The Difficulty Justin Sun Has In Controlling The Witness Pool
There are a number of people who are speculating that Justin Sun, with his acquisition of Steemit Inc is simply able to walk in and vote whatever Witnesses he wants. This would enable him to make all decisions since the Witnesses would be under his thumb, including collapsing the blockchain.
Even if he wanted to do this, it is not likely a simple path. In fact, under such a dire threat, it could be very difficult to do. The math is not in his favor.
To start, we need to remember that 5 Witnesses not adopting an update to the software kills it. This is the Super Majority that is required.
Secondly, we need to determine what Sun really controls. He purchased Steemit Inc which had the biggest stake, by far. According to a post by @ew-and-patterns, this amounts to 49.9 million SP.
That is a tidy sum, how does it compare to the whole?
According to steemd, this is the present stake:
![mvests.png](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQma83ohLZoHsN8nD7AapEogCheV56qqrVWXcSDoBCs9eRB/mvests.png)
The question then comes in, what else was acquired with the deal. What else was controlled by Steemit Inc and/or Ned that could have went with the deal? Estimates are all over the place but a few I have seen add another 20 million to this total bringing it up to 70 million.
This would put the total at 33%. Actually, it would be less since I do not believe that is staked so it would bring the total to 230 million SP.
How can this be offset?
If we look at the community, we see where it can easily come from. Just looking at the Dolphins and Orcas, the people most likely dedicated to Steem, we see that there is a fair bit of SP under their control.
Presently, those groups control 38.24% of the total SP, more than the roughly 33% Sun controls. How big is this group?
https://steempeak.com/statistics/@arcange/steem-statistics-20200215-en
There is a total of 2589 accounts that make up this percentage of the Steem Power. Thus, under 2,600 accounts can counter the voting stake of the, now, Sun voting power.
Please note none of this includes the roughly 39 million Steem Power in the Whale category that is NOT controlled by Sun. As we can see, this group amounts to 34 accounts.
Basically, at the moment, the community controls more than 2/3 the STEEM that is staked. This puts Sun a long way from the proverbial 50.1% required to take control of something unimpeded.
Of course, this brings up the fact that there is a lot of STEEM in liquid form that Sun could acquire. He does have money. The challenge with that, as pointed out by @edicted, a buying spree of that magnitude would send the price of STEEM flying.
The biggest advantage Steem has is that a lot of the stake, in my opinion, is in some very strong hands. It is likely that most of the top 2,000 accounts are very dedicated to Steem and want to see it prosper. For the most part, they put a lot of time and money into this ecosystem to make it grow.
We talk a lot about community and the ability to come together. Under a large threat, which I am not saying Sun is, could we band together to stop a takeover. Mathematically speaking, yes it is very possible. In fact, we only need to get a little more than half the stake I mentioned pointed in the same direction.
My point is this is far from a Mark Zuckerberg situation where he owns more than half the stake and basically can do what he wants.
There is a lot of SP held outside the hands of Sun. One of the biggest advantages to Steem is that the distribution has been decentralizing more over the past few years. Each day tokens are issued which a large portion end up being powered up. Over time, this has eaten into Steemit Inc's percentage of the whole.
Thus, I think Steem is on firmer footing than most people realize.
If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and resteem.
Posted via Steemleo
Who will pay for servers?
People will follow the money and migrate to Tron.
In case of fork it'll get even worse.
Yea - servers and media storage ... this is the first item to address as the long term cost is going to be enormous
Posted using Partiko iOS
Eh there's plenty of free image hosting alternatives out there, someone would just have to connect a condenser instance to upload directly to imgur.
good idea :)
for sure I give some money to server if they will be needed ;)
exactttlyyy
STEEM TRC 20 is coming...
Also include the steem in Poloniex to Sun's controlling interest
A market distribution that would be the most ideal in my opinion is discussing a leasing program of The Splinterlands cards as payment for leased SP. In that event it cannot exit for a week plus 13 it takes to power it all down. Monster cards are as central to the interest of maintaining a ground soil for the community of steem/steemit more than anything in my humble opinion. Consolidating this into a mass of "Pro-Steem Witnesses" along with usage of the steempower on a daily basis would be an extraordinary thing to prop up the community for high end stakers of steem to the lowest fish on the food chain, benefiting both greatly and making this much more difficult and likely expensive to overtake the whole steem blockchain infrastructure.
If I am not mistaken, for the purpose of Witness votes, I believe that the SP remains with the original owner. Thus, even though it is delegated, it is still votes by the owner.
But your Pro-Steem Witness campaign is something I also have been thinking about. It is time to get active and having people power up and vote for those Witnesses who are pro-Steem, especially those in the top 20, would be helpful.
Posted via Steemleo
Well, i started my first power down. To have liquid Steem when the price pumps. Will be fun to try out the sell feature to see how it works. One way or another let ALL be well with #STEEM.
Posted via Steemleo
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to pay you guys back in return thanks to your GREAT LESSON that led the whole community into the chaos by your so-called “good-intensions”
Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to pay you guys back in return thanks to your GREAT LESSON that led the whole community into the chaos by your so-called “good-intensions”
Ned went through a lot of trouble to tumble Steemit Inc's stake through the exchanges and to random accounts. Anonymity only works if you stay anonymous. If Justin starts using that stake to replace witnesses it's going to be really really obvious which accounts he controls. We'd then be able to fork all his stake to @null and he'd look like a complete fool. Guy better tread carefully.
This point might be moot though considering 42 million coins are still on the @steemit and @steem accounts. Simply forking that stake off the chain right now preemptively would be the likely smartest course of action... of course stealing an investors money is really really bad publicity for everyone involved... so dire action like that can't happen without the immediate threat of a hostile takeover.
Who's got the faster draw? Can the Top 20 execute a fork faster than Steemit can vote up 20 of it's own witnesses to stop it and take the chain?
Part of the current distribution stems back to Steemit Inc’s monthly selling of steem into the markets. One question I have for Justin is will the monthly selling continue or will he bankroll Steemit Inc now?
I would guess @sepracore, the selling is done. Sun has the money to inject in Steemit Inc to pay the bills. That is why they were selling.
It is a good thing those tens of millions of tokens were unloaded over the years.
Posted via Steemleo
The selling by Steemit Inc was definitely long term good, short term bad.
Hell yeah, top 2020 accounts represent.
I see what you did there @abitcoinskeptic.
Witty.
Posted via Steemleo
Hi @taskmaster4450!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 6.173 which ranks you at #263 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 1 places in the last three days (old rank 262).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 94 contributions, your post is ranked at #5.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
Very informative as well as crucial for those wondering. Thank you.