RE: My thoughts on Soft Fork v0.22.2
First time I disagree with you. Yes, there are great reasons to do this, and I get your point for voting rights.
I even think that we should remove voting rights from the accounts that belong to exchanges.
The problem is not about voting rights, but about not allowing Justin to powerdown/sell his stake. It's just flat wrong. He bought it, and it's an investment. The whole point is to make a profit.
Saying the stake should be used for Steem's development is the most naïve thing ever. Even if it was a promise with Ned, the promise was broken when he sold the stake.
The way I see it is that Justin will spend his own money to improve Steem to get a good ROI on his stake, not use the stake to improve Steem for no benefit at all.
Now Justin owns it and he 100% should be able to powerdown. Even if it fucks up the plan for the negotiation, so be it, we fork.
If he is able to powerdown, he able to move the stake to a new account and vote. The stake was promised it would not vote based on the founders. That is fraud and I don't see why we need to let fraud have a chance at destroying the chain.
If I created a coin, premined most of it into existence for myself, then let others start to mine it. To help the price one could have made all these promises what that the token wouldnt be used to vote or destory the system. People invest based on that word. If I was then to go back on my word that would be fraud with the possibility of jail time.
This is very black and white. The founders stick to their promise or they are frauds. They didn't stick to it, so here we are.
But if he powers down all of it, at least we'll have a heads up. We'll have time to talk with him or make the appropriate fork.
However, if you freeze his stake, then you just stole his money. It's his investment (Justin, not Ned).
Once he powers down there is not talking, we have no power than to stop him. This is the same as buying a house with a lean on it, I would know, I did so once and it rekt my life temporarily. Just because you buy something does not exhaust the purchase of former obligations.
But Dan, we don't have leverage.
Even with this soft fork, he ultimately decides what happens. He can just say no if he wants to. Then we'll hard fork and there will be two coins.
Who do you think cares more about keeping one chain, him or us? I'd say us, and that's why the only solution was to negotiate with him in good faith.
There might be a sweet spot where we can use this soft fork in negotiations, but if he gets tired of the demands then it's the worst case scenario for us anyway.
I couldn't agree more, seeing as, he doesn't want anything else but to sell his stake, why should he be restrained.
He should have every right to decide what he does with his stake.