It's been a very busy week for most people working in the finance field due to the extreme volatility - if I remember correctly, this is the first time in history when S&P 500 went up and down for more than 5% for every day of the week.
While it has been 3 days since the [Four-Party dialogue] (https://steemit.com/hive-101145/@sct/four-party-dialogue-proposal-steem-foundation-tron-foundation-steem-witnesses-and-korean-community), there were no significant other (public) discussions as of I know. Thus, I hope this summary and review is not too late.
- Full script can be found here: Meeting between Justin Sun, Korean Stakeholders, Steem Witnesses and Steem Foundation 12/03/2020
Goal
The main purpose of the dialogue was to discuss specific issues in which the Korean community(or @proxy.token) is interested (to make further decision) , so that we may understand positions of different parties and find a compromise between the dialogue participants if possible.
To achieve this goal, we have delivered potential discussion topics in advance so that the participants may prepare.
For example,
My understanding and thoughts regarding this ongoing witness battle provided background thoughts of how many Korean Steemians have felt,
Let's change 1SP 30 votes (current) to 1SP 1vote introduced a relatively new topic to solve the current stalemate situation,
and both witnesses and the Steem Foundation have presented their roadmap: see the comment section of [공지]Four-Party Dialogue Proposal (Steem foundation, Tron foundation, Steem witnesses, and Korean community) and the posting Steem Foundation Proposed Roadmap.
Agenda
Since this meeting is requested by the Korean community to hear opinions of others, we thought that it would be better to let other participants talk and the Korean community representative (me, @glory7) should simply set the agenda - and the opinion of the Korean community is already presented before so it would not be a very good use of limited discussion time.
There were four specific questions:
Do you agree to change the current voting system (1 steem power 30 vote) to 1SP 1vote? or 1SP 3 or 5 votes?
Do you agree to change the powerdown period to 1 or 4 weeks? (Note: we thought that we should not give privilege to exchanges regarding this and every user should be treated equally, so that part is left out and only shortening the period was asked).
Do you agree to remove free downvoting mana or make it mandatory to specify the downvoting reason?
Justin's witness voting rights. Justin: under which condition would you like to give up your voting rights (if you ever would like to). Other paricipants: how can you guarantee that softfork or hardfork like 22.2 would not happen again if Justin removes witness votes, according to your request
Answers
- Witnesses (represented by @roelandp):
- I cannot speak for all witnesses as individual opinions may vary, but in general we believe that these issues should be discussed more and let's make decision using the SPS.
- Same as the above.
- Disagree with removing free downvote mana, and stating downvote reason may be solved by UI improvements.
- Cannot guarantee anything as different witnesses may have different opinions.
- Steem Foundation(represented by @guiltyparties):
- Needs to be discussed more.
- Should be decided via SPS and personally do not think that 4 weeks is a bad idea.
- Disagree with removing free downvote mana, agree with stating downvote reasons.
- Steem Foundation has no direct relationship with softfork.
- Tron/Steem INC(represented by Justin):
- Needs to be discussed more with the community.
- Yes, shorter the better. Tron powerdown is 3 days, for instance.
- Agree to remove free downvoting mana.
- Willing to give up witnesses voting rights if it is guaranteed that all(in particular his) accounts and assets are safe.
(Personal) Review
Going through 4 preset questions already took about an hour, which was the estimated meeting time. Hence, we had a short Q&A session (to Justin) and wrapped up.
It would have been better if we had more time, but I think it was pretty productive given time constraints.
My personal findings are as follows:
- Witnesses (represented by @roelandp):
In retrospect, I should have known that it is practically impossible for one witness to speak of other witnesses. Thus, the answers could not be definite and had to be general.
After the meeting, @therealwolf pointed out that "20 witnesses are 20 different individuals and if any of you truly values decentralisation, then there are no "simple" answers"
Some witnesses, including @steempress and @followbtcnews, have provided their opinions regarding the 4 questions after the meeting. I would like to appreciate their time again.
- Steem Foundation(represented by @guiltyparties):
While some people questioned the eligibility of the Steem Foundation participating the dialogue, I believe that their answers were straightforward and helped us to progress.
- Tron/Steem INC(Justin):
- It was great that his answers were clear and easy to understand.
- However, someone maybe get skeptical that the some answers were in line with what the host (Korean community) has suggested before.
What now?
While it is said that lots of discussions are going on unofficially, as far as I know, there has been no official meeting with Justin and 22.2 witnesses after this dialogue.
It seems that there is a clear gap between Justin and 22.2 witnesses - and if we are not going to fork out sister chain, we should compromise.
Based on my understanding regarding both sides' requests, I believe that the first step (and meaningful step) is that both parties make public statements on Steem:
Each witness officially posts that he or she would not freeze anyone's asset, in particular Justin's.
Justin posts that he would not exercise witness voting rights (or cast 5 votes maximum to prevent hard fork) if top witnesses, say top 30, officially post that they won't freeze his accounts.
Perhaps I am being cynical, but it seems to me that they tend to deploy that rationale strategically to avoid being pinned down. Somebody asks one of them "Are you willing to pledge to not freeze funds?" and they say something like "Given the vagaries of the blockchain, who can say what code anyone will run?" rather than something like "I can only speak for myself, but I will pledge not to run code that singles out particular accounts to freeze funds".
And perhaps this is cynical as well, but I'm also dubious of "let the SPS decide" as a meaningful solution to anything since, like with witness voting, a few huge accounts can dominate that vote if they are so inclined.
While I tried to focus on facts and remain positive, I actually believe that your "cynical" views could be closer to the reality.
In particular, I agree that "let the SPS decide" is basically saying that let's keep the pre-Justin status quo.
Hi @glory7
Thank you for posting this summary and documenting the positions of the parties and possible paths forward.
I also appreciate those in the Korean community who were willing to arrange this meeting. I hope their efforts bear good fruit.
I also appreciate your attitude about positive and respectful interactions.
I have listened to the meetings thus far, and while I understand the reasons for emotion, I hope the intelligent parties can suppress those emotions and work towards a trustless solution.
I personally think Justin Sun’s position of giving up his witness votes in exchange for a promise not to vote for witnesses can be accomplished by making them NFT Tokens which would have all rights and characteristics of non-NFT tokens like powering up, selling them, transferring them, etc. Likewise the same HardFork could code away the ability to freeze funds and we could vote as a community to agree that it wouldn’t be done again. I think the remaining issue of funding development can be negotiated also. If the transcripts of the previous meetings are accurate, Mr Justin Sun is already on record offering 25% of his Steemit Inc stake for development in return for guarantees of not freezing his stake in the feature. This offer by him is very significant and should not be ignored as it is a very large amount of Steem which could fund an enormous amount of development. This resolution and funding of development should have a positive impact in Stern’s price and the currently delayed projects like SMT and improving the sign-up process could finally be achieved.
I believe the metaphor/ idiom “Hope springs eternal” as long as there are calm reasonable parties willing to compromise we can resolve this.
It’s difficult in a decentralized environment, but not impossible.
I feel if we can stick to respectful and polite dialogue concerning these issues we can close this chapter in our history and move on to our other challenges.
sorry for the late reply. I agree that making a portion (25%?) dedicated to steem development is a great idea.
I don't know much about NFT, but I believe that as long as we can agree on the high level, we can work out implementation later.
Hi @glory7!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.073 which ranks you at #2388 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 65 places in the last three days (old rank 2323).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 72 contributions, your post is ranked at #20.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
do you agree that Justin talking about powerdowns and downvotes is like me telling you that i am sure i can make your car to have 600 horsepower and i am an accountant.
Justin is not a technician so I don't expect him to know how to make a car. What I expect is that as a major stakeholder whether you would like to set 600 horsepower setting (or to some other number).
yes but he said what you wanted to hear, and he has no idea is that possible.
That was my concern as well. But we don't know... so I was more inclined to give him the benefit of doubt.
@glory7
Thanks for the transcripts, links and sharing your thoughts. I am afraid that the Steem community is about to HardFork, and perhaps that’s best. I had high hopes for the Steem community, but this stalemate and today’s news of the coming HardFork suggests otherwise. It will be interesting to see what happens when the old witnesses turn off their nodes, the power down is reduced to one day, large stake holders sell their Steem and an unknown number of smaller stake holders also sell. I wonder if Steems price will crash and those who are left here will see their investment reduced to nothing.
What do you think?
Sorry for the late reply.
It seems that a group of users already decided to create a new chain, and there could be more to come.
I think the "dumping" issue exist both in the current Steem and the new one. For each, there are users who do not like it and they will sell. My guess is that token prices would go down everywhere, and it is likely that the sum of all steem-related tokens would be less than the current steem price.
Thank you for you reply.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts.