Playing devils advocate, who watches the watcher as only one person can mute at the moment, which means one judge, jury and executioner...
I'm sure you read @themarkymark's excellent post about how Layer 2 tribes and tokens are not at all decentralized -- that the tribe account owner has complete control over a LOT of consequential aspects.
As Marky pointed out, putting your trust in a tribe and token really means putting your trust in the tribe's account owner.
There is no way around that; however, a blockchain tribe/community is the people, not the bits & bytes, not the token, not the front-end. If a tribe account owner ever becomes tyrannical and/or unwilling to listen to the demands and expectations of the tribe members, the members can simply create a new tribe and a new token, and airdrop the new token to match the old token's distribution (minus the tyrant), similar to what the Hive community did after JS's hostile takeover of Steem .
As such, it is the constant threat of a tribal 'hard fork' that will generally keep tribe account owners on good behavior; that plus the fact that the tribe must compete against all the other tribes out there in order to stay relevant and to keep its members interested and engaged and willing to keep investing their time and treasure.
There is no guarantee this will have any value. Most will stay with the old system because their money is there and will be afraid to do anything due to the sunk cost fallacy.
Ultimately it will just move one centralized system to another centralized system. It all comes down to trust, something crypto is suppose to be able to avoid. There are few that have proved themselves in a way that I would trust with sole control of a $1M+ market cap token and many haven't had the chance to prove themselves with numbers that matter.
Yes, that is part of the risk. However, if most stay with the old tribe & token, then maybe the tyrant wasn't so bad, after all?
I kinda view it like the CEO of a company you are thinking about investing in. If you trust the CEO, then invest in the company. If you are unsure about the CEO, then maybe think twice before investing.
In fact, the Hive-Engine tribe & token arrangement is quite similar to Facebook's governance structure. Even though Zuckerberg only owns 16% of the company (by valuation), he controls 58% of the voting shares. As such, Mark Zuckerberg can literally do anything he pleases with the company, and no one can stop him. Layer 2 tribes & tokens are much the same.
Justin Sun stole over $10M by change balances to user accounts. Yet there are tons of people still on Steem. Even those who don’t believe in Steem any more.
I agree with the trust aspect but there is a big difference. Facebook is accountable to rules and regulations. There is very little he can get away with while crypto is the Wild West. We have had many scams on Hive alone that would flat out get someone in jail but in the they usually get away with it.
Although crypto certainly 'feels' like the Wild West, given the fact that every action is immutably stored on the blockchain, truly illegal behavior should be relatively easy to prosecute. Or am I being overly naive here?
Have any of his actions been brought before a court of law, either civilly or criminally?
Most people here are anonymous, and generally the police want no part in anything online, crypto or not. So unless you are ready to front major legal bills, most people get away with it. There are a few examples of this even on Hive like bellyrub and Magic Dice.
Yes, there is an active lawsuit.
Same? Ha ha ha.
At least we know Mark Zuckerberg's history, his past activities, strength and weaknesses.
What we (you) know about a person, who is hiding behind this 100% anonymous account "proofofbrainio" ???
Did this person first time discovered Hive only on 25-02-2021 ???
Did he never had any other Hive or Steem account?
Has no FB, Twitter, IG, reddit, or god-knows whatever other socialnetwork accounts?
Why on Earth is he hiding his roots so hard, IF he has no bad long term intentions?
I'm waiting for the answers.
I've stated it before but I'll state it again: I know @proofofbrainio probably isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. Sometimes I wonder though...Or, @proofofbrainio is a time traveler limited by a temporal prime directive.👽
I would also say, we vote with our fingers...if we don't like the community any more, we sell the POB we've staked/earned. I know I've put hard earned USD into Hive and POB. If I felt it was not beneficial to me to be here anymore, I would sell (as long as it was still worth something) and move on to the next best thing. I'm sure you'd do the same. With your account (@holovision) value sitting around $4-5K, I'm guessing you've put $$ in the game, too...then again, I did see you've been around for 3 years, so it's possible it was all just posting/curation awards... for @onealfa around $60K I'm guestimating, I can understand that certainty in the system is key for his nest egg. The community requires certainty to a degree or it falls apart. As trustless as crypto can be, we actually have to use trust in this case.
I had not thought of the idea of hard forking the tribe, it becomes a bit like the old MAD model, a tyrants know he can only push so far...