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RE: I interviewed Steemit's Andrew Levine, talked cryptos & Steemit
I think @andrarchy is actually understating the difficulty of rolling back transactions on the Steem blockchain. Just because the witnesses agree, even 100% of them, doesn't give them the power to roll it back, if it has passed the number of blocks deemed by nodes to be irreversible. It would require a hard fork with economically important nodes getting on board with it as well. Transactions-As-Proof-of-Stake is a factor also.
20 people agreeing is hard but not "nearly impossible". The network has more measures to protect itself from reversed transactions than that.
Yes, this is a valid point. That's what I meant when I said effectively, "If the 20 witnesses agree and the rest of the community agrees." I didn't want to bring up hardforks because I didn't want to get too technical, but I agree that this was one of the areas of the interview I could have done better on. I think I should have focused more on the separation of the database as this immutable thing that stores the information and can't be altered that then enables developers to build their own platforms with their own set of rules and solutions to speech-related problems. Thanks for the feedback homey.
Yeah, it was just a bit ambiguous in a non-technical conversation. I wanted to bring it up in the comments it because I could see listeners coming to the conclusion that all it takes to reverse a transaction in Steem is for 20 elected people to agree to it*. You frequently get unanimity or near unanimity on authoritarian legislation (The PATRIOT Act was famously approved by 98 of 99 present senators), so it's important to know just how high a level of consensus would really be required, where it becomes an impossibility in practice.
* Bitcoiners often have this perception of Steem, because they see our 11-20 witnesses as equivalent to their thousands of miners. On the contrary, our top 11 witness majority is equivalent to 3 Chinese mining pools in Bitcoin.
Yup, thanks for bringing it up. Maybe the best way to think about the Steem blockchain is an immutable "backup" database. People can use it however they want, show or not show whatever they want, but the information will always be there and there's nothing anyone can do about that.