RE: "Respect is all you have left in the morning."
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 If the vote is withdrawn, recharge is instant to 100%.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!
I do so in the hope and expectation they inspire your own, which might benefit my understanding.
I think steem is a very amoral place, kind of like the world itself is very amoral. A person with shelter can forcibly kick someone out of a log cabin in the middle of a blizzard. When the guy is found frozen and dead, we humans will make judgments about the cause of death. Some will say the guy who forcibly kicked him out is a murderer. Some will say the guy who died, was an asshole anyway and had cruel intentions ever since his arrival.
On the other hand, if the guy with cruel intentions gets all riled-up and tries to lead a trek into the wilderness to find bigfoot. The fact he doesn't yield to the many warnings that conditions are unsafe for travel may lead to his untimely demise. Then, when they find his corpse; People will say poor shame, he should have taken the sober advice of those who knew better.
As far as nature or steem is concerned, a corpse is a corpse. Steem doesn't care who gets downvoted and why or who gets elected to witness and why. It doesn't care whether or not the chain is centralized or decentralized, but no matter which way this whole thing plays out, it will be the people who judge the actions of the new supreme leader of the one chain or the organic witnesses on the other.
Whatever we are to become, perception is half the battle and very important. And then we still have the problem of how to prevent the whole scenario from happening again by others who choose to invest heavily. Affixing social media to blockchain tech is a great solution for mining human creativity. However, with the seemingly unsolvable problems it creates, it makes you wonder if it should have ever been done in the first place.
Ultimately, we have people that believe in dPoS, and who believe in decentralization as well. We were sold a false bill of goods. Many of us were led on to believe that these two things go hand in hand. The potentially unsolvable problem and truth of the matter is that, eventually, one of these ideologies destroys the other.
Additional thoughts: If community witnesses initiate the fork and null his stake, that sends a strong market signal that the community is shunning dPoS when it becomes an inconvenience. If J.S. and his astroturf witnesses initiate the fork, he's sending a clear message that he's shunning decentralization. This is why I like that one guy's solution, where we stop worrying, do nothing and wait for J.S. to do it, and the community witnesses can shun his duplicate stake on the sister chain that resulted from his hasty decision making. This is akin to the people choosing not to follow the guy who is looking for bigfoot into the wilderness in the middle of a blizzard, and we can retain the respect of the cryptosphere by not being those who kicked him out of the cabin. Better for him to slay his investment through his actions, than us through ours. I might be speaking out of school in assuming that dhimmel's solution is viable, but if it is, it sounds like the best path to me.
Every spring many corpses are found when the snows thaw where I grew up. In Alaska, if you kick someone out of the cabin knowing they will freeze, you are considered a murderer under the law.
It happens.
Mostly people drink a lot in the winter, wander off and fall asleep in the snow, to be found come spring.
That happens a lot more.
I am pretty much in agreement regarding DPoS. However, the four years prior to @ned's sale of Stinc reveal that even a dictator can be a benevolent dictator. While @ned had the stake to do so, he never centralized the chain, and allowed decentralization to be the practical fact of our interaction on Steem.
Interesting that.
I'm not sure if a society that cannot be centralized is possible. If you have an epiphany, do be sure to let me know. I'd like to know about such if it's possible.
Thanks!
It's funny you mention that; I had a friend that once told
me something very similar, he said they called'em poppies.
Will do. I'm actively seeking out great ideas for a solution. I
am not blockchain smart enough, so I like to share the many
ideas with those who know to see if they pass the smell test.