You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: The recent controversy between Steemit Inc and the community - the premine, control, and where it leads this blockchain
Yes, its theft, because it removes stake from 1 party, and the reduction of supply increases the value of remaining stake for everyone else. Practically this means that someone benefits from other persons forced loss.
With Golos its different, since they went on to create a new chain.
I think if someone forks-off Steem (hey, the code is open-source), removes people they don't like and airdrops to everyone else, its totally fine.
Any fork is always "a new chain". An existing unforked chain would continue with the existing consensus rules.
There may be one or two (or less likely, but possible in the case of a severe botch) no viable chains after a fork, depending on the actions of independent individuals in the ecosystem (users). By now in cryptocurrency we have seen every manner of forks which have intentionally or unintentionally resulted in new chains, and many which have not (but which could have).
In many cases a fork may be viewed as an upgrade in which essentially everyone participates and that is their choice, resulting in only one chain. But again, this is a matter of the choices people make and that is all.
There is no "reduction of supply" resulting from any fork, because even if the fork did do that, the larger supply still exists on the other fork if people choose to continue to use it. Arguably forks always create new supply, not reduce, and some have even made the case they are inherently "inflationary", which in some sense is strictly true but the economic reality is a bit more subtle (and off topic here).
In Steem people don't really have a choice - rather, the decision is made by the witnesses.
Theoretically perhaps, but unlikely in practice. In any case, a chain that is not recognized by the ticker symbol STEEM would have almost no value.
People always have a choice what code to run. If you don't like how things are working with the witnesses you can change the entire block production model if you want, and/or if existing witnesses don't participate in such a chain, the chain can limp along via backup witnesses until witnesses can be replaced.
What chains will continue and what price they will have is always speculation. Perhaps informed speculation, but still speculation. I don't agree with you that anything not with the magic S-T-E-E-M imprint on it would somehow become worthless, were it otherwise of value.
Moreover it isn't even a predetermined matter what symbol applies to which fork. If the Ethereum community (miners, users, exchanges, etc.) had ended up not supporting the anti-DAO hacker fork as they did, what is now called ETC would have ended up now being called ETH, and Vitalik said he was open to that possibility at the time.
Those clarifications were very much needed. I'm not sure why they were not more predominantly specified in any of the discussions.
I held those statements as correct.
There was never support to do this on the live chain, though it was discussed (as it should be to explore the consequences). I'd also argue that in the greater discussions, a new chain was actually discussed far more than doing this on the live chain.
Everyone who even mentioned the slightest support for the idea of a "Steem without Steemit Inc" never actually said "on the live blockchain".
The context here is incredibly important.
Thanks for clarifying. My points do not apply to new chains.
It's not because people would invest more time and energy on the steemit free chain that it's by any mean theft.
The forked chain might die, if they're worried about that it could mean they've contributed less than what what they've stalled.
BTW I have made zero commitments to that other hypothetical chain yet. Like almost everyone.
My understanding is predicated on the assumption that the fork being discussed here is applied to Steem chain itself. This is a contentious modification as it violates the core promise of blockchain systems.
If the intent is to create a new Steem-like chain that is not Steem, but based on Steem's codebase and modified state, well, I have no objections to that, and I wish the new project/chain best of luck.
And yes, I don't have the full context. I've been removed from "secret slack" a while ago...most likely due to inactivity.