people blogging on there you could make a decent amount each post and if the market came back and you were able to power down at some point you could make good money for your time. Otherwise you are risking your time and money on an unclear future. If not that many people are going to the website then the ad revenue isn't going to be that great either.
Also how much inflation is there per year? I can't find the numbers anywhere.
Conclusion
Initially I was pretty excited about signing up today and finally getting on that blockchain today. I still am in some respects because athletics has been such a big part of my life. You can check out my Introduction post here.
I sobered up a little bit at one point because I started seeing how much Scorum Power some accounts had and started doing the math on how much money it would take to become a bigger fish in that pond. Suddenly it was coming down to investing more into Scorum than I have in STEEM which in some respects doesn't make as much sense because STEEM is more established and we have a track history of where the floor seems to be as far as price discovery is concerned. The liquidity is way higher and STEEM won't die anytime soon. For the rest of the STEEM clones the future is a lot more unknown.
I think the sports market is huge and I really want to see this project succeed. On some level you have to respect the development team as well for actually coming out with a well designed product that works and not doing what a lot of ICOs did by not actually doing anything.
Can anyone answer some of the inflation rate questions and point me to the Discord Chat where the Scorum witnesses are hanging out so I can try to ask some more questions? I am interested in making an investment in increase my power but I really want to get the numbers hammered out before I do so.
After submitting the post this came up because I posted it first on Steemit, WhaleShares, and WEKU. I actually agree that this helps the platform be unique and not just be a content dump for content creators posting other places and prevents the problem with people copying and pasting other articles out on the web.
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