"Respect is all you have left in the morning."
![](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://s5.gifyu.com/images/img0cd4d0813d89f433.gif)
Here we go, back to it, back to the Steem controversy. There are several things in play. First, you have the infamous ninja mine. Yes, it happened. Was it dirty? Probably. Maybe. Almost certainly depending on who you ask. However, there are bigger fish to fry. What I speak to is the entire ecosystem of cryptocurrency and dPoS in general.
It's common knowledge, even according to Wikipedia, that dPoS is vulnerable to centralization, very similar to how a gazelle is helpless against a pride of lions. However, most steemians, and many times because of the steem whitepaper itself, have conflicting opinions about all the bullshit acronyms.
I say bullshit because it feels to me like some millennial coder can make up a three-word acronym, and everyone drops all they know and worships the concept like it's a God. Regardless if it's true and real or not, give that shit three letters and obfuscate it by capitalizing one or two of those letters, and you have a brand spanking new deity for people to believe in.
In reality, as all things do, it's a bit more complicated than that. I've shown this in a previous post where I debunked the notion that proof of brain can exist on the blockchain. One of the two core elements in PoB as suggested by the blue paper is the wisdom of the crowd. However, dPoS cripples the ability for the wisdom of the crowd to exist by giving people uneven votes based on their stake. At best it's WoS (wisdom of stake), yeah; Why don't you go and worship that one for a while?
Anywho, back to the matter at hand, the title of this post. "Respect is all you have left in the morning." That was a line from Teddy KGB to Mike McDermott in the movie Rounders. Teddy is a Russian mafioso, and Mike is just some guy who likes to play poker. They both know the game is outlawed, i.e., outside of the legal system. However, in the realm of crypto tokens; Some might suggest, that's the reason the damn thing was invented in the first place, to get outside of the legal system which has become a mafioso in and of itself.
So, our beloved Steemian witnesses have existed in harmony with the ninja mine and its holders for up to four years now and counting. They could have acted against and nullified it when they had a better argument, but instead, they chose to legitimize the stake by putting it to work for the blockchain and paying those who have "learned to code."
Now that a large portion of stake has changed hands through a sale on the marketplace, many prominent individuals want to pitch a fit and nullify its existence entirely. This, after already having condoned its use to either enrich themselves and or fund dApp developers.
I love Steem, and I love the way it inspires me to get creative and tap into an ability that I didn't previously have access too. Steem gamifies creativity and cuts through all the red tape so that creative people can create, express themselves, and get remunerated relatively hassle-free. Kind of like poker, if it doesn't pay you well in cash, it will pay you well in dopamine.
That's all that everyone's out for, and it doesn't matter what you do. If you love doing it, you're doing it because you love it, and if you love it, it's because of those gat damn brain chemicals that keep you coming back for more. I don't care if it's a relationship or a fish that just moved your bobber. If you're into it, you'll get a rush from either or.
When all is said and done, Steemians will collectively send a clear message to the market. As the house in this casino-like game, we will honor the chips we've distributed, or we won't. This message will instruct the feels of all crypto enthusiasts out there, more specifically, it will directly influence how they resonate with our token. At the end of the movie (Rounders,) you couldn't help but love both the antagonist and the protagonist. As it turned out, despite all the shenanigans, they were both standup guys in the end.
If Teddy KGB had Mike dragged into the alleyway at the end of the movie and shot in the back of the head, he'd lose all his future business. If Mike robbed Teddy at gunpoint to retrieve his losings, there goes your protagonist and the entire plot of the film. The long and short of it is that the Steem blockchain has it's reputation on the line here. We didn't do what could've been done when it mattered when it was an internal fight. That ship has sailed and is gone now. But now we're talking about an outside investor of real capital.
As unpopular as it may be, as far as I'm concerned, the ninja mine is no longer in contention, and we need to pay that man his money. Sun needs to be able to break even with his investment and then some. This, in addition to becoming a whale, and owner of STINC, and a respected member of the community with voting rights intact—or we can tell him to fork off and lose all credibility among the cryptosphere, and he gets to take the Steemit brand name with him.
I know many of you are like, who cares about the brand. Steem is not Steemit, and although that is true in some sense. It's the new brand, Steamy, or whatever the fuck you might call it, whose name will be eternally tarnished in the eyes of future potential investors.
My final thoughts on this matter are that both sets of witnesses; Tron and the Steem community have to codify a trustless solution that ensures Justin Sun (at the bare minimum) gets his investment back and then some, and has enough stake leftover to make him a whale in the community with a reasonably influential say. If we can't do this, whoever we become in the end, our name is mud. We should be thankful that we're currently at a gridlock if we still are because it prevents either party from burning the whole damn thing to the ground.
I know it's fun and games to say fork it, but when reality kicks in; If you nerf the value of the coin. You get what you get, and you get what you deserve. If increasing the value of crypto was as simple as forking chains, that's all anyone would do. In reality, forking chains dilutes crypto by creating a winner and a loser. The winner ends up with less than they could have had if there wasn't a loser, to begin with. But what say you, sound off in the comment section below. After all, isn't that what this place is all about?
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Perhaps an even better solution has presented itself.
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Witnesses meeting with Tron Representative Roy Liu (Full Recording)
Oh man.. Rounders lol. Can I be a God too bro? 😃 Nicely articulated article, and I really enjoyed reading this 😉.
pKi! I always knew if I posted long
and hard enough that 1 day you'd
answer my posts and you did!
Praise be, and long live pKi!
Thanks for the kind words!
This was my initial response the the Soft Fork (in fact, that's a direct quote from my post on the matter). However, since then Tron has executed the threat the Soft Fork was intended to prevent, and it's no longer possible to do this. The Tron stake is large enough that the Steem governance mechanism breaks down when that stake is applied to it. That stake has been applied to it, and the governance mechanism has broken.
The only way that stake can exist and Steem remain viable is if it declines voting rights, which it has not done. Therefore Steem is not viable, and DPoS has proven to not have been instituted functionally via Steem. Only @ned allowed it to appear to be viable by not exercising his sole option to undertake governance at will during his possession of it. @ned is no longer in control of that stake, and that allowance no longer pertains. Had Sun understood this, he would not have done what he did, because destroying Steem destroys the value of his stake, but he did not (or he did not care), and he destroyed the value of his stake by assuming control of governance of Steem with it, because he destroyed the viability of Steem by doing so.
So, those are done deals. All we can do now is proceed to undertake a project that may be viable, unlike Steem today. Given that Steem approaches viability and only the existence of stakes large enough to take over governance breaks it, it seems possible to adapt the Steem protocols and migrate the community to a new blockchain that prevents such a stake from being instituted.
If one party can control governance, and that party isn't @ned who can be trusted to not do so, Steem is no longer viable, and that's just the fact.
Since that is demonstrated today, it's time to move on to things that are possible. There is a question as to whether Steem can be forked to a new chain that may be viable, and I am awaiting the community's arrival at this conclusion and implementation of it. Until then, I can still post and discuss here, so I do.
Thanks!
Thanks for your feedback on this @valued-customer.
After having read @dhimmel's post I'm convinced
that a sisterchain is the correct response too. But,
I think it should be Sun that shoots himself in the
foot by making it. That way when the coin price
tanks, he's only got himself to blame. On the
other hand; If he stays and doesn't screw
himself over, that could work too?
Too late. He's dispelled the illusion of decentralization. I consider him voluntarily executing code that prevents him exercising governance, the exchanges also doing so, and a HF preventing hodling of stake nominal to that purpose being undertaken, highly unlikely.
Presently Steem is kill. It could come back to life, but so could any corpse with equal likelihood IMHO.
If we don't fork now and migrate, the community is kill too.
Thanks!
I'm not sure about the mechanics, but his post
suggests; If Sun forks, people can simply refuse
to run the new code resulting in parallel chain.
The witnesses on the parallel chain would run
a HF immediately freezing STINC Steem on the
new (not steemit chain.) This way, instead of
restricting access to his stake on the original
which would be akin to theft. Something new
happens and all that prior stake is restricted
on the new thing that he with his witnesses
merged away from. Basically, he'd be forking
himself over, and nerfing the value of his &
everyone else's stake. But at least the new
chain's reputation is in tact. We don't steal
stake, but if you upset the balance and fork
the chain over, you won't have access to said
stake on the new instance.
A fork is a fork. It's time to stick one in it, 'cuz it's done.
Thank you, I respect your opinion on the
matter. I just hope that if we have to fork,
the way in which it's done doesn't burn
us in the long run. I think Justin Sun did
probably want to conduct a takeover.
However, the chain and
community need a protection
mechanism for these types of
events, one that doesn't end up
burning the stake of stakeholders.
Basically, decentralization and dPoS
cannot live in harmony without a fix.
It might work for a while, but not for-
ever if we can't evolve the blockchain
into a thing that remains appealing
to the free marketplace at large.
I vehemently agree that we need a way to separate stake from governance, yet not neglect skin in the game. The traditional 1 person = 1 vote is quite difficult to implement when the people are virtual, and doesn't acknowledge how committed one is to governance.
I believe at the least we need to reform the witness voting mechanism such that 1 Steem = 1 witness vote, not 30 votes as it is now. I have detailed elsewhere how that deranges the weight of stake influencing governance, and how dramatically that centralizes governance. I will mention here the simplicity of implementing this change, as all it requires is 100% depletion of VP and 0% recharge. If the vote is withdrawn, recharge is instant to 100%. Most of the necessary code is already written for normal voting, and all that would be necessary would be to apply it to witness voting, and set the parameters appropriately.
But that isn't enough. Neither does limiting the number of witnesses an account can vote for, because some users have multiple accounts, which makes them more equal than others who have fewer. One user has told me they personally have ~10k accounts. They are very equal indeed.
I was enamored of the idea of oracles, which has been proposed to facilitate 1a1v (1 person = 1 vote), but with @ned's passing from our social confines, I have not heard again of this facility. Oracles, if they could be made to work as has been proposed, could prevent my overly equal acquaintance from being 10k fold equal, and make limiting the number of witness votes an account can cast relevant by preventing a user from voting more than one account.
Mayhap that may come back to life apropos.
But, all of that is premature today, as without a consensus of community supported witnesses, none of these ideas, nor any others, could be implemented.
I suspect we are being baited into remaining intent on this blockchain by the lack of full application of stake Tron can deploy, to keep the community on this chain rather than building one free of the taint of the toxic founder's stake. It is clear to me that stake will never be properly applied to development now that Sun has it, and even if we do force him to not sell it for profit, his resentment will prevent it's whole hearted application for the good of the community.
Sun certainly views us as unruly thralls, at best. I find the idea that he might care one whit about us laughable, given his demeanor and actions.
So, I reckon we should fork, and hash out those details of improved security then.
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
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