Steemit Inc Stake-Freezing Softfork Thoughts
I've been quietly listening to a variety of thoughts about the recent Soft Fork 0.22.2, and just wanted to put out there what I think about it, mainly because I seem to be in the minority.
The Ninja Mine
My position on the initial "unfairly" acquired stake ultimately boils down to being fine with it. I don't care so much about the governance by the community (although having a fully democratic 1 person, 1 vote would be interesting, but seems out of reach). I do care that there is a governance structure in place. Is it so bad that the founder has a significant portion of it? That's exactly how corporate structures are, and power can shift over time depending on ownership of company shares. I wouldn't even have cared if they decided to vote with it, especially now that the collective assets are not actually overwhelmingly dominant (I've heard the figure 20% thrown around, and with all the fuss you'd think it was >50%). The stake right now has a bit of spread now, and the distribution is improving over time, at least with respect to this Ninja mined portion.
Soft Fork
Since I'm starting from the premise that the stake in question is okay, then it's clear that I do not approve of the soft fork. But let's say I was against it. I still wouldn't approve of the soft fork.
The assets belong to Steemit Inc, and it should be theirs to power down and sell as they see fit. If we've established that voting with it isn't going to give them a mandate on all future changes, what are we doing?
Then let's go a step further, say they do have full control of the chain (are we even sure we got all of them, by the way?). Would I be okay with this hard fork, then? Say also that Steemit Inc's vision is totally unacceptable to me, and I do not want what they have the ability to force feed through. Surely that possibility warrants this move?
I still don't think it matters. If they wanted their way, they can do the clean fork themselves too. Sure, the soft fork adds more steps but it doesn't make the possibility any less real. They would have the support of the exchanges as well, being the side with more resources to boot. Either way, it would make it difficult for those that side against.
So really, what's the point? I applaud that the current consensus witnesses were able to have such a conversation and come to their own consensus to deploy this soft fork, but to me it just seems like an empty exercise.
And where was I, you ask? Too busy with real life and the occasional Steem-related maintenance to deal with the current drama. But had I been part of this discussion I would have argued similarly anyway. So I just watched from the sides. But yeah, this is how I feel at the current time.
Witness Votes
For the time being, I have adjusted my witness votes to reflect my disapproval of the soft fork. Right now it's proxied, but will probably soon set them myself as there are still those that approved the soft fork I still want as witness.
Funny to me that you “don’t care” and were “too busy with real life” ... but a week after the fact, you felt the need to share some kind of moral stance.
So really, what’s the point? To me, it just seems like an empty exercise. :)
I actually agree with that, but I figured there was at least a few out there interested in my stance.
And what were you doing? You are absent from steem and just come in to launch jabs, you have made it clear you REALLY dont give a fuck about steem lol u only started posting again recently after steem was in the news lol
Your $2.84 comment upvoted by @likwid now thats an empty exercise lol, 2 bucks for a comment, and you arent grateful to his post so u could make money?
just be happier, enjoy your massive steem privilege like all top steemians like you who basically get welfare from a few top accounts lol. I wish you would be happier about that welfare.... you shouldnt be ashamed of it. Steem is all privately funded (for now)
Even if I was the first to criticize Tron and many of their moves, I share the same vision as you @eonwarped.
I'm also thinking that witnesses and some big stakeholders made this only for their own defense/benefit and not for the whole ecosystem/community. As one of the first and determined dapp developper on Steem I asked to people to join our forces all together, the result was unfortunately a discussion and a soft fork made behind closed doors without any talk with the rest of the community and the devs. I'm working for the success of Steem since 3 years now and maybe more (@hightouch67 is my first account), and I learned what happened after reading some witnesses post. Funny...
Does running the chain means that you have all the rights to do what you want and take some big decision that will impact all people there, behind closed doors?
"If they wanted their way, they can do the clean fork themselves too."
That was an option that our witnesses could have chosen to, (let call it SteemClassic) and I would have followed it without any doubt if things were going wrong with Justin, as some people and myself expected. Now I can say that I will never follow a bunch of people who are acting only for their own benefits while adding censorship to our ecosystem when it was no required at all! I have also no doubt that Justin will coax them and fire them as fast as they made this soft fork.
We, are a minority for sure, but we are not the smallest one too, and I'm not the only one to share your point of view I can guarantee that. But for many reason's, it's not so easy to be against that decision (because of politics and/or monetary issues) ;)
Here is another one.
I was right !
Thanks for your thoughts on this issue.
I could still follow this option also, in the worst case. Though I just don't see it happening anyway.
I don't think you are in the minority. Witnesses are too loud now because they are protecting their business. They should fork-off with their ideas of ownership. Everything is written on the blockchain, not some random Discord group.
Maybe a Sunny boy will fork them away.
Agree, tired of discussing it, but it's their stake and a DPOS system, the voting agreement was weak at best.
A sixty person meeting and surprise sf doesn't feel good.
Only commented, because I know what you mean about unpopular opinion.
Yeah, I know people are getting tired of talking about it. I've been stewing on this post for a while so just wanted to finally get it out. I think my initial version had a lot more fire in it and I took a lot out, just to focus on points I think are slightly different than what I've been reading. Yeah... That'll be for my eyes only and maybe for discord haha.
Its far more complex then that. Its important who does the fork, who is it that keeps the original chain. Whos is it that keeps the exchanges. The devs.
Thats not how it would work. Exchanges wouldnt go with it if 1 stake holder forked the chain nothing would happen. If we on the other hand hard forked we would most likely lose in that case.
Thats why a soft fork is so brilliant.
Its really pointless to argue if you dont care what the stake holders have to say. Our values differ.
If i wanted "corporate control" i would have stayed away from crypto.
Also youre dismissing the fact of what Steemit.inc said, what was agreed upon etc.
If this soft fork didnt happen Steem would probably be dead in a short amount of time. His intentions were openly hostile.
corperate control was just an example model, but hey bro lol steem and steemit was always controlled by a corporation called steemit inc Steemit always had a majority of SP, they just never really used it.
its never been "decentralized" nothing in crypto really is, its always been a situation of 30% stake owner who can outvote anyone on witnesses, i mean, ive seen the witness voting results, its a few BIG accounts like Freedom who used to vote for witness, remember? I mean, freedom chose who the witnesses were at one point.... Isnt there always one entity that makes the witness voting decisions at the end of the day?
How do you see this turning out? Do you think we will have Steem Classic emerge like Golos.id ?
Anyway, just because steemit inc doesnt vote for witness, doesn't mean they cant. Dont you think its good if @justinsunsteemit starts voting for witnesses and maybe allow verified steem accounts to VOTE for what HIS steemit inc accounts vote for?
Hopefuly steemit incs power has atrophied.... and maybe, we will get to a point where justin sun just never gets around to voting for witness and the keys for steem and steemit get lost in a bureaucracy , thatd be cool if they are hands off just from natural apathy.... but id rather them USE steem and SHOW people how steemit can be used to promote tron, or any coin. I want steemit to be seen more like coindesk/cointelegraphg and its what I want to start with @newsdac i just need Staking Scot and Nitrous for http://cryptowars.me or http://chatcrypto.org i want to use nitrous as just a site for NEWS like coindesk/cointelegraph and i REALLy see Tron as the first of many coins steemit posts will focus on.
ALSO, if steemit inc doesnt own majority share someone else will. We would all love to have a system where No one person can have over 10% lol but like EOS is showing, cartels arrise and the best way you solve this is to increase our governance and adopt Telos style system with Constitution, arbitration, steem foundation, all that.
I really want to actually have rules to prevent anyone entity from having more than a certain amount of steem, maybe 10% , maybe 4% and we can enlist a universal ID system that can emerge in the future to not PREVENt cheating completely but where we can get close enough to a fair situation..... im thinking of using a network of whitelists voted in, the opposite of the blacklists, and i really want to see steem develop its own universal ID systems
This simply isn't true. Exchanges are centralized and can decide on their own who to follow. It's likely in a clean split scenario they would allow both if both are reputable.
You're right, but it's not relevant to my points, which I wanted to focus on. Plenty of squabbling about who said what, so I didn't want to focus on that in this post. And as you mention, our values differ in the first place.
It depends who forks and how and what Justin would have in place at that time. The choices made by exchanges would effected by multiple factors.
I think Pfunk did a good breakdown on what was said and when.
Actually, it also depends on exchange partnerships. They may not even want to run two exchange nodes.... So there's that too
I agree with this:
Especially since, as you say, their percentage seems to be around just 20 or 30% at this point.
Steemit got the biggest stake because Steemit took the biggest risk. That's how entrepreneurship is supposed to work. When they ran the so-called "ninja mine", whatever they were bringing in was basically worth zero, but they had already expended substantial cost and effort on development.
Frankly, with Steemit abstaining from voting, the blockchain has fallen from #3 in market cap to as low as #90 and the price fell to less than 5% of the price in July/2016. Far worse than the other top coins in existence at the time. Maybe that would all reverse direction if they were to start exercising their voice in governance and curation. Maybe not, too, but it's hard to imagine that they could cause the value to do much worse.
Anyway, like you, I've mostly stayed out of these conversations because it's clearly a minority position, but I am glad you posted this.
Would like to see your witness votes not supporting the Tron puppets.
I'm voting for each of the warring factions to have veto strength against the other, so I can't really do that. Sorry to disappoint.
You can own a gun in a free society but that means you can literally shoot yourself in the foot with it.
If I bought a bunch of Euros and found the next day I couldn't spend them. I would feel there was something fundamentally wrong with the system of this money. Now how should this be different if it is Steem and @justinsuntron instead?
By undermining the social contract of your keys your coins, it casts doubt on the currency in general.
But it also has its strengths. Did you know that it is possible on the blockchain level of Steem to have accounts with multiple owner key pairs, active key pairs, and posting key pairs? I have done these things. I have done multi-signature transactions on one of the test nets.
Nice read! It’s always interesting to hear both sides of the coin
Here's one more minority comment for moral support. :) I also share your opinion, but I moved to a position of "what's done is done" and see how on earth we find our way out of the mess (both sides, not just one of them).
Everyone who didn't invest anything seems to have the same opinion.
I've invested more than I care to admit. Likely not as much as others though.
Ok, sorry to hear, to me the statements made about the "pre-mine" were important in my decision to invest.
steem doesnt need investors to pump and dump, it needs buyers of ads to monetize the site, it needs users, it needs businesses and services like @likwid which took peoples valuable time (I guess time is an investment too :D )
Investors just push a few buttons, users and developers who put in priceless time are giving up something much more precious. Money is cheap anyone can send money, but time development tools, like @likwid for example give steem blockchain a lot more than some flash in the pan investor. With Likwid we actually had a team spend their TIME which they cant get back and now all steemians can get likwid payouts (which really helped authors after curation went up to 50%)
So a service and development helped steem a lot more than some investor.... if we had less speculators and more value adding services like likwid we could have more businesses to buy steem not as an investment but as a utilit :)