Sort:  

How about this perspective (no analogy needed):

If you spent almost 4 years of your life building content on a blockchain you believed would live on forever and someone comes along, buys up stake which has previously been promised would never be used to centralize the network, buys up the main interface, buys up the company behind the development (without their say in the matter), and tells everyone your content, your tokens, your apps, and everything will migrate to a new chain you have nothing to do with and you have no say in the matter at all... wouldn't you ask those you democratically elected to prevent this and protect your property?

I've been here since July 2016 and lived through all the empty promises and price implosions.

Whether Justin was to buy up Steemit INCs stake or slowly buy everyone's funds who are dumping STEEM on exchanges overtime he still had the money to influence the Witness votes.

And what is the difference of STEEM being its own chain or being a TRX token? They are both DPoS with 3 second block times and TRX has smart contract capability. Even Steem-Engine tokens could have likely been migrated to work with the TRON smart contracts......etc.

Justin had done nothing yet and you guys locked him out of something he paid tens of Millions of dollars for.

Did you not think he was going to play defense to your offensive attack?

The mass majority of the community was likely to gain in value from the Partnership / Acquisition. Even your own stake would have likely appreciated.

What the whole thing came down to was you were going to lose partial control and a cash cow that has been a huge cash cow for a very small part of the community that has primarily been selected by @freedom and a few other key parties ....etc.

You guys have masked this war as "Decentralization" blah blah blah.

Most wars come down to power and money. Why were we in Iraq? It wasn't weapons of mass destruction. Mainly control and money

All that being said I do see part of both sides because people have put in a lot of work here and maybe initially had good intentions in some respects even if it wasn't helping the community or the price. But you can't peg Justin as a total villain in this situation. I don't agree with everything he has done overtime but if you are in his shoes are you just going to sit back and let other people lock you out of your investment you just purchased?

It's sad you think this was all about money on the side of the witnesses. I've seen witnesses go with little sleep for weeks since this all started, many of them nearly unpaid backups working to protect the chain from the centralized take over we experienced and you seem to gloss over all that. Please, focus on how DPoS actually works and how serious it is that one person was able to take over the chain, in spite of efforts to protect against that very thing.

I mean yeah it is a serious thing when one person has the money and power to make a power move like that but I just don't see how that is so much different than any other chain. If someone spent enough money even on a POW chain they could take it in a direction they wanted to and if they had enough friends running exchanges .....etc then the same would occur essentially.

Until we have more decentralized means of exchange like a good way to do Atomic Swaps or something then the weak points will always be at the exchanges.

STEEM has been an interesting experiment though and the premise of the SBD could have alleviated the need for the exchanges if it could have reached critical mass and continued to grow as an ecosystem.

I don't know what is going to happen but I'm personally surprised that more Witnesses haven't came to the conclusion that no one can really expect Justin to not launch a counter offensive if he just spent Millions and then suddenly all these people with less influence than him in the crypto world who have less stake in the game are trying to cut him off from the multi million dollar investment he just made.

I just wasn't the right way to go about it.

It is like throwing someone in jail because they might drink and drive when they were no where near a car or showing any intention of driving.

Also to add to that. You are acting like your time and money is more important that Justin's time and money.

If money is a partial reflection of store time / energy then Justin has ultimately invested more than most if not all the witnesses.

Also @lukestokes I know you aren't a bad guy and there are a lot of good witnesses that have good intentions. I know I play devils advocate / Internet troll sometimes but I would still shake your hand at an EOS event and have a peaceful debate. Just differences of opinion that is all. Don't take it personal.

Hopefully the STEEM blockchain can figure out a way through this without pointing too many fingers and vilifying each other too much.

Pretty crazy what is going on overall though. Uncharted territory for sure.

You make it personal when you make accusations like this and presume my intentions or lack of integrity.

you were going to lose partial control and a cash cow

Sorry, but no. If you are an asshole ("troll" if you prefer) on chain but nice in person, I'll still hold you accountable for the many personal things you said to me and about me. If you don't want it to be personal, don't make it personal.

Honestly @lukestokes you might be a little more amped up now because of the stress of this and you have more time invested in this in the last month and more money invested here as well.

This whole thing is more of a sideshow for me at this point because after I didn't get my proposal funded when the SPS launched that was sort of the point where I took my funds out for the most part and moved them to other chains. I gave it a solid 3 years of thugging it out here and at that point I had to see the writing on the wall.

EOS despite its issues, I have been stacking since mid 2017 and I have never sold. I just keep stacking more and more and more even when others have had doubts.

Hahhah. @lukestokes Man I know you are stressed out but when it boils down to it I'm apologizing online and I will apologize in person. It's not that big of a deal.

The thing about losing partial control and a cash cow. I don't see how that isn't true and it isn't meant to be mean. It is just stating a fact in my opinion.

Plus I have always said I know you aren't a scammer and you mean well. The main disagreement I have always had about your stance is that Witnesses only need to process transactions.....etc. And I always took a stance that there were other more deserving Witnesses that were doing that and providing a ton of other value like @partiko and there are a lot of other examples that fell out of the loop and left.

That was the main thing. Well and the whole thing about Ad revenue. I had said this place needed Ad Revenue long before the price imploded to create a feedback loop and give bloggers an additional revenue stream instead of just trying to rely on price speculation.

But all those disagreements are not really a big deal. It is just a difference of opinion.

That have been points where I have been really frustrated with this place but now I just don't have as much of an investment so I'm just sort of watching what happens and chiming in some.