RE: The recent controversy between Steemit Inc and the community - the premine, control, and where it leads this blockchain
The ninja mine was done to fund Steemit to do the development. I'm not sure if investors would have been any better. I know that I personally don't really like the idea of people only bringing money to the table and then sucking all the profits out and pushing you to fuck everything up just for more profit. The problem is that Steemit has been acting as a dictator and actually discouraging development in various ways.
Eventually there will be a fork. I don't know if it will happen because of this issue. It's up to the people that will be doing the actual development and the people funding that development. I think that the future forks that will happen will be a good thing for the most part. The problem is potentially splitting the community. But I don't think that should necessarily be a reason to not do a fork if the potential development can be an advantage. Right now, development on Steem is pretty much fully up to Steemit and they like it that way. The problem is that they haven't been getting enough done and haven't been making it easy for others to help.
I think that we need to stop relying on Steemit and basically just pretend like they don't exist when it comes to development. We need to work on a site for communication and documentation for development and start pushing forks to witnesses. We also need to get developers together to review the code Steemit drops and put forth recommendations to witnesses and patches for the forks BEFORE they cause huge problems. The problems of the past with hard forks need to not happen...or at least be rare.
Steemit wants to lead development, but they aren't acting like a lead. They're acting like a closed source corporation that just drops code and expects everyone to just be ecstatic. We can't change the fact that they're acting like this, because they really don't have to listen to us, and do have that huge stake. The only thing we can do is start doing things on our own.
Yeah, investors may not have been any better, can't disagree with that. The way it was done though is clearly an example of "what not to do", since we've seen very little success with this model.
I look forward to seeing what people come up with if they happen. I've always been a proponent of forks, which is why I've helped support things like Decent/SounDAC/etc. The more experiments running, the more likely one of them will succeed.
Amen.
The hard part here is that if something was proposed/created that Steemit Inc didn't like (for example, redirecting a portion of the rewards pool to a worker fund pool), they'd block it. That's just an example and I don't know what their stance would be in the end, but it's a problem we face if we just ignore their existence.
Well said in general though, I think you're hitting the nail on the head in terms of identifying problems and potential solutions. This post in general feels like the conversations we were having before this entire conversation entered into a death spiral of drama.
Yeah, I think if you drill through a lot of the bullshit, a lot of people are on around the same page. Except Steemit. That's the problem.
We need a lot more to be done here as far as development. Either we do it with Steemit, or we fight with them about it. If that means development that doesn't get adopted because they overule others...that sucks...but I don't see the alternatives as very good. We can't continue on the way we are going. If we start putting code out there, then Steem will move forward. Of course, if they block a change that splits the community, that's a lot more likely to cause a fork than this.
We are ourselves a fork though. It all started with Bitcoin. Forking isn't something to be afraid of. Of course, I think this isn't the issue to fork over. Whether people decide to fork due to Steemit or not, this battle needs to be fought. We need to have open source development on Steem. There's no other option. We can't rely on them.
The idea of one company pretty much doing all the development for an open source community is just...stupid.
You know, I've been building a phenomenal idea to utilise the Steem chain in a world-changing way, and many people are very excited about it (I don't want to give it away on-chain), and I have been inches away from making the proposal to the wealthy investors I work under of which this would be very relevant to their cause and business. I genuinely suspected millions of CNY could flow in this way.
I've been inches away numerous times for many weeks now. But... I can't. My idea is super exciting, putting it on a blockchain? super exciting. Putting it on the steem blockchain, where people bicker and monopolize and collude and centralize? and threaten and lie and cheat and steal, with the reputation being 'steemit.com is a place to get paid to spam'?
My idea would work totally fine the way things are, but what can I tell a multi-million investment?
It's such an embarassing shame, I just want this project to Go. Even if all of this got ironed out instantly right now, the history of cacophony that will pull up with even the most casual google search into Steem will probably get me fired for trying to burn so much money that could otherwise have been spent on ivory backscratchers.
Not sure why I'm typing this here. Just venting.
I really like the idea of a worker fund pool.
If you take a look how Dash blockchain stakeholders can vote for worker proposals.
Just take a look here: https://app.dashnexus.org/proposals/leaderboard
This way developer would be encouraged to improve the Steem blockchain itsself - and Steemit Inc. would have an intencive to keep there funds on the blockchain, in order to use their large stake to influence which proposals would "pass" and receive enough voting power.
All Steem stakeholders could choose which company or individual developer should improve Steem further in an open market.
The Dash worker proposals were a hot topic during all of these chats. It's a great idea, and as I said in my post, it was the topic (incentivizing developers) that specifically caused this entire conversation to explode into a discussion about a fork.
The one downside, which also came up with the conversation, was the only way for it to actually work on Steem in the long term was a change to inflation, which likely means redirecting rewards from authors/curators rewards pool to the worker rewards pool. This will probably be a sticking point and cause a lot of grief from the community, which in turn causing grief for Steemit Inc's mission, and prevent it from happening.
I'm pretty confident that the witnesses would approve and deploy the right worker proposal system, but I fear that Steemit Inc might actually block it. Which leads us right back into the territory of who controls everything :(
Thanks for your valueable feedback as always!
I'am pretty sure most of the community would approve a small reduction on the reward pool in favor for "worker proposals". Long term this will increase the value of Steem and be more valuable for stakeholder.
If Steemit Inc would be confident in the work they deliver - there shouldn't be a reason to block it.
They could use their large premined stake of Steem in order to let their own proposals pass, even if a portion of other stakeholder think they failed to deliver in the past and won't give them another try. Of course this will be way harder if they move their stake into exchanges or sell their stakes.
I really hope there will be further negotiation with Steemit Inc about such a system in order to secure the future of Steem as a whole - or at least a statement from @ned about this topic.