Relax People: We Will Be Alright

The news overnight (at least in the West here) has everyone reeling. Last week the Witnesses made their move and now Justin Sun made his. The power of centralization is upon us.

For those who did not check their feed, all 20 Witnesses were replaced using the STEEM that is sitting on exchanges. Those exchanges powered that STEEM up and then voted in Sun's Witnesses who then reversed the previous soft fork. This has freed up the Steemit Inc stake which was frozen by the Witnesses previously.

Thus, we are looking at the blockchain under the control of the centralized entitiy.

As an aside, @lukestokes put out an excellent video detailing how this took place. The core of his message is how people forget about Crypto Rule #1. I suggest everyone give it a view, it is only about 4 minutes long.

https://steempeak.com/steem/@lukestokes/your-stake-in-steem-on-centralized-exchanges-was-just-used-to-take-over-the-steem-blockchain

So, essentially, we have centralized exchanges that centralized things even further. This is an ongoing issue in the world of cryptocurrency that is causing a lot of problems. Even in the Proof-of-Work world, we are seeing similar complaints as the miners came under control of a few entities.

The question is where do we go from here?

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There is supposedly a meeting with the Tron team and Witnesses set to take place this week. I have no idea what will be said but, to me, it is a rather negligible point.

At the core is trust. That is one of the things blockchain is good for. Trust in the code tends to override what people say. Of course, if the governance is broken, then the trust is meaningless.

My view is that it is going to be tough to trust anything that is said. The situation is evidently hostile and I, as a community member, cannot see trusting anything that is said at the meeting on the 6th. Perhaps I will be proven wrong but it is a volatile situation. Without trust, there is little to build upon.

Where I do see a lot of trust is within the community. We might bicker and argue with each other but, in the end, we are dedicated to the same thing. While there are disagreements of how to get there, we are seeing the coming together of people with a single end in mind.

This trust extends to the developers who have created a lot of wonderful products and applications that are operating on Steem. Over the past few years, we saw the roll-out of a lot of different apps that are now ranked rather highly in terms of their usage. Steem is known for its community and this is reflected in the numbers.

While the centralized control took over the blockchain, the layer 2 solutions are not under the same premise. Right now they operate tied to the blockchain yet that could change in an instance. There is nothing that says the applications have to support this move.

Dan N of @blocktrades wrote an excellent article last week about the topic of forks in the cryptocurreny world. To me, this struck at the core of it all.

It is a rather long article and certainly worth the read.

https://steempeak.com/cryptocurrency/@blocktrades/cryptocurrency-forks-why-do-they-happen-and-what-happens-after

Essentially, the point was made that forks take place because someone does not like the actions that are taking place. This can be done with the majority of support or by a single person. With open source software, anyone with the technical know-how can fork the chain.

What this really means is someone takes the existing software, alters it, and starts running it on a computer. Hence, the blockchain is forked.

Of course, if anyone can do it, what adds the value? That is where people enter the picture. If I fork a blockchain and nobody else follows, the blockchain is forked yet what I created means little. Without users or applications, I have a piece of software running on a computer.

On the other hand, if the majority of people migrate over, then the forked chain ends up being more active than the previous one. Both will be ongoing but it is where the people (activity) is that determines the difference.

The most obvious examples are the Bitcoin forks. This happened on a number of occasions stating with Litecoin. There are many chains running the Bitcoin software in its many adaptations. Obviously, some are more successful than others with none being as successful as BTC.

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So what does this all mean for Steem?

What we are seeing is the test of open source, decentralization. It all boils down to what happens if something is done that the majority of people who are using that network do not want? Open source blockchains are now being tested as to the ability to defend themselves.

In the existing system, a hostile takeover means "you win". It is pretty cut and dry. With what we are dealing with here, it is not so clear.

The "fork" is the last line of defense. When a company gets taken over, everything associated with that company goes to the new entity. People are free to leave yet they cannot do certain things because of intellectual property, NDAs, etc...

With open source, none of that is the case. It is only a matter of who is able to attract the users and keep developing.

Is a fork the proper move in this instance? I cannot say for certain. It would not surprise me if someone is already running an adapted version of the software on a server somewhere after the news this morning.

Either way, people are going to ultimately decide what happens. Threats of big money players coming in and controlling everything is as old as the sun. It has happened throughout history. Nevertheless, we are entering a new era which provides option. With options comes power.

What I can say is that Steem is one of the better positioned chains to deal with this situation. While not ideal, Steem-Engine provides a lot of what is needed. A decentralized exchange with a couple of different front ends that enable token creation and exchanging.

We have a number of interfaces to the blockchain, most of which are better than Steemit In. Between Steempeak, eSteem, and all the tribes, there are plenty of ways to post to the blockchain.

At the end of the day, people are going to come to use the applications. When you look at games such as Splinterlands, Steemcity, Next Colony, and Holybread, what blockchain they are on matters little. The same is true for others such as Appics and Actifit.

The interesting thing about Dan's article is that his researched concluded that forked blockchains end up creating more value, collectively, than was the case before. The reasons for this are speculative but it likely has to do with the greater exposure and increased number of options end users have.

No matter how all of this turns out, I am confident that we will be alright. The threat was there from the beginning, it is now just being utilized. It is important to note that many of the displaced Witnesses also are developers of many of the applications that we use each day. We can probably guess what their thoughts are on the situation.

At the end of the day, this is an opportunity. We can further the cause of decentralization and distribution against centralized control. There are pieces in place that serve as a nice foundation to build upon. Sun realized that which is the reason for the acquisition. The challenge is he wants to do things in a centralized way.

Sometimes set backs end up being the best thing when going forward.

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Posted via Steemleo