RE: Is Steem Centrally Controlled?
You don't see working to restore suspected compromised accounts an act of protecting property rights? As I said in my post, I wasn't a witness at the time and yes, I know Steemit was using their stake to vote for witnesses prior to HF17 which is why this stake issue is such a big deal to begin with. If they do full power downs and remove the connection between their stake and Steemit, Inc the company, then we'll back where we started with Steemit, Inc actively controlling witnesses directly.
I understand how hard it is to bootstrap effective governance models (been working on it since April with eosDAC), so I can understand some early decisions needed to protect the ecosystem (and, as you said their own accounts). I agree, they were stupid to not be using posting keys.
Protecting some property rights by compromising others, where the central authority gets to decide which take precedence over others? Not really sure I am sold on that vision of 'property rights', in fact I'm pretty sure I am not sold on it.
No, that is a different matter. Some Steemit employees were voting, including (but I believe not entirely) with stake that was vested from the ninja-mine.
In the case of HF9, it was the literal
steemitaccount which immediately and without warning or discussion voted out all witnesses and pushed through the fork which reset keys on a wide swath of accounts, some compromised, some not. The witness discussion on the topic was literally "What's going on?" There is no way that you can say witnesses supported it, because there was no discussion or voting.As I stated, there was a very real risk that I and others could have had our property lost and that only didn't happen due to luck (in my case a difference of a few hours). Steemit unilaterally decided that their own 'property rights' (really a misnomer when viewed through the lens of being the subject of one party's arbitrary decision) were more important than mine and others'.
Thank you for clarifying the history of what actually happened. Based on what you said, this line in my post is not accurate:
I'll edit it. Thank you as always for spending the time to clarify things for accuracy.
The whole reason there was a discussion about changing the number of witness votes was to close the loophole where Steemit Inc could (again) elect the required number of witnesses for consensus, wasn't it?
No, it was due to an exploit where someone could vote in 10000 backup witnesses and get a disproportionate share of the backup rewards.
Thanks for the clarification. :)