My friend @edicted, is trying to play a devil’s advocate and bring some arguments against mainstream belief that Justin Sun has stolen funds from 60+ users in the amount of 23K+ million Steem with Steem hardfork-23. @edicted is a talented content creator and a friend. I have been following him for a while and really enjoy his content. Occasionally you may find educational information within his content, but most of the time content has a great deal of entertaining value. His couple of posts regarding Steem hardfork-23, while very entertaining, fall short proving his point.
@edicted has a very unique style of writing that definitely falls into the entertainment category, and I believe that is the intent. But don’t be fooled with long-form posts and smart injection of quotes, definitions, and sources. It is all entertainment material. That’s it.
I won’t bore you with a long post or random injection of definitions and sources. I will just resort to common sense to respond to some of his claims.
- Claim 1 - All hardforks are the same, regardless if they create a new chain or not.
- Claim 2 - Based on claim-1, Justin Sun didn’t not still anything and just created a new chain.
- Claim 3 - If this case goes to courts and Justin Sun loses, not only Steem will fail but also will Hive.
Currently, this case is not being tried in legal courts. It is being tried in the court of public opinion on social media. Most of us, myself included, are not legal or blockchain experts. However, we all reason and make up our own minds based on the facts in front of us. The fact is Steem has gone through many hardforks. While technically @edicted may call them all new chains, for us ordinary people they mainly always been software/code updates. Whenever chain splits happened like Golos or Whaleshares, we all knew they were separate and new chains. So, for an ordinary person it is not hard to differentiate the two. In the court of public opinion, any reasonable person can see what is going on. Even if you did go technical and declare every hardfork as a chain split, legal courts also rely on how a reasonable person would perceive things. Some courts rely on a jury, who are not experts on blockchain and who would go by what is reasonable to their understanding based on law and circumstances.
CZ Binance also suggested a similar idea as a solution. He basically said, he would support if anybody came up with a forked chain starting from ta block where accounts are not zeroed out. He seems to be using the same logic. While I am no expert on blockchain, my common sense dictates it is stupid. Even if you continued the pre-Steem-HF23 chain, JS would still have power and stakes in the chain to alter things unless you nullify his stakes. Why would you continue a chain and nullify his stakes? We already have HIVE. It makes zero sense that anybody would be interested in that.
My point is whenever hardfork occurs and only one chain continues in practice, that basically makes any potential old chain obsolete and in reality produces a code update and seamless continuation of the chain. That is how an ordinary person would interpret it.
This one is easy because @edicted already conceded that this is a securities fraud. This even worse than just theft. I tend to agree with @edicted when he calls it a securities fraud. In essence, Steem has turned into security by Justin Sun personally, instead of being a decentralized crypto asset. One of the sub-claims @edicted makes is somehow Justin Sun is not personally liable, but Steemit Inc is due to actions being done in the name of Steemit Inc. If these crimes to be found as security fraud, Justin Sun will be personally held accountable for the actions. Not to mention the fact that he probably is the only one who holds the keys to the major accounts that executed fraudulent actions. Add to that planning and masterminding the whole criminal plot. If it went to courts as securities fraud, I doubt Steemit Inc would shield him from personal liability.
First let me note how @edicted bashes a brilliant legal opinion by @apshamilton. I have read the legal opinion. It is a brilliant piece and thanks for Andrew taking his time to study this case and provide a legal opinion pro-bono. It did convince my ordinary understanding and I wouldn’t be surprised if many more are convinced that there is a case there.
First of all, if this did go to courts as @edicted mentioned it would trigger securities fraud and related agencies. Which in turn would potentially expose many more frauds committed by Justin Sun? This case would be so big that nobody would even care about Hive. In the case this did go to courts, let’s civil, again I would assume it would attract the attention of agencies investigating securities fraud. Hence, it might turn it into a criminal case. While I doubt things would go that far, I doubt litigation would be about the technicalities of how hardforks and what they mean. But rather how much damage is done to regular people who bought into the idea of those assets, invested money, and lost due to the fraudulent actions of one or group of people.
In conclusion, I am not a legal or blockchain expert. This post is meant for entertainment purposes only and to annoy @edicted. :)
@geekgirl you are 100% correct.
Courts are indeed interested in the regular everyday understanding of things - the understanding of "the man on the Clapham omnibus" is a well known phrase in English law (if somewhat non-PC these days).
As my friend @brianoflondon says: The less you know about blockchain the clearer it is that this is plain theft.
Despite what crypto advocates might like to believe, blockchains have no special legal status. They are just computer code and this is no different from a bank changing their computer to to transfer money from one account to another without lawful authority.
Indeed its even clearer in this case because banks have contracts with users and are bound by all sort of regulation which might be relevant.
Here there are no other legal complications. Its theft, plain and simple.
Also Courts REALLY don't like people who:
a) think they are above the law - saying "code is law" in Court may put you in jail for contempt of Court;
b) take the law into their own hands for perceived wrongs as the Steem witnesses have openly stated they were doing.
Ding ding ding - perfect answer.
I'll give an example. Twice I've had HSBC in North America close down my business account because they simply didn't want my business any more. The first time I got it back with an appeal above the heads of HSBC NA to a more important part of HSBC but when they closed the account the second time 2 years later, I figured they just don't like me (perhaps I don't deal enough drugs for Comey's taste).
Each time they closed my business account, however, they mailed a check with my most recent balance to me. They did not confiscate my funds! It still caused me extraordinary business damage but I had to suck it up and find another bank.
There is simply no difference between what Justin Sun has done and what HSBC did except for the theft and that Justin is trying to hide behind "witnesses" and say he didn't direct the action.
Wow. Now @edicted is checkmated! :)
Wow, thank you very much for weighing on this. I was just trying to have fun with picking on @edicted. :) Your legal opinion is brilliant, detailed, and convincing. Simply makes sense.
The only thing I'd like to add is this:
The only reason Steem has any value whatsoever right now is because Sun and friends are keeping it afloat pretty much single handedly. If at any moment he decides to exit, Steem will go to zero. Is that theft?
Have we noticed that EVERY SINGLE TIME someone makes reference to this "theft" they do it in dollars and not Steem? 26M Steem is not $5M unless Sun holds his bag open. Ned knew damn well he wouldn't of got $5M even if he had dumped all 70M coins. It just showcases yet another way how many users are over-exaggerating and misinterpreting this issue.
That being said I was going to write a post soon about how it is theft because I give no fucks.
Because people on twitter have no clue as to how much STEEM is worth and to get the message across its imperative to put it in $ value.
If someone said: "Justin Sun stole 100 million Algorand" i wouldnt know if that was worth 5 dollars or 500 million dollars.
Thats his problem. Thats how much the market values Steem. The fact that his ego is keeping a dead project token price propped up is his problem, not ours.
Well. The thing is that you want to have a concise and easy message to send out.
What would be the point of saying: "Well Justin Sun did steal the funds but while they are worth 5million USD, they are worth that because Justin is not selling and you couldnt sell all that Steem for 5million USD. It would be much less because the selloff would tank the price so really 5 million USd is the current valuation of the tokens but you cant sell it all for 5 million."
😂Just say its 5 million.
Just say 26M Steem.
Even better, you could say 7% of the total supply.
Saying $5M is not what the market values those coins at.
Why do you think Ned sold under the table?
Looking forward to reading your post on "how it is theft". Your arguments are always interesting and fun to read.
You don't have any claim to ownership in a market value. There is no theft if new gold discoveries or a change in market demand for commodities reduce the price of gold bullion. However, if someone takes your gold, they are a thief. And someone took these tokens from the people who had earned them.
Cryptocurrencies are always speculative. But this seizure of tokens is a violation of the core principle of blockchain security. It overrode private keys and revealed a deep flaw in the protocol behind STEEM and HIVE. That is a major issue we may need to address here, too.
No one stole anyone's gold in this scenario. What happened is alchemists turned copied silver into gold and then took the gold that never existed before. Then afterwards the value of silver plummeted because no one wanted it anymore.
No.
But nice Red Mage avatar!
Resteemed.
kek.
This is not a case of theft.
This is a case of murder.
Old STEEM was killed by Mr. Tron.
Now we have two new block chains STEEM(justin) and HIVE
the only confusion is that Mr. Tron kept the old name.
And any lawsuit would be dead in the water.
Sure they could prove damages in a securities fraud case, but all that can be attached is the empty shell that is steemit inc.
In order to go after Mr. Tron, you would need to get him inside a proper jurisdiction (really difficult) and then PROVE that he is the owner of said keys (an almost impossible task). Sure we all know that those are Mr. Tron's keys, but we really have never seen them in his possession. We can only prove that they existed in the past.
I think ownership of keys can easily be proven. As there would be documents like sales agreement of Steemit Inc, legal depositions of possible witnesses like Ned, and other ex-Steemit employees. But I understand you point, it would probably just be a case against Steemit Inc, rather than JS personally.
Still, there is so much we don't know.
In my opinion the Hive witnesses started a precedent by moving HIVE balance of over 200 Steemians to @steem.dao account.
Now Steem witnesses doing same and community calls that "devil steal". Such hypocrisy.
The purpose of the fork was to create a blockchain where Justin Sun and his supporters werent present.
If you didnt remove those accounts the fork would be pointless. We could just stay on Steem.
You fork to introduce a change. The change was to create something where these guys werent present. Its really first grade logic. I cant explain it more simply then that.
There were no "hive balances".
Nice narration to excuse wipeout of someone else's account and move funds to dao wallet.
My HIVE tokens has 3-years continuous history on my account. They exist for a reason. Hive fork is exactly same fork as many over 20 previous versions that happened before.
Hive as the longest chain (produced far more blocks) is the natural continuation of STEEM/HIVE chain. No matter how it is named.
Both Steem and Hive witnesses running latest forks got dirty hands.
No they dont. There was no such thing as Hive. What has history is your posting.
It blows my mind that you can argue this.
Hive exists because Hive was not given to those accounts. If the tokens were airdropped to these people the chain would not fork. Itd be the same fucking chain. Everything would be the same.
You're arguing something that makes no sense.
I have heard the cons and pros of excluding airdrops to select a number of accounts. I think both arguments have merits. However, being excluded in the airdrops doesn't equate to theft. You can't steal something that is not there. But if there is something already in someone's wallet and you take it, that's theft.
There are many, including whales that think everybody should have received airdrops. I can agree with that. In my opinion the only evil in the entire debacle has been Justin Sun.
Those who were excluded from airdrop can still receive them. It would require some campaigning on an individual or collective basis. But I think it is possible. Hive stakeholders are reasonable. However, it seems many who were excluded are not interested.
Stop calling this "airdrop". This is continouous chain with origin in Steem chainbase.
Airdrop word would be used if Hive chain start from 0 block and empty user blogs.
Stop lying. Hive was a new chain when I moved here, and the tokens I was granted were a gift.
Multiple services migrated here. Multiple exchanges listed the new token. Incorporate those facts into your arguments, and your arguments become utterly insuperable.
You know this, so you're lying.
Stop.
Nice I have also tried to examine this issue with a common-sense approach because for the most part that's well how this case will be approached in court--if it ever gets there--with some legal reference.
Code is the law doesn't apply. The technically meaning of hardfork doesn't necessarily apply as stated by another reader. The impact of the said action is key in determining the legitimacy of the hardfork. I believe it will get to this point if the stolen funds do not go back to their initial owners. Bittrex has a huge decision to make.
Yes, Bittrex has a big decision to make. Once they examine all facts, I would think they would be able to recognize the theft and provide secure return of funds on their exchange. They have all the resources and tools they need.
I am so tired. I quit steem days ago, because I wanted to not be associated with, then I find this news and I see I can't withdraw my Steem man, that's there after downpower.
Sucks man, truely.
Justin Sun has made even my life meserable, can't leave a old bygone issue off. Anyway.
): ... I want to WITHDRAW ALL MY STEEM, for God's sake!!
Yes these things has been disappointing to all of us. At least, I think with Hive we can build something much better.
HOw many steem do you have, i dont see any steem in your hive wallet? What do u mean you cant withdraw your steem? You dont have any to withdraw.
This will go to courts and Steem will fall down, and Justin and Tron's reputation will further go to the gutters, I assure you!!
I am not sure about that. It seems his reputation was bad even before he bought Steemit Inc. We just didn't know about it. It seems like scammers get away with their shenanigans in the crypto space.
When Justin came, to Steemit, I knew this will happen!! Anyway... I think due to this legal charge frame, no exchange is taking deposits of Steem.
YOu cant trust a greedy chinese, as a viet i already knew that, that is why im not in it.
#posh
Congratulations @geekgirl! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your board And compare to others on the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPSupport the HiveBuzz project. Vote for our proposal!
agree!
Was someone deprived of earned assets on the source chain? Yes. This is definitely theft. No other conclusion can be supported. Actions were taken that violate the core principles of blockchain security and keyholder authority.
HIVE was a true hard fork that created an entirely new token for the express purpose of removing the clearly-demonstrated point of failure in the Steemit Inc. stake and bad actors supporting Sun's coup. Yes, some people were not issued new tokens, and of those, some should receive retroactive airdrops. But this is a new token even though it copied the old chain. No one was owed anything. There has been no theft, and people still retain their keys with all the security protocols they ensure on both chains along with an avenue for remedy.
The Security Argument:
If STEEM is a security, it is (I believe) illegal for a US citizen to own or transact with a crypto security. Might be an interesting situation if this does travel down the legal route - would definitely open up a boatload of SEC fines and interpretations..