Today's STEEM Updates: TRON's Roy Liu & Steemit's Eli Spoke in Discord. Ned Ran his Own Discord: "No Contract with Community for Steemit Tokens". Recordings In This Post.
I've had another busy day of research and conversation regarding the state of STEEM. Three main events took place:
- @justinsunsteemit posted a list of questions to witnesses in order to try to identify which ones he would vote for using the Steemit stake. He later removed the post's contents, but you can read the questions and my reply to them via the link in my earlier post.
- TRON's representative, Roy Liu came into the Discord town hall meeting on MSPWaves and discussed his thoughts on @justinsunsteemit's earlier post addressed to witnesses. It was agreed that a few top 20 community witnesses would go and have another private meeting with Roy - which by now should have finished.
- @eli also spoke in the Town Hall Discord and seemed to state that Tron and Justin Sun knew in advance that the community would lock up his stake!
- @ned set up his own Discord server and talked in a one way direction to community members. He attempted to respond to some of the points made by the community.
My feeling on the situation
The conversation with Roy seemed kind of productive and I feel there is a chance that the outcome of the private meeting may have been productive. I don't know what Justin intends to do with his witness votes but it seems that currently the community has chosen to hold the TRON and STEEM witnesses in a 10/10 split for the top consensus positions - suggesting the community wants a negotiation to take place.
The comment from @eli seems to totally contradict what Justin Sun said in his 1st conversation with witnesses and on Twitter. She appars to say that he knew about the risk posed by the witnesses and community in advance, due to the previous statements made by Steemit inc regarding the use of the ninja mined Steemit stake.
Ned's monologue was pretty evasive and he deliberately avoided answering all of my questions and anything remotely challenging.
The only comment he made which was of any use as far as I am concerned was in relation to any contract being in place between Steemit inc. and the community regarding the actions of Steemit inc. He did also state that he still holds STEEM and wants STEEM to succeed.
Recording of @eli from the Town Hall Meeting
Thanks to @jacobpeacock for this section of audio in which @eli makes a statement about her warning those negotiating the sale of Steemit inc. that the stake would get locked up and that their response was to reject her advice and that they would 'buy time':
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/685266036152729645/685271327674073121/eli.mp3
n.b. If you have a better quality recording of this audio then please let me know.
Ned's position on Steemit tokens
You can listen to the audio of Ned speaking in these two MP3s recorded by @someguy123:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/341298478498185226/685248516997775437/ned_pt_1.mp3
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/341298478498185226/685248518344147035/ned_pt_2.mp3
Ned's bottom line is that there was no contract or agreement in place between Steemit inc. and the community regarding what it would do with it's tokens and he pointed us to 'the about page on steemit.com'. Since there actually is NO about page on steemit.com currently, it was nearly missed entirely that the page he was referring to exists solely on steemitwallet.com:
Disclaimer
Steemit Inc. (The “Company”), is a private company that helps develop the open-source software that powers steemit.com, including steemd. The Company may own various digital assets, including, without limitation, quantities of cryptocurrencies such as STEEM. These assets are the sole property of the Company. Further, the Company’s mission, vision, goals, statements, actions, and core values do not constitute a contract, commitment, obligation, or other duty to any person, company or cryptocurrency network user and are subject to change at any time.
source: https://steemitwallet.com/about.html
Since this text ONLY exists on an about page which I imagine gets almost NO traffic, using this as a disclaimer is a pretty weak defence to begin with. I am not legally trained, so I cannot comment on the strength of this disclaimer in the context of the numerous points of evidence where Ned publicly stated that the Steemit.com tokens would be decentralised and used for community growth purposes (rather than being sold - as he did and as Justin Sun has stated he intends to do).
Potential evidence of verbal or other form of contract
The Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake is said to consist of approximately 74 million STEEM tokens by those privy to the terms of the sale. Some of these tokens are liquid but most of them are powered up in @steem, @steemit, and @misterdelegation accounts. The sum of STEEM Power in these accounts alone is currently about 60 million SP. They also have almost 5 million liquid STEEM total. The rest of the total amount of STEEM is presumed to sit on exchange accounts.
What can you do with just the 65 million STEEM and STEEM Power that we can easily see between @steem, @steemit, and @misterdelegation? As of writing, the top-ranked Steem witness has about 45.4 million SP of Steem user stake approval. If used, the 65 million SP of known Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake can put that witness in 31st place and well out of establishing blockchain consensus.
For reference, the following are all examples of Steemit statements regarding these tokens:
- https://steem.com/2017roadmap.pdf -
Section 3. Steemit inc. “We plan to decentralize the @steemit account stake”
Section: Decentralizing Stake
Also in that same document:
video evidence
26:30mins Ned talks about the mining, the steem INC got and how they would use it to decentralize the network.
43:30mins - Ninja mined stake is “not voting” and “reserved to develop eco system”
52:00mins - Ned talks about ninja mining and it's uses/justifications. “it's (the ninja mined stake) completely dedicated towards getting better and decentralizing over time any object that comes into existence I just centralized and its birth moment and over time to centralize this and we are at the very beginning of scheming over time it will decentralize so if there are issues with it today you know decentralization is a subjective and sliding scale hopefully it gets to the point where Steemit doesn't matter or Dan and I don't matter and you know that's could be years away I don't know but there's still a lot of growth to be had a lot of development to be done and it's fully in our objective to make sure that that happens”
48:30 seconds talks about stake being intended to be given to the community. "we have no interest in controlling the entire blockchain and we want to distribute to others asap".
16:15 seconds (asked about stake)
17:53 “my company mined a bunch and now we are using it to grow the eco system”
Further links
Steemit inc. code implementation of features to temporarily freeze stake in the circumstances that occurred after the acquisition:
https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.14.1
Section – Decline voting rightsThread from dan larimer about implementing the mechanisms used to temporarily freeze the stake.
https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/324
Summation
Clearly it is up to each of us to make our own mind up about the situation and take appropriate action. I personally had a similar feeling while listening to Ned that I have had when researching pyramid scheme type scammers in the past. The evasive half truths and carefully chosen words did not feel good to me. To hear Ned speak using the term 'we' in reference to him being part of the STEEM community felt particularly unpleasant to me. I appreciate that he may have been in a difficult position and from my perspective he was out of his depth, not matter how professional he tries to make himself sound... However, if Ned wants to be part of an actual community (other than a gated one), he needs to learn how to communicate openly and live from the heart.
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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The recording from this call is now online at
Ned seemed very clear to me and I have to agree with him regarding Steemit's stake. Anything "promised" was merely a plan of action taken by the company and those plans can change at any time. Justin bought Steemit and the stake and we have to deal with him now. Ned is not really part of the picture anymore and I think he's just trying to help move things along.
The witnesses need to figure out a good compromise ASAP that doesn't include dictating to Justin what he can do with the property he legally purchased.
If there cannot be a good middle ground, then the witnesses should give it up and start a new chain.
This is turning out to be a dumpster fire of the utmost proportions... what a mess. Both sides have good points. Nobody wants a centralized chain though, or to become a TRON token. Everyone is way too invested in Steem. I feel for @justinsunsteemit however as well ... but also... seems like people have a hard time trusting him... Very hard to discern what the 'true motives' are. Maybe I'm just naive, or too empathetic. In any case, keeping fingers crossed for a win-win situation.
Everyone be acting like STINC owe them anything when in reality we're simply HODLing empty promises on text without some kind of a legal bind to that agreement. I don't see why the witnesses didn't get STINC to somehow put down that agreement on code. When Tron team asked to see it, the witnesses said they needed some time to collect it.
Really? We claim we reached out to have THIS conversation and we're yet to get the facts straight, but it's okay to jump ahead to freeze stake.
We negotiated in bad faith by taking Ned's word for it for 4 years. Today, we're freezing someone's stake. Shows how little we understand contracts on the blockchain. Do we really believe this blockchain code is law thing, or we pop it whenever it's convenient for us?
Steem's been too hostile to new people and people who have a different opinion. Centralization in decentralization.
You see it everywhere you look. They're trying to censor a person's opinion because it doesn't align with theirs. Earlier, they froze STINC's stake, then a witness called the steemit twitter account handler a monkey. Today, it's @lukestokes calling on the community to boycott steemit.com interface. (se his latest post)
You'd ask, what community?
The community they've consistently ignored for years, choosing rather to circle-jerk themselves to the trending page on steem related posts?
The community whose witness votes never counted because the top 20 was essentially centralised by 2 accounts (@freedom and @pumpkin) for years.
It's pathetic how they hide under the cloak of community to bully and demand the community take responsibility for them.
-- @pangoli
you may like this you can find it in steemwallet
Steemit Inc. (The “Company”), is a private company that helps develop the open-source software that powers steemit.com, including steemd. The Company may own various digital assets, including, without limitation, quantities of cryptocurrencies such as STEEM. These assets are the sole property of the Company. Further, the Company’s mission, vision, goals, statements, actions, and core values do not constitute a contract, commitment, obligation, or other duty to any person, company or cryptocurrency network user and are subject to change at any time. https://steemitwallet.com/about.html
Clearly, despite our personal opinions regarding what does or does not constitute obligation, agreement, or contract between investors relying on Stinc's, @ned's, and @dantheman's representations regarding the deployment of the founder's stake, there are grounds to determine the answers to those questions in litigation.
There are certainly enough folks hereabouts that are willing to claim they have been financially harmed by this sale and the hostile takeover of Steem governance, and the seizure of their tokens on exchanges - that still remain unavailable to their proper owners last I heard.
Regardless of what witnesses do, financial injury is being done as we speak, and those parties will have to settle their claims, or seek remedy juridically, at their sole options. That's not up to the witnesses, but that continuing financial injury is certainly their concern, and should be at the top of their priorities.
Any compromise they agree to should necessarily resolve financial harm ongoing as quickly and completely as possible, while also ensuring no more is forthcoming. That's a tall order, and likely to involve restricting voting rights on somebody's stake, to make sure this never happens again.
Appealing to "the government" expecting them to "fix" what is, essentially, a systemic software design error for a bunch of hypocritical "libertarian" techno-idealists is INSANE.
(IFF) you subscribe to "the rule of law" (THEN) "special" "emergency" "temporary" "powers" should NEVER be implemented.
Live by the blockchain-code-law, die by the blockchain-code-law.
Making up new rules for fabricated "emergencies" is a core ethical violation (patriot-act).
Everybody knew the ninjamine was a "problem" but their fundamental mistake was to "trust" ned. Never trust a human to do anything except act in their own personal self-interest.
BLOCKCHAIN should be TRUSTLESS.
If ned was so trustworthy, they would have VOLUNTARILY divested the ninjamined stake. They could have EASILY done this by slowly dumping at least 50% of the ninjamine onto the OPEN MARKET (and transferred the proceeds to steemit or whatever he promised to do).
sURE this would have lowered the market-price of steem tokens (better reflecting the TRUE-market-value), but this is not necessarily a "bad" thing. A reliable micro-payment system is a major paradigm shift away from traditional models and a low market-price of steem would lower the bar for new accounts (allowing regular people to "compete" with the "big-fish" (oligarchs).
@themarkymark and @freebornangel and @tarazkp and @abh12345 and others have repeated told myself and others,
"if you don't like it, then start your own blockchain".
They should take their own advice.
The reason @ned didn't execute code restricting his ability to exercise governance is apparent today. I agree that is not worthy of trust. It remains a fact that his long failure to exercise that governance yet enables people to believe the illusion Steem is decentralized, or ever has been.
Either Tron and the exchanges execute code that prevents their exercise of governance, or Steem remains the exclusive possession of Tron, to whom @ned sold it. We users of Steem aren't a possession, but that only matters if we act to retain our agency. If Tron does not execute that code, and no one cares, we might as well be possessions of Tron.
I presently await the community understanding the reality of Steem's ownership and execution of a HF to create a new platform that enables us to actually have a decentralized community.
Thank you for your vigilance.
did Steemit & BitTorrent just get hostile takeover by a criminal network?
https://newslogical.com/ethereum-is-over-and-tron-is-moving-to-lightning-network-on-bitcoin/
https://www.coindesk.com/trons-takeover-of-steemit-is-internet-history-repeating-itself
A lesser man would not have included the link to steemitwallet.
Much respect and appreciation
I did a post recently on Pelfonomics which I'll link below.
I mentioned the 4-criteria for healthy contract law:
Good Faith...
Consent...
Full Disclosure...
Mutual Benefit...
The community can decide if these 4-areas of concern were met.
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@andrewmarkmusic/pelfonomics
I would love to hear @apshamilton's take on Ned's claim that the disclaimed I quoted earlier on removes him from any form of public contract here.
Manually voted on for excellent archiving!
@scipio
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Very nice work here @ura-soul. Thank you for putting this together!