Are you upset and discouraged with how Steem operates? Perhaps we should fork/clone the platform! Yeah! That'll show'em!

Haha, no. It doesn't matter how big of a genius you are, no one person can fork a blockchain and expect it to be better than the original. If you want to fork, you have to have a damn good reason, and you need community support. That means hundreds of developers and community members need to be on your side.

The two 'forks' of Steem I know about are Golos and Weku. These platforms are actually clones. In order to qualify as a fork they would have to accept the previous history of our blockchain. Most importantly, a fork implies that all/most of the coins are still in the same place. If someone forked Steem, we'd all get coins on the new platform for free.

These two clones of Steems are garbage. They are clearly greedy cash grabs meant to target frustrated users who are too impatient to wait out the slow burn of development. Soon™.

So what would it take to actually create a fork of Steem that was superior to the original chain? Well, first of all, no one wants to reinvent the wheel. In order to make a superior chain we would first have to try to change this one multiple times and fail because greedy whales with stake were blocking our actions. No such political debacle has occurred, so you can be certain that any Steem clone that comes out is vaporware.

The decentralized nature of crypto makes leadership and organization very difficult. How do you get a team to come together and accomplish something great? ERC-20 was the first attempt at accomplishing such a task. By monetizing a project with its own coin hundreds of teams have come together to try to bring a valuable service to the cryptosphere.

SMTs are Steem's version of ERC-20. Again, the idea is to create new coins tied to new projects. The purpose is to quarantine a project to the given coin, so that you don't have to share the wealth with the main chain. It is in this way that small teams of developers can come together and claim ownership of their project while still maintaining the benefits of piggybacking off the main chain.

However, will this be enough for large development teams? If we want to get the world's attention we need to start competing with what centralization has to offer. If we want to be taken seriously, we need to create products that took millions of dollars to create and require strong leadership, organization, and professionalism. How can this be accomplished? In the same way that a successful fork could be accomplished.

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Everything will work itself out once we figure out a decentralized reputation system. Centralized rep gets gamed very easily.

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Ironically, given the trustless nature of decentralization, we do not have a lot of trust here at Steem. This is due to the high level of centralization of coin distribution, but even moreso due to the high level of centralization that our apps are bringing to the space. When Steemit Inc creates a trending tab that wholeheartedly trusts that the best content will be the one being paid the most, we have a problem. Busy and SteemPeak have brought nothing to the table in this regard. They've simply made better interfaces for the centralized problems we are facing, which is nice, but not enough.

Once we have a reputation system that people can trust it will be obvious who is in charge and who is a leech. The people in charge will organize and delegate responsibility, while the leeches will continue to amass flags and community outrage.

If finally we get to this moment and realize too many leeches have power on the platform, we can offer an ultimatum: help decentralize the platform or we fork a new one. The new fork would be the same as the old fork, except all the stake from the identified leeches would be drained and redistributed accordingly given the superior rules of the new reputation system.

Even better than a fork: if the reputation system somehow brings together 51% of the platform or more we could simply flag the other 49% into the ground and control 100% of all Steem inflation. I'm not gonna hold my breath on this front. I'd be happy if even 20% of the community could come together under the same banner.

How?

The biggest question we are stuck with is how to create a decentralized reputation system that can't be gamed. I believe that this problem, and subsequently its timely solution, is one of the biggest issues not only we face, but the entire cryptosphere faces as a whole.

Proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, and delegated-proof-of-stake are currently the only hard-coded solutions we have to this problem, and they all have big problems. Despite these problems, these models have carried us to where we are today, and they are very important.

I believe the Steem environment is a breeding-ground to create more solutions. I lovingly refer to this prototyping as Dumb Contracts. I've been brainstorming a solution for quite some time. Perhaps I'll actually deliver one day! The most important thing to note is that these problems will all eventually get solved, it just takes a long time to get traction.

Conclusion

What we have is what we have, and a fork isn't going to make it better unless we are 100% certain we've identified all the trustworthy people on the platform. Even then, if such a feat was accomplished, a fork shouldn't be necessary because the threat of a fork should theoretically be enough to change the system from within.

Forks are only a last resort in the battle against greed.