How Justin Sun Took Over the Steem Network and How Can We Prevent It From Happening Again...?
As you probably know, if your head isn't buried in the sand, yesterday Justin Sun took control of the Steem Blockchain by force.
Justin Sun is also known as our Supreme Leader, Dear Respected Comrade Justin sun, Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Steem, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Steem and Supreme Commander of the Steem People’s Army.
How could he took over so easily? Basically, he took advantage of two flaws of the Steem Blockchain, one that is embedded in the code... and the other one created by the Steem users themselves.
Flaw #1 - The Stake of each user can be used multiple times to Upvote Witnesses. This means that a single person with lots of STEEM POWER can select 30 Witnesses of his trust.
Flaw #2 - The STEEM of many users were not stored at the Steem Blockchain but at Centralised Blockchains like Binance, Huobi, Poloniex and Bittrex. Justin Sun was able to convince Binance, Huobi & Poloniex to use the money from their customers to upvote for the Witnesses. Only Bittrex stayed out of this power play.
How can we fix these flaws?
Solution for Flaw #1 - Change the Witness Voting method so that our stake can only be used once. This would mean that, if you wanted to upvote for 30 Witnesses, you would only be using 1/30 of your Steem Power for each Witness Vote. (Or something like that...)
Solution for Flaw #2 - Take your STEEM out of exchanges, if you are not expecting to sell it on the short term. (You can lock it in your Savings Account at STEEM, if you are scared you might be hacked.)
Sources and other Interesting Reading Material:
"One user told CoinDesk he initiated a withdrawal of 500,000 STEEM on Binance following last night’s news and it took three hours to arrive, shortly following the Binance CEO’s announcement that it will “likely remove the vote.”
The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin has recently hinted at the part played by big exchanges in the recent takeover of Steemit by the CEO of Tron, Justin Sun.
Going by what Vitalik recently insinuated, the takeover of Steem blockchain was orchestrated.
The young co-founder of Ethereum recently wrote this, “Apparently Steem DPOS got taken over by big exchanges voting with depositors’ funds.”
His observation came about, in response to a tweet shared by Luke Stokes, the co-founder of Foxy.io.
He shared a video and wrote, “Your stake in Steem on centralized exchanges was just used to take over the Steem Blockchain.”
- Justin Sun and Steemit Inc Disaster Explained
In the meanwhile, what can you do to help restore the Steem Blockchain and remove Justin Sun from Power?
Right now, it seems that the only solution is to upvote for Witnesses that you might not necessarily agree with... and I mean all those who are running the code version 0.22.4444:
Plus those who have reverted back to version 0.22.1:
I'm joining this movement... but when all of this is over, I'll probably revert my Witness Voting to the only Witnesses that I feel I can trust. Right now, there are only 7 of them: @busy.witness, @curie, @dsound, @good-karma, @prc, @steemitboard, @steemitportugal
I'll investigate what the others are doing but some of them I already know and don't like, mostly because of past decisions that I don't agree with. The remaining soldiers who are leading this movement will likely keep my vote, too.
For now, I'm upvoting all of you, whether I like you or not.
I see any of these "remedies" only band-aid fixes. The crux of problem as I see it is the inability of the system to differentiate between good money and bad money.
This is compounded by the prevailing ideological bent that seems to preclude making such value judgments.
The system that prioritizes wealth is inherently subject to become ideologically corrupt.
As there is a tendency in the real world for the corrupt to obtain more wealth. In effect, rather than being something different than the outside world, that is something revolutionary.
It has in itself the recipe to become just a microcosm of the same flaws. This turn of events has been that which has elucidated my mind to the notion that the system as stands cannot be saved.
It is and will remain dysfunctional. This struggle has been the catalyst and cause for my pursuing the creation of an alternate vision.
Love the honesty that you are upvoting whether you like or not
You know the saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 🤣
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Solution #1 would just scale the problem, rather than solve it... I think there needs to be a "number of votes" component to electing witnesses. So, SP would be half of the equation (perhaps) and the number of votes would be the other half... Maybe there's another factor which should be added, not sure...
Solution #2 is a good one. I've been reminded at times, that the exchanges were never meant to serve as wallets anyway. You should do what you need to do and get out. (I'm not a great one to advise here as I've only barely dipped my toes in that water.)
Thanks for your good article.
I don't think so. I think it would be more fair to divide our power through our Witnesses than using our stake 30 times. It doesn't make much sense to me.
People cry for decentralization but then they avoid using the Decentralized Exchanges. How weird is that?
I already changed my witnesses like you said yesterday :)
Nice. Every little bit helps.
Hello!
This post has been manually curated, resteemed
and gifted with some virtually delicious cake
from the @helpiecake curation team!
Much love to you from all of us at @helpie!
Keep up the great work!
Manually curated by @priyanarc.
@helpie is a Community Witness.
Thanks, @priyanarc, once again! 🤗
Good one! Thanks for this. Resteeming for sure 😉👍
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Thanks a lot for your visit and help. I appreciate it. Let's save this Blockchain!
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Nice one! 😎