RE: The #ivoted initiative
The term 'fork' on this platform would simply be called a new version in most software development. The next fork will be fork 20. Any other software development still in Beta would probably call it version 0.20. Once out of Beta it would probably be 1.0. Now the normal use of 'fork' is a bit different.
Let's take the Bitcoin fork from August 2017 as an example. Satoshi left 5 people with control to the software repository. Steem's code is found on github for example. Such repositories are used for version control.
Bitcoin was reaching scalability problems due to the 1MB block size. Satoshi's white paper suggested increasing the block size at that point. It would not have fixed the problem permenently but it would have bought more time. Two of the 5 in charge of the repository wanted to increase the block size and three did not. The three wanted to use a corporate owned patent called the Lightning Network as a permenent solution. They could not come to an agreement so the two members decided to fork the code and increase the block size to 8MB. This became Bitcoin Cash and it has fixed the scalability issue for the time being.
The other three continued on with the original code and began integration with the Lightning Network. They are now known as Bitcoin Core. The Lightning Network now has their test network running and full operation should be expected in the near future.
When they went their seperate ways they both had exact copies of the same blockchain. So anyone who had Bitcoins on the Bitcoin Core blockchain had the same amount on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. They just needed to install the Bitcoin Cash wallet and copy a copy of their old wallet.dat file (which had all their keys) into the new wallet's installation.
So let's jump to what this would mean with the steem blockchain....
Should a group modify the existing steem code to have a gradual reward weighting, have witness votes released from witnesses that are inactive for more than three months and votes for witnesses unweighted for minnows and above and set up a site called new-steemit then everyone that is presently on steemit could come to new-steemit and find they have the same amount of new-steem as they had steem and all their keys for logging on etc. would be the same. One would not have to ask anything from the present witnesses. There would be some technical issues at the beginning. Twenty temporary witness nodes should be set up until witness voting began. Yet that transition should happen once 20 witnesses had 1 vote each.
Then the two blockchains would begin to veer away from one another and each become their own unique blockchain.
Hope that explains it. Let me know if something seemed confusing about the explaination. ✌
It's perfect. I had some notions of what a fork is, but you explained it really well.
OK, so that's not impossible at all, it's just the technical problem of having 20 nodes up and operational and the "human" problem of having enough persons that would migrate their "business" on the new-steem.
But nothing would restrain them from using the 2 steems at the same time if they wanted to cover their backs, so it's more a question of support and promotion of such an operation.
That's nice to know, even if, as you said, hopefully it need never come to that.
I also think that what you propose is the way to go (gradual weighting), stop the SP being the absolute center of the ecosystem (or at least partially diminish its importance - by taking the number of upvotes into account too (hybrid of SP and one-person-one-vote) for classic upvote, and for witness voting going to a full one-person-one-vote system), and if it's not done by the main steem, it's just a question of time before steem forks or dies. As you said, it's really exposed to competition.
Yeah once a team puts together the modified code, just the threat of a fork may smarten them up. My plan is to bring this up with the Devcoin Admins. My position is HR Admin with them. It is one of the original alt coins looking for rebranding. We have a witness node running under @devcoin. You can find our mandate at:
http://devcoin.org
P.S. Yes folks could use both versions just like folks can have both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash wallets. The winner will be where most of the users go and they should go were they are earning the best rewards. Yet, again, my hope would be to find a solution without a real fork.
P.S. Busy and all apps could work on the new version. It would be up to them, yet as most apps are open sourced you could have new-busy etc. if need be.