RE: What is property? Is it defined by consensus?
When there is a threat to the security of the chain (zero day exploit, etc), witnesses are expected to quickly put security precautions in place to mitigate the threat without public discussion to ensure the exploit is patched before it is taken advantage of. There were enough people (and importantly, token holders supporting witnesses) who believed this to be an existential threat that immediate action was asked for.
If the token holders disagree, the temporary code change can easily be removed. I also disagree with the private conversations and in the future I would probably take a different approach where everything is public. The argument made against that approach in this case was that Tron would just power down, transfer tokens, and vote out witnesses before we could even have a discussion about the will of the 80% of the tokens not owned by Tron.
Now we can at least have that discussion and figure out what it is they want to do with that stake and what they are willing to codify on chain to support those intentions.
Whys and hows are always important. To disregard nuance is to have unsophisticated conversations or fall into dogma.
There was no threat, just fear of a threat.
You don't consider posts like this a threat to your STEEM property? Saying "We're going to swap your property to a new chain without discussing it with you" certainly sounds like a potential threat to me.
It may all be a misunderstanding which is why I'm glad this is a temporary, easily changed bit of code. Even now, token holders can vote in witnesses who don't support 22.2.
No, I don't consider it a threat.
I consider this entire situation a great lesson though.
When a handful of people can make a decision to change code and execute it without so much as a conversation...
That's an eye opener whether you made a great choice or not.
There was about 9 days of conversation among many top witnesses, token holders, and community members. I would have preferred it be done in the open and fully publicly, but many strong voices in that group said it could have created a situation which could only be responded to via hard fork which would have been much more severe (and something I've personally already said I would not support).
From my perspective, this is a temporary change until we determine the intentions of the Tron Foundation for that stake.
The memory of it being done will long out live the circumstances.
As I said, powerful real life lessons.
It's also possible the memory of token-elected witnesses coming together to take action to protect the chain is seen as an honorable thing worth celebrating and a demonstration that Steem and DPoS actually does have token-elected governance control of the chain instead of just rubber-stamping Steemit code deploys or rolling over if social contracts between Steemit, inc and their ninja mined, purposed stake isn't used as promised to the world.
If The Sun voted in 20 new witnesses, couldn't all the old witnesses keep running their own version of the blockchain-steem-code?
Couldn't steampeak and steemit just ignore the "new" witnesses?
What am I missing here?
Blockchains are defined by consensus. The DPoS consensus of Steem is based on the top elected witnesses. To make changes to the protocol or to add blocks to the chain, you need 2/3rds + 1 support of the top witnesses. If lower ranked witnesses ran their own code, the chain would reject their version of the protocol.
What could be done is a hard fork to a new chain (similar to Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum Classic) like SteemClassic which excludes the Steemit stake owned by Tron and runs the chain without it. The trick there would be getting exchanges to take this "new" chain seriously.
So, basically blocktrades controls the flow of steem (exchange) and therefore controls its fate.
Ethereum Classic was kept alive by a single miner, and by sheer persistence was eventually validated by the exchanges.