We shouldn't have to worry about accounts having the power to yield the chain to their will regardless of whether the community approves or not. At some point, this fork will become permanent (thus setting a precedent for disempowerment), or it will be removed.

Things like this never end up is temporary. There is always the push, the pressure, the energy to imagine that someone, somewhere out there will be coming in and destabilizing the status quo to the point that those who wield it must use that power to protect it. Even if that active protection is completely and utterly in contravention of the underlying philosophies which protect and justify the presence of the system as a whole.

And I'd like to recast this entire thing in other terms in order to more starkly represent what kind of threat it is:

As others have mentioned over the course of the past few weeks, having 30 votes available to each account does nothing to prevent attacks from parties with large stakes in the system simply voting in their own pawn witnesses and adopting whatever rules they want via consensus.

We have mentioned the inevitable capacity for failure in that set up for years now. When the mechanisms for buying new accounts outright in exchange for three SBD came along, the obvious threat of multiplying all of the things that are right and justly considered rights of each individual account was very plainly paraded before everyone. They knew exactly what could happen. They knew exactly why it could happen (because of the inability of the system to vet incoming accounts to avoid account duplication and try to contain the worst of the scams) and why it would inevitably happen as predicted. It would have been slightly better to accept that enough steak could simply buy out right as many votes as they could afford because at least then it could've happened in plain sight, for the most part. But add three or four levels of cut outs and scrambles, political smoke to hide behind and a few deals brokered in back rooms – and now we don't actually know where most of that power flowed from – or who it could be flowing to wash away next.

If we really want to have a discussion about voting within the Steem blockchain as a governance activity, we really have to stop, take a moment, and decide if the idea that the governance mechanism truly runs on SP is a good idea. It is from SP that all power flows, and if you possess SP, you possess a portion of that power. Any blockchain mechanism which denied SP its ability to vote to the maximum for whatever purpose it felt like aiming at would simultaneously be reducing the power of lesser SP holders to compete using the same tools. Protecting those what has with the cost of those what has not.

But this is the truly dangerous discussion to have because at the end of it, you very well may think that the best thing to do is simply to dissolve the Steem blockchain altogether as an entity. And indeed, that might be the best idea. Certainly a better one than picking an enemy, freezing it, making it personal, and treating it specially – which is what we see here. This does not end well. Having been established as possible, it will be used again, and again, and again, just with all new players but the same old game.