RE: Steem Governance is Multiparty
You know, those words in that sequence don't actually mean anything, right? You have quite adroitly sidestepped every question implied and expressed, and responded by saying "it's a blockchain that can support different currencies!"
Well, yes. But that's not a vision. That's not a direction. That's the definition of a thing that already exists, and it's not the only one that exists. The important question you absolutely have not answered is, "why should we care?"
Every blockchain expects to "support the future of users," because that's what applications and services do. Yes, it's an application or service. Congratulations, you worked it out. Every public distributed blockchain supports content persistence, because that is what a blockchain does, store persistently a transaction list. That's all it does. So yes, congratulations, you worked it out. "Interactive, specialized currencies." Like Ethereum. Which already has a widely expansive support for interactive, specialized currencies. Congratulations, you worked it out.
"Steemit Inc. focuses on the blockchain roadmap that enables these constituents."
You mean "our vision is to run a blockchain which chases Ethereum?" Because that is what you just said.
I have read a lot of corporate-speak in my life. Vast amounts, in fact. More than any entity should – and the fact that you don't have a ready to go, boilerplate answer to "what's the direction the company wants to go in?" that avoids legalese and actually picks out a direction? That's terrifying.
If your answer is, "I have no idea; we're just banging on this thing like monkeys and expecting other developers to figure out what to do with it," it would be a lot more honorable and a lot simpler to just say that. Just say it! We can handle the truth. I promise, we can handle the truth.
Do I expect that to happen? No. Not even a little.
But it's nice that I get to ask the questions and point out the failures in public in a way that can't be disappeared unless the whole blockchain goes toes up.
Man, it would really be good for business to have a real answer to "what's the current vision?" Maybe someday someone will want to do that business.
That was my first reaction, too, but I eventually teased a bit of meaning out of it. I've read and written enough mission statements to know that one's probably around the median, even with minimal substance to it. It definitely could use improvement, and Ned's version of a roadmap up there is much more in need of it. Hopefully they will see reason to.
I do think this for Steem is focused on a specific type of human-engaging content, rather than quite the generic function of any chain. Since there are some big differences that benefit from specialization, this strikes me as a real thing.
This much seems pretty spot-on, though. To be fair, ETH does this pretty badly, so it's hard to blame someone for seeing an opportunity to do better. Though we've already seen one Graphene-based attempt to surpass it with unencouraging results.
Definitely.
If you have to tease meaning out of a thing, it doesn't have meaning. If you have to tease meaning out of what should be a clear, concise, and well-polished corporate statement of intent, it definitely doesn't have meaning.
You might be engaged in projection, or you might be engaged in whshcasting, but it can't be in deriving meaning from words.
We all need to be better about separating those things, especially in the face of that which people ostensibly care about and which affect their lives. None of these should be hard questions. They should have straightforward answers.
You can think that, but that doesn't make it true. Steem transactions allow for a chunk of metadata which can be interpreted by client front ends aware of the structure of that metadata – but that's no different from any other blockchain in a very literal and specific way. The only thing that separates steem at this point is an implementation that makes use of that metadata for the rough implementation of a low-feature social media platform. But that could trivially change tomorrow and arguably has already changed pretty aggressively with both Whaleshares and Minds making use of crypto-commodity technology.
I'm definitely not sure that it is fair to say that Ethereum does "this" pretty badly, when Ethereum supports a ridiculous number of E20 sub-tokens which are in active, actual exchange and has been for quite a while.
What is it that Steemit Inc. wants to do that Ethereum isn't already? You'd think that would be an easy question to answer.
Politicians typically speak in platitudes. Demand plain language communication from @ned or anyone else in these positions. This should not be politics as usual.
This doesn't even read as politics. Politics attempts to make promises to one group at the implicit expense of another. What Ned has said here is essentially devoid of promise and without real direction. When politicians engage in this sort of presentation, they rightly get lambasted by both those who of traditionally supported them and those who oppose them.
This is supposed to be business, not politics. In business, we communicate clearly with the market, offer them what they want, and have a plan for doing it tomorrow.
Witnesses are elected? That means politics.
Elected and selected – but Steemit Inc. aren't witnesses, at least openly. They have gone out of their way to avoid being seen running a witness node directly under their control, probably sensibly as a means to avoid the accusation of double dipping, both controlling the majority stake by a vast amount and taking a part of the inflationary value of the reward pool which is allocated in accordance with the stake in that reward pool. That's not to say that they are absolutely not behind one or more of the top 20 witnesses, but they are at least smart enough not to be so completely obviously.
But you bring up a fine point. The witnesses are elected. We are not talking about witnesses – we're talking about the company that owns the majority stake in the steem blockchain, the company that has the most to lose should it remain unprofitable, the company which pushed hardfork 20 containing obvious and major design flaws, who continue to not have a clear statement of where they want to take the project or what they intend to do with it, and who specifically avoid being responsible by not running a witness.
Steemit Inc. cannot be voted out. Steemit Inc. is not beholden to votes or to politics. They have mathematics on their side, as defined in the very white paper that describes the blockchain.
If @ned is pretending to act like a politician, he's doing a absolutely crap job of it. Like I said, politics attempts to make promises to one group at the implicit expense of another. The function of witnesses is ostensibly to be responsible for making sure that computational and replication nodes for the steem blockchain database are up and running at all times. In theory, they should also be responsible for checking any new software deployments to that database, possessing the technical acumen in and of themselves or be willing to spend some of the resources which they get as a result of being witnesses on the blockchain on expert personnel who can do that. The failure of which is why hardfork 20 was such a debacle.
But if we look at what the witnesses go out of their way to sell themselves with – it's political. It has nothing to do with technology aside from, one way or another, getting a steem node running on the system somewhere that can keep up with current traffic. Everything else is, in fact, political. Convincing us that they have the best interests of the blockchain at heart, persuading us that they give more of themselves to the blockchain than "the other guy," alongside kissing hands and shaking babies.
Witnesses are political. The votes for witnesses are political, sometimes being a literally handshake exchanges reeking of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."
But Steemit Inc., again in theory, not being witnesses and not being beholden to any part of that architecture, instead simply being the root and prime mover of that architecture, have only one purpose in this whole thing:
Business.
Not politics.
I realize this may be hard to grasp for some people but it is terribly and completely obvious. Not only that, it's important to understand and to be able to make good judgments going forward about investment, time sink, and what we can and should expect of Steemit Inc. and the steem blockchain in the face of a very diminished crypto-commodity market and increasing competition from what has to be said to be better social media ecologies.
People interested in that deserve better than bad political pablum.
The other thing is perhaps @ned isn't supposed to decide? Maybe the community ought to decide what Steem is to be? Maybe this should be discussed with @ned included in a public forum at a conference and online?
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.
This is key and in my mind a huge advantage of Steem/Steemit.