Thanks, @howo, for the reply. That all helps a lot.
re: converting steemit's stake
At one point, it sounded like there may be a community discussion over what to do with steemit's holdings. I guess a decision got made to just go ahead and convert it? I've been waiting to see what people thought about that since there were a few options as to what to do with it.
Don't count on that.
Hey, @oldtimer?
What part am I not counting on? :) That the decision has been made or that there could still be a discussion about it? Something else?
The decision was made without community discussion.
My remark was more meant for future actions.
I know they'll jump on me for this but let's face it;
decentralization and proof of stake don't walk together hand in hand.
Ah, okay.
Apparently, we all have our own definitions of what decentralization means—for some, it seems, around 60-100 persons involved out of thousands is sufficient, certainly better than 20-30, at least to start with—I guess we'll see moving forward whether that continues to be the case. For others, you can't have enough involvement, and I would imagine there are more points for folks in between.
I think a lot of this could be mitigated if someone were to regularly (once a week would be nice, like hiveio did for a bit), communicate, but while some individual devs have been popping up here and there, we don't seem to have regular and consistent updates from the main blog.
So, we're left to piece things together. Which, unless I'm getting this wrong, was one of the many knocks on Steemit Inc. for such a long time.
I'm not sure how I feel about using the 'ninja-mine' stake. I guess I'm just not used to creating something out of nothing, even though that's the way things have really worked since man began to barter.