Soft Fork 22.2, Ninja Mining, TRON, Marketing & Future STEEM!
In case you are unaware, the STEEM blockchain now runs a soft fork (v. 22.2) that effectively deactivated the large number of STEEM tokens held by accounts operated by Steemit Inc. While these tokens remain owned by TRON / Steemit inc., they are unable to be used to vote for witnesses and cannot be powered down - at least until another fork is activated that reverses the situation.
This has been done for a variety of reasons, though mainly due to uncertainty among the witnesses and the STEEM community regarding the intentions that the TRON organisation has for the future of STEEM. There is also some concern that Justin Sun perhaps did not fully appreciate that the community here holds the ultimate power over the blockchain. This fork was partially intended to make the situation clearer.
Ninjas Lurk
These latest events have been a long time coming. Long before TRON and @justinsunsteemit bought Steemit Inc., the Ninja Mined tokens owned by Steemit Inc. became a contentious issue that caused many to devalue the entire STEEM project to some extent.
Ninja mined tokens can create an air of unfairness among an allegedly decentralised community and in this case, Steemit inc. (in the very early days) appears to have deliberately created a situation where they would produce far more tokens than anyone else. Considering that very few people even knew about the STEEM mining process, their actions seem all the more intended to ensure they create an empire for themselves rather than a truly decentralised eco-system.
The result was that the largest holders of STEEM became @ned, @dan and Steemit inc. - which meant that despite the idea that STEEM become a decentralised community, the nature of the stake weighted voting system in the DPOS algorithm meant that it was ultimately centralised.
Gentleman's agreement
To get around this contentious situation, @ned and various whales agreed to not use the Steemit inc. Ninja Mined tokens to vote for witnesses or to vote on posts. However, it was used to delegate funds to certain projects. It seems that over the years it may also have been used for various other purposes that the community might not have liked if they had fully seen them.
With @ned selling Steemit inc. to TRON, this community agreement needed to be re-affirmed, but was not mentioned either by Ned or Justin Sun - therefore leaving the situation cloudy.
Vagueness Intensifies
It was decided that this situation presented an existential threat to the blockchain, since Justin had repeatedly stated that his plan was to 'take STEEM to TRON' and seemingly to swap STEEM tokens for a TRON based STEEM token. However, communication of the finer points of the situation was lacking and the vagueness left the community uncomfortable.
The 1st Steem-a-Tron Public Meeting?
A few hours ago, Justin posted to reassure the community that he wanted to work with us to 'Make Steem Great Again', which has calmed some people's nerves. The more cynical remain unwavering in their abuse hurling (as is to be expected given their propensity towards dysfunctional behaviour in almost all situations).
Justin announced a Mayor meeting for March 6th and invited the top 50 witnesses to participate and to resolve the pertinent issues in a way that everyone is happy with. I commend this and wish success for all involved.
NOTE: I am currently just outside the top 50 active witnesses, so if you would like to have me be involved in that meeting then please consider asking any larger STEEM stake holders that you know to vote for my witness server.
Future STEEM
The future of STEEM still looks bright to me, despite the uncertainty regarding TRON's acquisition of Steemit inc.
The reality is that Steemit inc. was not guided well by Ned and many opportunities have been lost due to inaction or poorly managed activity.
It would take some pretty stunningly poor decisions by the TRON group to do worse than the previous owners, so for this reason alone I am interested to see what happens from here on out.
This has also made clear to all of us the STEEM community is more than ready to step up and guide the future of STEEM, with or without a reliable company running the code development side of things. We have numerous developers who could work to take the blockchain into the truly decentralised future that it deserves. None the less, there is always room for large groups to participate and co-create a more diverse and exciting future for STEEM too - perhaps TRON will really add some greatness to the mix too as time goes by.
From my POV, there is every reason to think that the evolution of STEEM to include the already live 'communities' features and the soon to go live SMTs will deeply change internet culture in ways that make community building and teamwork much more practical online - I will continue to do what I can to help that.
Marketing? What's that?
One of the main limitations to STEEM has been marketing in general. Steemit inc. seemed to have done little or no marketing whatsoever (playing a guitar on a livestream doesn't really count). The ban on crypto ads by Facebook and other Social platforms also didn't help (although paying Facebook to advertise STEEM could be said to be logically counter-productive anyway).
I recently announced that I have formed a company in Britain to provide Digital Marketing Services to private clients, called 'Crucial Web' (@crucialweb). We are carefully watching the unfolding situation to ensure that we can provide the best support for any organisations seeking to promote themselves and their use of STEEM, plus to also promote STEEM itself where possible.
I can foresee a time in the not too distant future where STEEM is the go-to place online for community building and social commerce - all taking place in a voluntary and decentralised way. Who knows what changes this might bring for an injured world that has been locked up in pyramid schemes and limitations on free will (held in place by epic psychological manipulations) for so long!
Here's to liberation!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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This will probably be the only comment I make about this whole situation as I try to see both sides of the story so thanks a lot for clarifying the situation and didn't know the full history.
When you just see out the blue an announcement that all the top 20 witnesses (which is only 20 people) decided that they can fork out large accounts if they want to, that sends a shocking statement and seems ironically centralised - "you have too much stake, we'll fork you out"... for a stake based platform.
Thing is, now that Justin has bought that stake with his own money, does it make it right that those funds are now locked with this soft fork? Does that set a precedent that if someone came along with £2.5 million and decided to buy 20 million STEEM (approx), witnesses would shut that account out as well?
The situation seems to now be very ugly (from someone who just uses the platform and shares music & travel blogs) where you have a lot of hostility towards a new investor with marketing presence and deep pockets to drive things forward. I don't know how many people outside of steem would know about the whole ninja mined stake but I'm guessing not many, if any, when you consider that not many users of the platform knew about this either!
But the fact that the original stake was created by "bad means" (ninja-mined as you say), then it seems like this should have been dealt with when it first came to attention 4 years ago? Is it so wrong that the creators and lead developers of the Steem blockchain have a large stake on their platform?
All rhetorical questions more than anything - will be interesting to see how the discussion on the 6th March plays out. I believe I'm voting you as a witness so hopefully you get a say at the table
Ultimately, the decentralisation is a decentralisation of Power. Power needs to be used and in the context of an economic system, that means power to affect the economic balance (something that all stakeholders can do to some extent). Any form of representational 'democracy' is fundamentally broken because it takes power away from many and gives it to a few - this is part of why I am now so anti democracy, in general (democracy does not fairly balance the power - I am not saying we should go the other way and have dictators!). None the less, people can voluntarily agree to support representational systems and to give power to a few - which is what has occurred with STEEM. Most people do not have the will, time or skill to invest into such a project, the amount of time needed to really understand it and support it.. So the stake weighted voting system seems to be a somewhat workable way of helping generate practical guidance for STEEM (though it is far from perfect).
In terms of the freezing of the tokens - the tokens are not 'gone' or 'lost'. The tokens are temporarily locked until negotiations and conversations happen between TRON and the STEEM community. The witnesses attempted to get a meeting with Justin Sun and AFAIK they didn't get one until they took this action. It would have been better for them to publicly consult on the issue, but this would have given a heads up to TRON and also opened up an epic debate surrounding a topic that, ultimately, witnesses are empowered to deal with themselves, by design.
Essentially, no-one likes to feel like they are being exploited and it is the need to end exploitation by big social platforms that has led many to join STEEM. If there is a sign that exploitation here might significantly increase, it is understandable that people will take action with the power they have. It's a bit like a battered wife attacking to defend herself - maybe she will be too 'sensitive' to some people, but without knowing how she feels, the truth will not be understood.
Thanks for your continued support bro - I appreciate it.
I guess this sort of makes sense.
Just as long as they implement a PERMANENT (GENERAL) FIX so they never have to do something like this again.
If your system of control is based on the PRIMARY AXIOM of "the more you invest, the more control you have over the system because those who invest the most have the most to lose and will naturally want to protect their investment by making decisions that are good for the community" IS PROVEN FALSE (the rich often invest in things in order to kill them either because they don't like the organization (pure spite) or because they want to eliminate competition) THEN YOU MUST RE-EVALUATE THE ENTIRE SYSTEM, AND FORMULATE NEW PRIMARY AXIOMS.
Imagine giving all active accounts (with at least one (non-spam) post or comment every 33 days over the past 52 weeks) with a rep of (70) or more, 20 witness votes each.
That way you know they're (probably) not sock-puppets and everyone gets exactly the same voting power (regardless of ninjamine or rich friends).
The issue regarding the potential to buy out the system in order to silence it is valid, except that the Steem blockchain can be totally forked at any moment - creating an entirely new version of the entire database, with new rules and new witnesses etc.
This means that any 'hostile takeover' could only, at best, result in the original chain being shut down. Any new chains could continue un-phased and without losing any functionality or post history.
The only solutions to the problems presented by the ninja mined stake I can see at the moment are:
We have discussed various options for improving the witness voting situation ad nauseum. Most people agree that vote decay and also limiting the number of witness accounts that stake can vote on are both good ideas that produce more balance. The reality, though, is that any such change has to be agreed by the top 20 witnesses, who would effectively be voting to make their job harder when it comes to keeping their power position.. Hence, they have not done it.
It's unfortunate that it is has taken this continual barrage of negative PR and existential threat in order for them to actually do 'something'. It's also unfortunate that they mostly continue to refuse to take responsibility publicly for causing the situation through prior inaction. That said, there has always been a lot of political pressure from large stakeholders for witnesses to conform to Steemit inc's decisions.
What if they just (slowly) dumped 50% of their steem on the open market, that would probably fix at least 50% of the "distribution problem" (and the "price" of steem would also more closely reflect what the real-live-actual-free-market will bear).
Contrary to popular belief, I think a very low market-price for steem would actually accelerate adoption (I'd certainly buy more). A reliable micro-payment system is a massive paradigm shift that could destroy established "norms".
It's pretty easy to squirrel away 90% of diamonds (or steem) in secret vaults to create artificial scarcity, and then claim your secret-vault-diamonds are worth a-hundred-zillion-dollars, when in REALITY, those diamonds (steem) are worth LESS than rubies or emeralds (on the open market).
Part of the issue with selling off large amounts of steem is that many investors didn't know about the ninja mined stake and plenty more knew about it but accepted Ned's promise not to sell/use it, except for the growth of the system. Therefore, a large number of people would feel defrauded by such an action and the actual value of their investment would also drop. There's no way around it, having such a large amount of tokens that were not acquired through input of equivalent value is a huge problem.
The actual value of the tokens doesn't make a lot of difference in the present moment to potential investors, since they are really only interested in whether the price will go up in the future or not. Having the issue of the ninja mine resolved would mean that steem has potential to go up in value, but it would have already had to drop hugely in value before that could happen (as a result of the ninja mined stake being sold) - which would ruin the investment made by early adopters, instead of rewarding them. The only community minded approach, in my opinion, is to either burn the tokens or only use them for the collective benefit of the community.
Sure, but they can't stop someone from selling their steem-tokens.
And if it was me sitting on 90% of steem, I wouldn't burn them (which always seemed insane to me) or give them away.
Slowly selling them seems like the best compromise.
Sure the price will drop, but it will predictably bottom out when the ninjamine is depleted.
Whoever's in this for the "community" will stick around as long as we can keep the servers running (and buy up as much cheap steem as they can).
The "investors" who are only here to "make-a-buck" should either take a longer-view of things, or SELL NOW (before the panic ensues).
I have always said that a smart community builder would fork the chain and start something that's more fair. Unfortunately, 'the community' has often responded to this with claims that we mustn't do that in case we split 'the community'. lol
(noting that the community is now tiny in comparison to what it was and it's true potential - thanks partially to NOT having sorted this mess out sooner).
This does all come down to there needing to be a parting of ways between those who respect anarchy and those who seek to build empires and self aggrandizement.
Thanks for explaining it all.. i think were all getting our heads around this now.. Its been Very interesting to see how this has all played out in many senses of the word.. notably.. that the Steem community has flexed its muscles and demonstrated its own power.. and more importantly the power of the Steem blockchain! I think someone like Justin Sun, MAYBE he was surprised at what we can do, but either way im Sure he may have grown some respect and noticed that this is no ordinary business, or blockchain for that matter!
Having a bit of leverage seems sensible to me, it was done respectfully and as a reversible change.. since Justin has not proclaimed his exact ideas, and there were some serious loose strings I think this was a justified move.. Having said that, i also very much respect and understand those witnesses that said otherwise.. very cool too really because it was not an easy decision for many ethically! It was a BOLD move really!
lets see how the meeting goes with the witnesses.. i have a feeling we are going to see a bunch of witnesses return all fired up about it!!
Aloha! Yes, I agree - it is not a straightforward decision, but when the details are weighed up and the options considered it isn't difficult to lean towards the path of least resistance towards decentralisation in place of what could be a threat of centralisation. That is absolutely part of the power of blockchain tech when coupled with en aware community of individuals. :)
There is likely to be continued controversy since we are continuing to see communication from Steemit Inc. and TRON which are lacking the needed details and which leave the community looking better informed about the technology involved, in general. This gives the impression that we too often have when dealing with career politicians. That being said, there is plenty of room for people to grow and improve the balance involved.
@ura-soul, Hopefully till that time you will come into the inner circle of Top 50 Steem Witnesses. And good to read that you are putting efforts to promote Steem through your Company too. Let's hope for the best and stay blessed.
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The longer I'm here, the more my brain hurts.
Posted using Partiko Android
I appreciate that there are complexities here that many are not familiar with - it's a learning curve for sure. On the other hand, the main alternative for social networking is brain, gut and heart death on centralised corporate social sites ;)
Very excellent summary of what went down!
Thanks!
its not like justin can force the top witnesses to commit to a fork if there is a change that would encroach on the freedom of speech network or programmability... i believe thats why there is a 50 witness "town hall" because justin does not want to take off with his changes without the witnesses on board... the question is if the witnesses have the balls to rally up the support to not commit to a fork that is bad for us...
the tron website says stuff like "Oracle relay-chain and DPoS on a single sidechain can ensure the security of on-chain/cross-chain transactions for users. Ultimately, the consensus of mainchain(TRON-network) safeguards the security of all sidechains." so i guess steem might become a side chain? but then it also says stuff about efficiency of Dapps through their system, so they might still impose change on the backend...
I don't know all the technical details but the bottom line for many Steem witnesses is that they value the free speech involved and will not risk the loss of that by passing consensus and security over to a 3rd party. In the event that this is forced somehow, the chain would be forked most likely.
Thanks for the reassurance.
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How was I not aware of this??
Corporate censorship is rampant.
If they make an exception for Fa.cebuk's Libra, it would seem a bit anti-competitive...
@jpbliberty was organising a class action lawsuit against fb, yes. ;)