RE: Steem Governance is Multiparty
Steemit Inc. is incorporated. It's a corporation. As such, it represents a business entity. It is the business entity that controls, far away, the most SP and thus controlling voting power on this blockchain. Not by one order of magnitude but by multiple.
Remember, this is a proof of stake system. Stake denotes control. Steemit Inc. possesses that control, definitionally. It is exactly for Steemit Inc. to make that decision, because they have controlling interest in the blockchain.
But let's ignore the blockchain for the moment. What about Steemit Inc. itself? It's a corporation, and thus has investors, it has a board, and it has the intent to do business. Intent to do business requires a vision, a direction, and a real plan for how you intend to do that business going forward. If you don't have those things, you don't have a real, functioning corporate polity.
Remember what I said about the orders of magnitude more control of SP on the steem blockchain? If the value of STEEM does not increase, the value of the corporate holdings has no value, and the corporate reason for existence fails.
Thus it is in their best interest to be able to answer these questions publicly and clearly, for their own sake as a corporate entity, assuming that the whole plan is not "let's build a half-assed system and get volunteer developers to figure out ways to make it work in order to increase the value of our conjured stake on the blockchain."
Every time we have this sort of interaction with @ned , it becomes harder not to hear that as the response.
Steem vs Steemit?
Ned responded about Steem not Steemit Inc. Steem is owned by the community not by Steemit Inc.
That's cute – but for all intents and purposes in the real world, Steemit owns the steem blockchain. They are funding and providing the underlying source code which drives the blockchain. They are, in theory, responsible for promoting and securing significant investors. They are, without a doubt, the greatest holders of stake, the most responsible as a result, and have the most to lose.
Steemit Inc. is steem. If you believe that the steem blockchain would continue to exist if Steemit Inc. picked up and disappeared, I have some lovely oceanfront property in Nunavut that I would love to show you.
You would have a basis of argument if the software running behind each of these nodes wasn't effectively driven by a corporately paid group of programmers. The recent unpleasantness with hardfork 20 puts a double underline beneath how beholden the steem blockchain is to Steemit Inc. as an entity.
Corporate vision for Steemit Inc. is the vision for steem as a blockchain.
I'm not making it anything. If it looks like a security that might be because it behaves like a security.
What you observe is not a flaw in the design of distributed proof of stake. It is literally the selling point for distributed proof of stake. "If you have more to lose, you have more say" is the whole point of the argument for the method of governance of proof of stake systems. It's a pretty good argument – but it has definite repercussions when it comes to the truth of the way the system works.
Steemit Inc., but because they have the most stake, has the most control – by orders of magnitude. Ergo, their corporate vision is the vision for the blockchain, and if we can't get them to speak clearly and openly about it – that speaks ill of the future of the blockchain.
And this highlights a flaw in the design of DPOS. You are making Steem look like a security.