An Open Letter to the Community - HF22.5
An Open Letter to the Community
On February 22, 2020, Steem Witnesses launched Soft Fork 22.2, with the sole intent to freeze the original stakes owned by Steemit, Inc.
Originally, as the core development team behind the Steem blockchain and key contributor to the ecosystem, Steemit used their stake for continued development of the Steem blockchain, onboarding users, and not voting for witnesses. The TRON Foundation is committed to add value and grow the Steem ecosystem and intends to use part of the Steemit stake for such executions. With that in mind, on February 13th, both TRON and Steemit planned to meet to discuss the future road map, with respect of the Steem community. Unfortunately, the Witnesses’ decision created a need to reclaim the stake and vote in new witnesses to usher in new policies for a healthier ecosystem and community.
Soft Fork 22.2 was maliciously structured, intending to freeze a handful of very targeted accounts and taking away their rights and possession to their owned asset, and may be deemed illegal and criminal. The group behind this could essentially do this kind of attack to any Steem community member, on any terms they want. They even threatened to hard fork, and nullify all existing STEEM token, putting every good STEEM holder, developer and community interest at danger. This is very much against every aspect of the original purpose of decentralization and the core value of the Steem blockchain and community. We can’t let it happen.
On March 2, 2020, Steemit regained the staked accounts, so as to course correct the hostile behavior led by a small group of people, and resume the order of the community.
Commitment to the Community
- The Steem blockchain will not be abandoned or merged to TRON unless the community decides so.
- Deploy in the next Hard Fork as soon as possible to reduce power down time to 1-3 days in alignment to other mainstream blockchains, while open for discussion for better economic implications.
- For the next 4-6 weeks, the Steemit team will be using the voting rights to resume the order of the community while having an open channel for meeting community members and Witnesses. The goal is to protect the Steem blockchain from bad actors, add transparency, and receive community suggestions and advice.
- After the 4-6 weeks period, the Steemit team will give the governance back to the community when it’s back in order and mutual agreement.
Product Roadmap
The Steemit team had a very productive and exciting conversation with TRON on the future roadmap and we can’t wait to share this with everyone. The following features are what we will be focusing on:
- Maintain Steem blockchain running in parallel with TRON
- Launch Smart Media Tokens
- Launch Cross Chain Atomic Swaps
- Improve Overall Steemit.com User Experience And Onboard More Users
Smart Media Tokens (SMTs)
SMTs are on our public testnet. We have GitHub testing issues created that once completed will ensure confidence in the release.
Alongside the SMT release is the SMT Wizard, a simple front end for creating SMTs, and client libraries. Client library work is mostly done except for small changes being made to the protocol during testing and is awaiting testing.
Cross Chain Atomic Swaps (CCAS)
CCAS will use a combination of Hashed Timelocked Contracts (HTLC) and Header Only Verification (HOV) to seamlessly move tokens (STEEM, TRC-20s, and SMTs) between TRON and Steem.
Steemit.com User Experience Improvements
Steemit.com is an opportunity to onboard massive numbers of users into our ecosystem through a social network / viral media model, now with TRON’s ecosystem and resources, this goal is more achievable than ever.
We are on target for feature parity with reddit.com. With communities core launched, we are very close to this goal. The remaining tasks are around onboarding, including an invite system for new accounts, and optimizing content discovery.
Specifically, our primary goal is to emphasize the organic and sustainable models for growth that Steemit.com enables. We plan on doing this by:
- Lowering the barriers to entry by streamlining the signup and first-use experience on steemit.com and on the Steem blockchain.
- Contributing to the quality and authenticity of the user base by implementing an invite / referral signup system.
- Enhancing the quality of user experience on Steemit.com by removing ads, optimizing the front page, making the rewards system easy to use through browser extensions, and integrating the wallet with the main site.
Enhancing the mobile experience.
More Rewards to Witnesses
Community is the core to the Steem ecosystem, and Witnesses should earn rewards accordingly given how important their roles are. We will come up with a plan to reward Witnesses privileges in Steemit like staking rewards.
More Users
TRON is known for its thriving ecosystem, and now Steemit has access to TRON’s active 15 million user community, a distribution network of over 600 million DAU, meanwhile leveraging TRON’s powerful marketing resources as well as some top industry leaders.
More Content
A social network without content won’t go far. Steemit.com has a perfect foundation and we will reward more to the content creators and/or curators to feed the users.
More Development
More developer support will be provided. Not only do we have access to more engineer support, but also we can run more hackathons and devote more capital to support the development of community projects.
More Liquidity
We’ll be learning a lot from TRON’s team on how to build a healthy exchange relationship and we’ll be having more conversations with exchanges to learn the best way to get listed and have more trading pairs.
A Brighter Future
Steemit and the Steem community is one of a kind within the current blockchain landscape. It had its own history, but now with TRON’s resources and ecosystem behind it, it’s time to course correct and build a healthier and thriving ecosystem around this dynamic community.
This will be nothing but an exciting future.
The Steemit Team
Do you understand this is exactly what we wanted to prevent?
With this move you:
Preventing this is the reason why softfork 22.2 was implemented in the first place. But how stupid where we to not include befriended exchanges. We discussed it but we could not believe crypto-world would be so stupid. Apparently exchanges pick a side.
Please understand you have killed a wonderful community of four years. Real people. From all over the world. Not bots or gambling apps.
Maybe your chain will continue, but it will be an empty shell. Happy pumping.
seriously, they used the stake to downvote comments....
@ben is a steem whale. Early Adopter. Not sure how he is aligned to Steemit....
That account has been sold.
The changing of the private keys does support this inference https://steemd.com/tx/24fcc974e1318a2665b6bc30c871d3247959203c
It's a Justin Sun/Steemit account.
@ned is/was a steem whale. Early founder.
sunkimjong and his comrades
Lol😂
lol.. hahaha
And changing the powerdown to 24 hours for what reason? That doesn't make sense and obviously won't be a community decision! Centralization at it's best!
So his exchange buddies can power down all the customers' funds they powered up to save STINC stake.
After centralizing the chain so totally and all of the dapps shutting down in protest, it would otherwise take weeks for every single user to rush to the exits as fast as possible and the price of STEEM to tank to zero. This way, the dumping can commence the day after they unilaterally change monetary/issuance policy of their centrally-managed, centrally-issued, unregistered publicly traded security.
I think it's more likely that they had to agree on doing this in order to have the exchanges move along with powering up all of their user's STEEM.
They knew that as soon as the SP on the exchanges was used to give back voting rights to the Steemit Inc accounts, those in turn can implement the new fork and they wouldn't need to use the tokens on those exchanges for voting anymore.
So the power down is likely added to allow the exchanges to power down quickly again once everything is "back in order", so that their users won't be too mad.
Why? Of course to un-power all what's recyclable, and probably to somewhat defend against any attempt to enforce things like https://developers.steem.io/apidefinitions/#broadcast_ops_decline_voting_rights with its 30 day period, but of course that one is dead anyways, as it can be issued ONLY by the owner of given account (owner decides to do a self-locking). It's dead because no malicious user will ever decide to self-lock the voting rights, and I don't expect steemit or justin or exchanges to do that, especially now. Considering that the steem API probably doesn't have any "lock that bad guy" ops (that could be easily misused), then changing the power-down period now can only mean one thing: INCOMING RAPID FUND DRAIN.
Changing the power down is being done so the exchanges that unethically, if not illegally powered up their clients Steem and voted with it can power it down quick and replace their clients Steem before SHTF.
Which would conclude the prediction I made about 2 years ago; steem/steemit/dapps were structured in the same way that a ponzi scheme is structured.
Start with an idea; get investors in on the idea, the future value of that investment increases with new investments (users, witnesses, content creators) that increase is used to payout early investors.
Eventually, either a) the value is no longer sufficient to payout the investors, or b) the main investor pulls their money out, leaving all the rest holding an empty bag.
He proves what he is: a pirate?
When Steem Inc held the most coins and Freedom could decide who can go to top 20, we already knew steem chain is centralized.
For the exchange, if the users can withdraw the coins as will, then there is no problem for the exchange to use the coins. If the exchange prevents users to withdraw, then it's another story.
When firepower the spammer retaliated me just because I reveal the truth and cleaners refused to help, none of your witnesses willing to help. When the whales put the upvotes for sale and the front page is filled with garbage, none of you witnesses care. Now you witnesses realized that you may not be able to collect money without doing anything, you guys acted super fast. Yes, I agree some of the top witnesses have contributions to Steem, but what you did is far less than what you paid for.
Let me tell you, the spirit of Steem had already dead long time ago.
I wonder how many of that so called 15 mil users on Tron are bots, proxy and bag holders who just go with the flow. Does anyone in their community even contest things? We might not be the most pleasant bunch but at least we're not just yes men for everything
They don't exist.
There's exactly one person from Tron that's commenting here and it's @will-richards.
For the record, I kidnapped @will-richards from a Tron discord.
Simple: all of them.
Sure looks like it, I've never heard a bag holder of Tron shit on anything they do.
You answer yourself ... It is not exactly Steemit, the most crowded platform of being human.
Nor is it the platform that most helps human beings to enter and participate.
In fact. To all the people to whom I have invited Steemit, they have escaped.
After verifying the content they found here. For them it was more like a conversation between aliens. That a conversation between human beings.
What makes it impossible to retain users... Tron will be crap. Personally, I don't know him.
But Steemit, I know him; and for a new user or person who is not a blockchains fan. I can assure you that Steemit is absolute bullshit. Equally.
And I have already checked with many people.. Trust me.
Both need the ideal change. At least Steemit. That is the platform that I know.
It must become a simpler, natural and realistic platform.
It is required not to talk so much about Steem, Steemit or blockchain applications, to let in other more normal problems for society in general. Other themes that in Steemit in many cases are prohibited or very badly received.
And facilitate understanding and use at the slightest expression..
haha that is funny
justin sun loves bots and gambling dapps so he can't understand our feeling
What if Justin is a bot masquerading as a human?
Dun dun dunmnnn
Brought to you by the CCP Android department. No relation to the mobile operating system.
lol now they are downvoting!! Stupid!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
You did this to Steem. It's exactly an accurate description but it fits well enough.
Streisand effect
The Streisand effect is a phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. It is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, their motivation to access and spread it is increased.It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress files, websites, and even numbers. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored on the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.
" But how stupid where we to not include befriended exchanges." I rebutt that this question is not accurately worded. Perhaps something more along the lines of "How could we not have thought about all the multitudinous "tricky" ways required for dealing with a Chinese person in business relations - based on ASSUMPTIONS we make as "non-Chinese" as to what is "fair play", versus wat is "beyond the bounds" of fair play?"
I am actually finding this all very entertaining, in a twisted way, because it vindicated my original gut feeling about this as soon as I heard the news of the "partnership". Aside from all of the "scammy" top dApps on the Tron blockchain (which is PROOF that this dude is not exactly the must trustworthy/straight-forward guy in blockchain) I just find it humerous that as China is literally on lockdown right now we're seeing this sort of thing play out in the microcosm. The bottom line is that, Chinese people "do business" in a totally different way. And so when you ENGAGE them in business dealings you're simply going to be "tacitly agreeing" to dealing with their "tactics". I have not doubt in my mind that Justin Sun BELIEVE that what he is doing is "the best option at this time". And it may ultimately lead to "progress" of some sort. But everyone is going to have to ACCEPT, going forward, that by engaging with Steemit we are all now "tacitly agreeing" to this kind of managemet behavior. As for me, I initiated the 13-week "power down" of all of my ~ 2,600 Steem, with the understanding that the "13 weeks" will be a "trial period" for Justin Sun to prove to me that it is BETTER for me to keep my Steem staked in Steeit versus converting [that] Steem to DEC and putting it all into the @splinterlands game, whose admins' ethics and business practices I have MUCH more confidence in, because they have EARNED that confidence through transparency and fairness over time. Steemit is just ONE dapp. There ARE - and WILL BE others. I find this situation to be more ENLIGHTENING than anything else at this time. Everyone needs to make their own choice. I am still willing to give Justin Sun the next 12 weeks to "show me what he's got". But I'm also wise enough to do my due diligence. Either way, I think things will work out in the grand scheme...
Just here to read the comments 🍿 nomnomnom
They do and don’t care....this isn’t a normal company.
I think all exchanges should: https://developers.steem.io/apidefinitions/#broadcast_ops_decline_voting_rights before being allowed to operate on the chain, or before people trust their funds to them. But of course, it's now a far too late to shout about it :|
I see nothing bad going on @roelandp ?
I think the funds used were the funds sitting in their Steemit accounts ! I found two of their account a few weeks ago and made an inquiry as to what they were.
As for Centralization! wow the decisions have been centralized for longer than I have been around which is more than three years. The berniesanders and markymark grouping of accounts has been running this place into the ground for years lol ! Yea a few of you were accumulating a lot of Steem but that is not will support a higher prices. More people holding and using Steem will increase the price! But our centralized leadership has been driving people off the platform just as fast as they can! And introducing pathetic plans like the EIP which was designed to drive more users away!
looks like the hostile actions taken by the centralized authority led by bernie and marky actually caused it to me!
But you fucked up
I'm sorry to say this, but you've been neglecting yourself for years, leading to Steem's death. That wasn't done by Justin Sun, but by Witnesses (and many whales).
So basically you hostile takeover Steem's governance claiming it's because you're striving for decentralization, and yet you do it by centralizing governance by voting the top 20 witnesses with one super powered up account.
But screw the 4 years and thousands of witness votes from the community that's been here every day for years, right?
And the fucking exchanges used customer funds! Its beyond unethical.
Not long ago I found this brillant operation in steem docs: https://developers.steem.io/apidefinitions/#broadcast_ops_decline_voting_rights - the community should have required any exchange to do precisely that on their technical accounts, so such things cannot happen.. too bad I learned about that op a week ago and I myself didn't consider the exchanges when SF was being prepared :|
AIUI, that op was explicitly created to render whale stake nonvoting to be able to remove the centralization of power risk to the chain. Today, that risk became non-theoretical. (That's actually also a pun. Hi @ben!)
AIUI: Exactly. Today: actually, I'd say it also prooved that this op was very much needed, and very much forgotten, and probably it's mostly rendered useless now :)
Buy more STEEM and vote for your witness. It's really that simple! STEEM was DPOS from the beginning.
I'm kind of happy they showed their hand and that the soft fork happened. We had till the town hall to discuss all of this and they pulled a fast one. There's not going to be discussions, just dictating.
I initially thought that the supposed 'town hall' was just a tactic to delay the valid witnesses while they (Steemit Inc.) re-grouped and implemented a takeover. Sadly I was correct.
Edited for clarity.
I honestly didn't think that lol how naive I was, here I was thinking okay we can now bring parties to the table but it looks like we're as divided as ever. I wonder if any of the witnesses will stick around for the great handing back of the chain
I doubt there will be any handing back. Justin Sun did the same thing to the Tron blockchain recently (with the aide of Binance) and has not 'handed it back' either.
I admit I know zero about Tron and never been interested in it. I don't get why people like these want to get into decentralised projects? Why not focus on something you can control then if thats what you want.
I think that calling something 'decentralized' has marketing appeal for someone only interested in making money.
Perhaps also Mr. Sun has control issues and can never quite deal with a truly decentralized platform but likes to be looked upon as a pioneer in the field for more complicated and perhaps narcissistic/megalomaniac reasons.
I think you're spot on there its more about the narrative and selling people on the idea and then obfuscating the implementation like oh we're not as shit as banks but low key we are exactly the same. Lets not forget the VC money Justin throws around naturally comes with conditions
Manipulators see lotsa potential victims when looking at something decentralized. It's what they do for a living.
Is time to grow in other decentralized social networks such as creary.net. Witnesses! Here is a tutorial to create a node in this community. The consensus it is 25 witness nodes. tutorial https://creaproject.io/set-crea-witness-node/
Good luck! You just lost whole community, the most valuable thing here.
Good luck! You just lost
Whole community, the most
Valuable thing here.
- jacekw
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
In a response to this I have shutdown my Steem Apps for iOS and Android: https://steemwallet.app - removed from appstores.
Additional apps have already been shut down by their respective owners to signal distrust in the centralisation of the Steem Chain:
C.R.A.Z.Y.
I support this. All STEEM apps/infrastructure should protest by going dark and maybe even using a MEMO to inform all users of the hostile takeover and its implications.
@justinsuntron and @steemitblog should know that without the STEEM Community, Justin bought nothing but a big pile of worthless SHITcoins.
Sounds like an excellent idea to deprive 'The Community' you're claiming to fight for of the tools to interact with the blockchain. insert facepalm
Right? Some community support there.
Good job!
Now that it's apparent forking doesn't work this is the best way to fight this kind of bullshit.
welcome to steem yall
What's next? All steemians to be quarantined?
Forcibly removed with drive-bys.
🤓 That ^^.
What the hell?!
"New witness" accounts were created yesterday and today they are steem witness? How? Everything is on the blockchain.
What we can learn from TRON? How to centralize the ecosystem? How to impose censorship?
THIS IS NOT STEEM WHAT WE WANT TO!
Only #SteemClassic
you think that this place is censorship free? lol
there are plenty of censored accounts here for sharing inconvenient truths !
one of them is mine
It is interesting that nobody complain when witnesses did same thing 2 weeks ago :D
Comments fiesta!
Really? You like dictatorship?
How is that a same thing when you had consensus witnesses with an intention of preserving Steem and now one centralized entity trying to force things?
P.S. They downvoted most opposing comments here.
It is not what I like, just how I see the situation.
Because they are teaching people a lesson in being not hostile. Should have not started this war in the first place. The witnesses didn't preserve steemit. They were on the verge of killing it.
Ass kiss much?
He really thinks Justin will pick him up in his new Steem order.
Can't write much?
I write a lot actually. Thanks for noticing.
I just noticed you got a thriving blog. Keep writing and one day you got enough pennies!
Thanks so much for your facetiously kind words. Hopefully all your ass kissing disinformation earns you some pennies as well.
This is in no way similar. A witness consensus voted by community stake is a decentralized action.
Exchanges taking customer funds to do a hostile takeover and completely centralizing the chain is an abomination of crypto.
Steem, at this moment is 100% centralized.
There is no point in it being a blockchain.
Community stake ? You needed what ?blocktrades and or freedom vote to be in top 20 ? Is that the community consensus ?
I seriously don't know if that's the case
Vast majority of witnesses and community members were on board with the SF. This is an action by 1 guy that bought himself a blockchain by telling his friend CZ to use customer funds to takeover the chain for him.
Has this not always been the case though? I've maintained since forever that all it takes is one wealthy bad actor, a youtuber prank or something and bam, centralised on a whim. Decentralization has always seemed somewhat of an illusion mixed with a pipe dream to me that only really functioned because Steem isn't popular or known
not really, because you can't buy that much from exchanges and not skyrocket the price.
It was only really ever as decentralized as @ned wanted it to be. Perhaps it will dawn on folks that @ned never did this, even though he could have at will, at any point in time.
All of us only ever spoke freely because @ned wanted us to, and that includes all the admiration for his hair.
Miss him yet folks? I sure do.
Don't miss him at all; he set this up as an inevitability from the very beginning and made no effort to fix. People on twitter have predicted such a 'coup' via exchanges specifically for years. I ain't wishing back anyone who created such a scenario
I have long shouted from the rooftops this vulnerability. No one competent to run a witness could have failed to understand it, and be aware of it's existence. That they did nothing to resolve the problem is not @ned's fault.
This is the fault of those witnesses and substantial stakeholders that continued to benefit from the gross inequity of distribution and did nothing to fix the problem until @justinsunsteemit bought @ned out. When trustworthy @ned was no longer standing between them and total centralization of 'their' blockchain, suddenly they blame @ned for creating the problem.
Bullshit.
Welcome to capitalism!
Customer funds?
Exchanges bought a lot of STEEMs 2 days ago causing +25% price pump...
They literally bought blockchain.
They didnt buy 100 million Steem. The price would have gone up much higher.
I di mys because it was like taking an aggressive stance and blowing the first strike. Fear is never a good advisor and the results are obvious. The other has to strike back if not intentionally than just in order not to lose his face.
Now please could we just go back to the table and try to deescalate before everything gets totally out of hand ?
Yours Jan
Now that's an optimist when you don't think things are totally out of hand now.
Too bad Justin didn't have the courage to sign the post instead of using the Steemit Inc team as cannon fodder. Cowardly to say the least.
I still do have hope. Because when we are really spiralling into an all out war then we are all going to lose big time. Just like in every other war. And I seriously can not believe that we are really wanting this to happen.
How do you not get that this is war? This was a complete takeover. This is exactly why Bitcoin and Ethereum are not allowing on-chain governance. It always gets corrupted, just like on EOS and TRON, on-chain governance never works.
Don't you remember what a shitshow in eth went down in 2017 ?
It was not a shitshow. People had freedom to choose, which is not a shitshow. On-chain governance is worse (read: coercive) than vote-by-node. Ethereum Classic is technically the original Ethereum chain and they are very free to remain doing things as they wish. However, the majority of people and projects chose the chain known today as
"Ethereum" because they felt different about the decision.
Steem is different. Because a very small number of nodes decide everything, all you have to do is hijack the nodes, which happened here, and boom, chain is officially centralized and under the control of one corporation. Consensys does not have that kind of power.
How do you not grasp that Steem is now @justinsunsteemit's personal possession? There is no war. He won.
Victori spolia.
He didn't write it.
how do you figure he didn't write it? well his people at his instructions would be more accurate... it's clearly not been written by the Steemit team we all know even though it has been written to appear it was.
Did you expect anything different from a one-percenter shitheel?
Exactly de-escalation is what we need. Things usually go south when people get emotional and let emotions rule over common sense. The emotional response has been impressive and has been resulting in an impressive escalation
What would be the point of negotiations? @justinsunsteemit has all the power. What can you offer him? Who would take his word?
Not me. Who will use those exchanges? Not me.
All the negotiations are done.
Steem is over.
He has got the chain in his grip but he already got others so that is not really what he wanted I guess. The community and ppl he has absolutely not, steem is more than just the technical topics behind the Blockchain. And by the way even though it was not that clear I yesterday it was not Justin nut blocktrades and freedom who decided the witness and in the end what code the chain is running.
Some of us did.
Wtf? Ben’s account who has been inactive since...forever, now upvotes those comments? Controlled by Justin? Wtf is going on?
Who knows...maybe @mottler jumps in too...or even @freedom if he pulls back the delegations...
Disgusting
ben...
ben|ned
Extreme...
The ownership was updated several hours ago if you check Steemd.
looks like it belongs to steemit.
A few people did.
where were you? There were tonnes of heated debates after the soft fork.
Spot on!
Witnesses were going to protect the blockchain from ninja-mined stake and centralization of the blockchain.
Now it's centralized power.
Don't go full retard.
Why they didnt protect before? Because Ned told them he will not use it? It is laugh
@ned didn't use it.
Think about that.
YES, controlled by the second largest name in the whole crypto industry. And you just unleashed the beast. We should be proud of ourselves.
Lol. After all, a lot of whales are whales because they were involved in ninja mining. You didn't block their accounts, so...?
feel free to read this and see why https://steempeak.com/steem/@joseph/the-history-of-steem-steemit-launch-in-the-words-of-dan-larimer-from-the-early-launch-days
How compatible with TRC10, TRC20 and various ERC standards does SMTs intend to be?
Posted using Partiko Android
I think one ERC1155 multi-token contract for all Steem tokens could work