Backstory
I knew that a hardfork of the Steem blockchain was in the works, but didn't know the date it would launch until the post came out. It makes sense that it was short notice. Justin was acting erratically and Hive needed a short runway to launch safely without his influence or him deploying his own hardfork. Additionally, much longer and it would have been harder to keep as much of Justin Sun's stake out of Hive, but from a business operator's stand point it presented a challenge.
The steem-engine dev team didn't have access to the completed code ahead of time. I figured there would be time to review code and prepare as a team when it was completed since it would be hard to build a compatible hive-engine backend from hardfork code that wasn't final. That didn't happen. When the code was complete it was announced, released, and there were 3 days to prep the hardfork. Go Hive and kudos for getting it done so quickly! But that's a rough timeline to operate re: Hive-Engine's development or strategic timelines.
Immediate Steps
Airdrop
The most immediate thought was "that's not enough time to prep a hive-engine, so let's make sure that everyone is able to withdraw their steem from steem-engine and let's make sure that the people who didn't withdraw their steem were taken care of quickly." I notified blocktrades we'd be participating in the air drop, and got to work figuring out on short notice the tools we'd need to complete the airdrop as quickly as we could.
We generally keep about 50% of the steem we hold in savings as a security measure. We worked out a plan to transfer that balance to liquid immediately, and then started working on securing liquid steem to ensure that enough Steem would be available to withdraw as people pulled Steem out. Lastly we focused on building tools to scan steem-engine for steemp holdings as a liquid balance and also those as buy orders on the exchange. Then we worked on a tool to airdrop Hive token on Hivers.
This tool that was built by @cryptomancer will be released as an open source tool compatible with tribe tokens for those that want it.
Within just a few days of the fork happening we completed the airdrop of Hive tokens to Hive balances on the Hive chain based on balances held on steem-engine. Woot!
Hivep
Especially with so many exchanges down we thought it was critical for the hive ecosystem to be able to trade Hive tokens. We prioritized getting Hivep operational. We were one of the first exchanges to accept the pair and along with Blocktrades the only website that allows direct exchange. So far around $30-40k dollars of hive/steem have been traded on Steem-Engine in just a few days.
We're looking forward to building that success on HIVE!
Stage 2 - Technology Considerations
Once the hardfork happened there became a couple of simultaneous priorities-
- Get hive-engine back end built and modified for the new hard fork.
- Get hive-engine.com worked on so that users could interface with the backend.
- Determine the cause and fix large stability issues of steem-engine after the fork.
- Get scotbot working to be compatible with Hive both in the immediate and in the long term.
- Get the crypto-token-converter compatible with Hive. Build an API for it.
1. Hive Engine Backend
The team has already built the back end for Hive-Engine. The backend API is already working as well.
2. Hive-Engine.com Front end
There are additional components than just the smart contract node. We've completed the account history tool and its api. Scotbot and its api for hive are underdevelopment, and the crypto token converter api for hive-engine now works and with a little more work we can get about 10 different cryptos exchangeable on Hive-Engine. There are visual elements that need to be completed. The hive-engine site references steem still and steem keychain. Those things need to change and those are in progress.
You can visit hive-engine.com. It's operational. There's not much happening on it now. But as the rest of the pieces and the skinning complete it should be fully functional very shortly. It's still in pre-launch alpha so if you attempt anything on the site please start with small amounts.
3. Stability of Steem-Engine
Steem Engine has had stability issues in the past, but nothing like what's been happening over the last few days. As the infrastructure on steem has crumbled we've had challenges. We've created and implemented some stability fixes which appear to have improved performance. These also work for hive-engine.
I've noticed first logins of hive-engine sometimes take a few refreshes or just being more patient than I'm used to. But once I'm logged in it's been working fantastic.
4. Scotbot
Eonwarped has done exceptional work helping to get scotbot functional across steem and hive. Users right now can move their tribe base layer to Hive. Token balances are still on Steem-Engine. Steem-engine is covering the cost of this transition.
5. Crypto Token Converter
Getting this to work for Hive-Engine is currently under development. Some test tokens are underway now. We are working to get BTC, BCH, SWIFT, DOGE, EOS, BTS, STEEM, GOLOS, SBD, HBD all depositable on Hive-Engine as Pegged tokens in short order.
Legal, timing, and balance considerations
With 3 days of full notice with the finished code for the Hardfork there wasn't enough time to complete a hive-engine plan and we dealt with the things in our control. After having a moment to think about it we were left with 3 options.
Stay on Steem exclusively.
Move to Hive exclusively.
Operate on both.
Because of the decision to exclude accounts from the Hive airdrop on Hive there are a large number of heavily invested users that the current atmosphere would prevent from migrating to Hive. Many people have purchased ENG, ENG miners, Tribes, Tribe Tokens, and Tribe Miners. There's a lot of people interested in the fate of this ecosytem. Many simply don't agree with the fork and want to stay on Steem. Many don't feel welcome. Over ten thousand accounts have SCOT balances on steem-engine. We have decided to continue supporting a steem-engine site on Steem even if it's for a minority of users on a centralized chain.
Because of how Justin behaved many former steem users and Tribe owners are going to avoid Steem and exclusively move to Hive. To support the development of the Hive Community we're opening up hive-engine.
While I personally support the fork and plan to help develop the ecosystem with my time and energy I won't force people to move. So, rather than completely abandon or "exit" on the Steemians who may willfully choose to stay or lack welcome or incentive to switch we plan to keep steem-engine operational.
To support the former Steemians who are migrating to Hive we'll operate Hive-Engine.com.
Whatever development work we do for Engine we plan to provide for the whole engine ecosystem.
Why we airdropped Hive?
When the layer one forked it was a very easy decision to say "ok, we'll honor any balances from the layer one in an airdrop to users." The layer one forked. There were a new set of tokens that operated with a new blockchain and we distributed them 1:1 based on their holdings in Steem-Engine.
But the layer 2 doesn't fork just because the layer one does.
The most simple example of this is pegged BTC. For every BTC we hold we issue 1 BTCP. When the fork happens if all of the balances fork over as well then we're left with 1BTCP-Hive and 1 BTCP-Steem, but only 1 BTC. The second set of tokens is meaningless and doesn't have value with respect to physical reality.
Additional reasons to not fork balances are from a legal perspective. I'm not an attorney, but my discussions with my attorney have lead me to believe it's "absolutely essential" that we do not carry balances over into hive-engine. Operating a legal exchange in the united states is difficult and in order to avoid chance of prosecution, fines, or jail the only safe way forward is to start with fresh balances.
Because of the legal and physical restraints we're starting balances from scratch on Hive-Engine.
Where does that leave Tribe owners and token holders
There are 2 solutions available at the time of this post.
A. Stay on Steem for posts and votes, stay on Steem-Engine for token balances (this is free and requires you to do nothing)
B. Move to Hive for posts and votes, stay on Steem-Engine for token balances (Steem-Engine is covering the cost of Eon's time for this). Specifics for how this work are documented in this post
A. If you choose to stay on Steem and on Steem-Engine there is literally nothing you have to do. Just keep operating.
B. If you want to move the base layer to hive please contact @eonwarped. He has adjusted scotbot to work such that you alter your tribe to post to Hive. The token balances are still recorded in Steem-Engine.
There is an additional solution that we're attempting to make available as quickly as we can make it happen.
C. Move to Hive, move to Hive-Engine (This will require the purchase of Hive-Engine based tokens)
Moving to Hive as a base layer is easy, but because we aren't transitioning balances over to Hive there's a need for the new equivalent of ENG on Hive-Engine that we're calling BEE.
Eventually there may be other long term solutions like working on more than one chain beyond just Steem or Hive. To set the future stage: if we do something like figure out how to get Engine on Telos, EOS, or ETH your token balances won't be reflected there. Each new chain will have a fresh install of Engine.
What are BEEs? What are Token Prices?
The Steem-Engine native token is ENG. The Hive-Engine native token is BEE. The pricing and structure is identical.
1 Steem can be traded on the market for ENG. We sell 1 ENG for 1 Steem.
100 ENG = 1 token
1000 ENG = Staking Enabled
1000 ENG = Ability to Delegate Enabled
1 Bee can be traded for 1 Hive on the Hive-Engine market (as soon as hive-engine.com is up and running).
100 BEE = 1 token
1000 BEE = Staking Enabled
1000 BEE = Ability to Delegate Enabled
You'll have just shy of 30 days to claim any token name that your account owned on Steem-Engine. After this time tokens will no longer have a reserved namespace. If this is critical for you to get done asap we have a functional alpha of hive-engine.com that's available to use, but with the warning that it's still skinned for Steem.
How will SCOTbot and Nitrous be affected?
Functionality is currently being built to allow Scot to start trailing Hive Engine for token balances. Once this is done, tribes that wish to completely move to Hive Engine for balances will need to let us know and we will need to follow a specific set of steps:
- Snapshot SE balances.
- Disable Scot indexing for all SE token-based operations. During this period any staking or post promotion events on Steem will not be respected. Staking and mining will also be paused.
- Transfer SE balances to HE.
- Enable Scot indexing for all HE token-based operations.
- Switch Nitrous to use Hive Engine instead of Steem Engine.
Steem-Engine will cover the labor involved in shifting to hive-engine.
So what does my Tribe have to do to completely transition to Hive?
If you're looking for your tribe to operate on Hive the minimum you can purchase is a token and the ability to stake, which is a combined 1100 BEEs.
If you're migrating off of Steem and moving to Hive Engine and you have miners you can purchase the necessary tokens on Hive-Engine and migrate your stakeholders to Hive. There won't be a charge for SCOTbot alterations to support the different chain with your miners. You can also figure out an alternative exchange with the holders if you don't plan to continue mining on Hive.
An open discussion
While the thought of spending more money on tribes might be daunting I'd like to try to provide remedy by providing some kind of path for people who don't want ENG, EM, or EMFOUR on a working steem-engine platform and instead want comparable things on the Hive-Engine platform. There's a limitation to hive-engine's ability to absorb the full cost of migration. There's a limitation of the tribe owners to absorb the cost of a migration. There's frustration of token holders across multiple tribes that want to see something figured out.
I don't want to simply provide an answer. I think it takes open discussion to figure a reasonable solution. I'm inviting tribe owners, eng holders, and miner holders to join me on Wednesday April 1st at 1pm EST in the Steem Engine Discord Server. It might be in the middle of the day but I imagine many people are forced to be home anyway these days.
As with everything I host all opinions are welcome, not all deliveries of those opinions are.
Will SMTs/HMTs totally destroy the Engine Product?
I think people just wanting some fun points to go along with their community will be better served by SMTs/HMTs than by tribes. I think people that want to use a token to earn a profit or run a website like a business or if they have tokens that represent something that has a fixed or physically bound supply it will make sense to stay in the layer 2.
People operating businesses may want to consider our experience before using Layer 1 SMTs/HMTs for business needs. If the chain forks all those tokens will automatically fork. Depending on the website or business it may not matter, but if layer 1 tokens represent something that doesn't fork (like websites) along with the layer 1 you'll have similar challenges as we do, but be forced to duplicate tokens. These things are complicated and users may not immediately understand the benefits and limitations of being on a layer 2 vs a layer 1.
I think SMTs and HMTs are great developments and very necessary, but as I've said for a while token distribution is like 10% of the problem. 90% of the problem is meaningful sinks and usecases.
Marketplace Innovation for Engine - Sinks/Use cases for all tokens
It's been delayed because of Justin/Fork business, but we're still working on building marketplace functionality into Engine. We already have simple token market place functionality, but I'm interested in a marketplace where NFTs are front and center.
When we're done users will be able to create listings and optionally create NFTs inside the listing to buy/sell/rent goods and/or provide services. I think it'll be the basis of decentralized marketplaces springing up. Want to sell shoes, make an NFT and list it for sale. Have a game? Make an NFT and list the game pieces on the market through your own storefront and the catalog in general. Offer a service? We'll help you book appointments and handle payment. Want to rent something? We'll help create a space for renting and service contracts that go with it.
Tribe tokens can be a part of that. You can use a small incentive with a tribe to get people talking about your business. To give the tribe token value you can accept for value for good/services. That's why I'm excited by markets!
Bringing value to engine token owners is the plan despite some very intense conditions. With good development and a little luck tribe owners will see a vast increase to the potential use case of their tokens.
This would have been better as notice...
This entire document would have been better as advanced notice as opposed to trailing notice of how things are shaping up after the hardfork. We've done our best under duress to enhance our tools, provide new services, and give our customers options. We look forward to operating on Hive and bringing users Hive-Engine.com. Thanks for your business, your support, your patience, and here's looking forward to the cool projects that people will develop with layer 2 SCOTs and NFTs provided by the Engine team!
Under duress? What a pathetic attempt at trying to gain sympathy for your pathetic life.
You're so fucking full of shit. You have been aware of EXACTLY what is going on since the beginning of the discussions.
Rather than coming up with a plan, you decided to play both sides of the fence, take Justin Sun's cock in your mouth and gargle his load like a cheap whore. Maybe if you were working with us on Hive and not AGAINST us, you would have known when the fork was coming.
GO FUCK YOURSELF @aggroed. YOURE A SCAMMY PIECE OF SHIT WHO IS DOING NOTHING BUT FUCKING RAPING THOSE WHO PUT DINNER ON YOUR TABLE.
AGAIN, GO FUCK YOURSELF.
PEOPLE, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR, REMOVE YOUR WITNESS VOTE FROM THIS PIECE OF LYING SHIT!!!!
STEEM-ENGINE AND ALL OF THESE SHITCOINS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN CENTRALIZED TRASH!!!
Don't hold back now, tell us how you really feel about him and his BS!
@aggroed has been aware of the softfork before it happened, the tricky vote war we played with Sun, and of course all the details about the Hive fork.
What an ingenuous piece of shit.
Excuse me sir, but "gargling" services is usually rather expensive... Guys often pay a premium for that!
I read in a comment a few days ago, this is like being told Splinterlands players they need to go and re-up for every card they already bought...
It sucks. Like really sucks. We've put our blood, sweat and tears into these tribes and believed in Steem Engine...Now we feel like we're just here to pump more money into the Hive / Steem Engine accounts...Again.
And sure, we can leave it on Steem for free...But I can't even load Steem Engine half the time...There seems to be zero chance that it will get the support it would need as well as Hive Engine.
I don't know if I'm speaking for all tribes, I can only speak for ours...We want to be on HIVE. And we want to support Hive-Engine. Our entire business model revolves around sending people to our tribe and getting them onboard with our tokens...And then to Steem / HIVE
We hope something is found to help our transition without asking for more investments after we spent a good chunk already to support this project literally from day one.
I hope to be at the discussion on Wednesday. Appreciate the opportunity to determine which path we will have to take...
Having been one of the first folks who bought ctp tokens and miners I would have hoped you would transfer ctp tribe to Hive, It seems very unfair to ask the tribe owners to pay for it all over again. I know this costs you some money to make hive-engine but to charge the tribe owners from scratch is a bit much.
At the same time, there are real costs involved with setting it back up again.
A lot of us had a lot of interest in the success of the tribes, but none of that was taken seriously in the split.
It's not an investor friendly platform.
Yeah I'm 1000000% ok with Hive Engine making money and God knows they have tons they need to pay for. I just dont wanna get charged twice, that's it.
I have been staking CTP tokens from the start. I'd love to see it migrated to Hive with no hassle. I hope that would be possible soon.
It's wait-and-see for the rest of my tokens on S-E.
Appreciate you Rose, thank you so much for your support of CTP!
I hope you are not left high and dry by this "business".
No matter what, we will keep on keeping on :) Even if we have to wait for SMT's. Our community are on HIVE no matter what. Just hope to get a token for our community ASAP.
I have to agree with Jon 100 percent. We need everything from steem-engine brought over to a "hive-engine"
Thanks Bradley, I'm ok with paying for fees to help the transition. Just dont wanna get double dipped.
I agree with Jon here, paying twice for the same thing is not the right move.
Thanks Erik, no matter what happens...CTP continues on :)
That is great.
Well said @jongolson.
I maintain my own tribes and bought all the features to make it better for my project. Now, we do it again investing more not getting even from the previous investment.
Why not follow the same approach of HIVE airdropping the equivalent of from steem-engine to hive-engine so we can keep the service and let the users decide where they support. Some prefer to stay and some will go. We can't decide for them.
I do think that's a good idea...Not sure how things work on a legal standpoint, and that seems to be the issue...But airdrops happen all the time, and exchanges do it...Guess it's way above my pay grade lol
I hope that the Wednesday discussion will be a good starting point for a better understanding of both sides... Tribes were the best supporters of the S-E from the very beginning and forcing them to pay twice for the same service isn't a good way to go...
Oh and you know man, how integrated it is into my business. I funnel every one I can into the tribes and S-E. Just wanna make sure we're not being forgotten about.
I have a better advice.
Stay away from both.
Seems you made ~35k HIVE profit with the transition. But you don’t want to reinvest into rebuilding your Infrastructure? Okay 👌🏻? That seems greedy.
Yup, completely greedy lol
I should be ashamed of not wanting to be charged twice for something I invested thousands into...
It‘s not the same chain, you got your STEEM/HIVE doubled. Greed is good, don‘t be ashamed.
Of course it‘s your right to talk business and demand free everything for yourself and your enterprise. That is even natural for a Leader, still it’s Gorden Gecko talk. Just telling you, no judgement from my side.
I think that you have to let trade the pair ENG/BEE and let users that want to simply transfer tokens from Steem to Hive and restart the token in the new blockchain have this for free, beaucause they have already payed for this.
So:
If a user want to have a token both on Steem and Hive, is correct to pay BEE for the new token
If a user want to just transfer his token from Steem to Hive I think it's a bit tricky ask for BEE having already payed ENG.
It does seem like this is a really good solution. Just let ENG/BEE be 1:1 tradable.
I understand costs for things... but i'm not sure why there had to be another token. Why didn't you just keep the token as ENG on hive-engine and let users transfer over. If they destroy the token on steem-engine it could appear on hive-engine.
We have a bunch of ENG we would prefer to be on Hive.
This is actually a very good idea and it will be a huge help for tribe owners...
👍🏼 an ENG/BEE pair would be nice.
My personal perception of steem-engine is a huge failure: how much better and profitable would it be for everyone to duplicate steem-engine tokens on hive-engine?
I don't understand, but I adapt to the decision.
A huge hug! 🤗
@amico, at first it sounds good. But please see the problem:
I'm President of the Swiss Simplex World Society who's section is CO2Fund. To support CO2 compensation projects we us the CO2 Compensation Coin (COCO) on SE and it exists 21 Mio. of them that have been issued on SE.
After some formal requirements I had to consider, now they can be bought and sold on SE legally. If all COCO would be hard-forked/duplicated I would be in charge that suddenly some thousand Steemians and Hiveians have got 'money out of nothing' in addition to the money (in form if the COCO) they already hold.
Me, as the issuer, never have controlled these Hive-COCO in advance to the HF (which of course is not possible) to offer them legally.
In addition, every Hive-COCO holder should declare the additional COCOs as a donation and I would be not able to present all formal and legally necessary details about everybody who has got these donation.
Thus a fork of all these Layer-2 tokens on SE could cause a legal problem to the issuer of the SE-(layer-2)-token. Anyway, 2 COCO out of 42 Mio. will have the same value than 1 COCO out of the 21 Mio. we have right now ;) (Even so I will buy the token name on hive-engine too, you never know...)
A nice feature would be that COCO and all the SE-tokens (on a common Engine platform one day) could be easily traded against STEEMP or HIVEP (via an internal STEEMP/HIVEP change) without the need to individually trade your HIVEP against STEEMP first.
Thanks for your interesting reply!
Exactly how you create your thin-air tokens, and exactly how central banks around the world do?
Many say that we are entering a new paradigm of abundance: that this new world depends on the attitudes and thoughts of each of us?
Of course tokens are created 'out of nothing', But not to run into difficulties you have to consider the legal aspects of the specific kind of token you have created. Then, maybe you are not allowed to give them away 'for nothing' - every country treated it differently and has its own regulations. So at least some of the level-2 token creators could run into difficulties if their tokens would be hard forked. It's a complicated thing - you really have to dive into it...
Unfortunately not. FIAT-money-power is heavily implementing an attitude control - but they can't do it for the thoughts ;)
Very impressive!
The complications of running a blockchain base business are huge when something like this happens.
Good point we later 1 tokens automatically forking. I’m glad the SUFB tokens were on layer 2 as they are worth a share of the Crypto Class Action damages which are a real world thing.
You had a few weeks notice. If you wouldn’t have been spending your time working with Justin Sun, you could have better prepared your team. I understand how it’s impossible for you to take responsibility for anything, but I’m glad you at least are informing your users after being asked to do so repeatedly.
Hopefully those who have put a lot of effort into building their tribes can now make informed decisions.
Thanks for the info. I am a emfour miner holder and eng holder. My account is small but feel like I got robbed right now. I will be in the meeting. I really hope to have an option to trade my stake for a stake on Hive. But I will wait to see what else is bought up.
Yes, you‘ve been robbed. The Thief took over the STEEM Blockchain and now your Steem-Engine funds are in trouble.
You should sell everything possible and pull it over into HIVE / Hive-Engine. If not possible pray for the Tron Foundation to not demise your investment to 0.
This is a lot for me to take in, but I feel heartened by what is going on and some of the costs covered that make it do-able for our tribe and token. I'll definitely be at the meeting tomorrow with @alchemage and @nateonsteemit so we have a better idea of what's going on. Thanks for letting us know as much as you could -- been waiting for this post and your work is appreciated as ever.
I have a long day at work tomorrow running a businesses that is thankfully considered essential during these times, but I will make sure to be there at least at the beginning. This has been a struggle for all of us to deal with, but I appreciate the opportunity to join the discussion and find solutions for everyone that we can. The WeedCash Tribe will be discussing ahead of time, to hopefully agree on what we want to do. I know we have members who support both chains, so that makes this decision difficult. Is there a way to support both chains and just have WEED transferable between SE and HE?
Thank you for this post @aggroed. I don't understand it fully but appears the "right" thing is being done by Steem engine. Lets see what the users who understand it better than me have to say.
Namaste
Can't wait to hear more details and will try to make time on Wednesday afternoon for the meeting. Are you going to sell Bee Miners? Also wondering what the inflation will be like on Bee. Eng did not hold a peg so well.
You did a lot for Steem and it’s great to have you doing it for Hive.
Congrats on getting done what you did despite the difficult circumstances. Very honourable!
Situation still fluid. We are not able to make decision yet so will postpone our decision till community has more time to see where are we heading.
All the best of luck with these developments. It's clear your running this thing with a business mindset, looking forward to new opportunities.
The future of Hive is bright and a lot of that for me is due to what you did with steem-engine and will do with hive-engine.
The capabilities of this second layer are vital to make this ecosystem grow.
Thanks a lot for the hard work you and you're team are doing and have done.
This.
Hive seems like the logical choice for most. I am excited to see what the Hive community will create now that Sun is out of the picture!
I really lost interest in steemit after witnessing the massive monetization of content by platform whales leaving basically nothing for curators like myself. It is really cool when so many people can come together to create something so special!
Extra Happy to be here and hope you all are as well XD
Thanks for this detailed review on what to do, or where to go to find out more. Appreciated! Keep up the good work.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 0/2)
I don't really have a clear image, how that would look, but seems pretty useful
I appreciate you taking the time to organize and undertake to explain what's going on for folks concerned with Engine, given how much demand there is for your time and energy presently.
To ensure I completely understand I will iterate what I have grasped is necessary to do to migrate to Hive.
If I have a SE token, that will not just migrate.
I need to purchase ENG and create a new token using the reserved name on Hive.Engine.
Is this correct?
Thanks!
Imagine that you purchase a ticket to travel by boat from Spain to the US. In the middle of the trip you realize that the boat has some leaks and it might sink before reaching it's destination. The captain of the boat tells you that he can transfer you to a another one but only if you agree to pay the full fee again...or you can stay on the same boat and risk sinking to the bottom of the sea.
What sane pearson would consider recommending that service or think of using the same cruise line ever again?
Powering down all stakes in any steem-engine tokens and will send that liquidy to STEEM then convert those coins to HIVE. Lose my arse? Probably not. I am a smart investor. *I never invest what I am not will to lose. Only sure things in this life are death and taxes.
Right now? I will continue to stake @banjo coins until I find another way to support @inertia's work spending a great deal of time integrating HIVE and Discord for real-time discussions.
That is what I am doing. We all do what we seem fit.
I have lost total confidence in the STEEM blockchain(?). Is it really a blockchain NOW?
tl;dr
Dear Aggroed
I did not receive my HIVEP yet.
I did claime my HIVEP 16 hours ago like below.
Please check this.