A forked version of Steem on another github account has added code to change the ownership keys for various Steemit Inc. accounts.
Thanks @anthonyadavisii for linking to it in my previous post.
This was a change made on the steemdev github account, which is not the steemit account where all previous hard and soft forks have been done and approved by witnesses.
The Steemit Inc. accounts listed to have their keys changes are:
@steem
@steemit
@steemit2
@steemit3
@misterdelegation
With a TODO: add all known accounts.
A majority of the top 19 witnesses would need to approve these code changes for them to come into effect. Honestly, I don't think it would happen. These changes would confiscate the accounts owned by Steemit Inc. This is essentially stealing accounts, and the stake therein.
You can see that this forked github change was done 2 days ago, and that the recent powerdown and transfer to Bittrex was initiated 14 hours and 15 hours ago respectively.
In my opinion, Steemit Inc. saw these code changes in a "fork" as a potential threat that the witnesses could invoke against their ownership of these accounts and the stake therein. It seems the power down and transfer to Bittrex is a precaution in case the witnesses agree to adopt these changes in a future hardfork. Steemit Inc. has decided to invalidate such an attempt to steal their accounts and stake by removing their stake.
The github account steemdev is not an official Steemit Inc. developer account. It poses little threat. The code changes are only a threat if they are approved by the top 19 witnesses, which I highly doubt they would approve of. It would amount to a coup against Steemit Inc.
Accepting a hardfork that would change the ownership keys of any account is a big nono. The top 19 witnesses would never allow this. It goes against their interests in the integrity of the Steem blockchain. Otherwise, whose account is safe? The credibility of Steem would be trash after that if stealing accounts was permitted.
As such, this move by Steemit Inc., although precautionary, seems to be premature and has the consequence of causing FUD in the Steem and larger crypto community. But Steemit Inc. isn't taking any chances, and I can't really blame them for wanting to take these precautions. Can you?
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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Am i the only one that sees not having that stake available to fend off attackers as a hazard?
What if the freedom account decided to only self vote or bid bot us to death, who would flag them?
Oh, wait,...
I've always seen the @steemit account having a large stake as good for potential threats from large investment to take over the chain in some way. But it's not guaranteed steemit would do anything. As you say, nothing is already being done with all the crap going on.. just a free for all for the rich...
By design, no one can take over the chain. The likelihood of that happening is close to 0. STEEM is safer then BTC.... That being said, the biggest danger is in misuse of stake by large investors like freedom, though i believe even him/her doesnt want STEEM to fail.
Im not a fan of relying on STEEMIT.INC for protection. What i would like to see is @ned giving up a chunk of the ninja mined STEEM to a top 20 witness run account for development.
Not running away with the STEEM leaving us wondering if it might get dumped on a exchange.
Really? I might be ignorant, but couldnt the majority of witnesses collude to approve changes.to the code that benefits them? There are.only 20 + 1 witnesses. Since the freedom account is practically electing them, it seems rather easy to take over this chain. I asked a question about steem being 51% attacked on musing but no one responded yet. This seems like a good time to get an answer.
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Steem is extremely vulnerable to this, and in fact one could argue has already been taken over by one single investor (@freedom/@pumpkin) since that vote is a de facto requirement for top 20 witness status. Perhaps a change to make the max # of witness votes per account 10, instead of 30, would make it a lot safer. To control all 20 top witnesses would take twice as much stake as current setup, where a single account with enough SP can in fact elect the top THIRTY witnesses
That could work. Seems like the easiest way to not allow one account to elect all the important witnesses.
Not sure if it will not have "go arounds" @kenanqhd . What then holds the "boss" to not create secondary acount "freedom2", move half of his stake to his twin/clone, and elect the first 10 witness with "freedom" and the other 10 with "freedom2" ?
Big potention to reduce the power of boss is in reducing his dominance. By encouraging more orcas and dolphins to make their votes for witnesses. How many of them do now? 7%? 15% ? (I've seen some post on this subj)
Make the participance from all of us in witness vote 5x times higher, and the danger from one single dominating boss goes down 5x times. Or even more.
Beat this.
P.S..
As smth towards such risk reduction I see the "dophin council" initiative by @kabir88. Check his blog.
Well, if the ninjamined stake isnt going to be used to flag abuse it's better not held in sp, and certainly not delegated sp, if you ask me.
The sooner the ninjamine takes its thumb off the scales, the better, imo.
They need to grow up and work with the community and the witnesses.
There is simply no excuse for their behavior at this point.
Do you think serious investors or Dapp builders would like to build anything on a chain that actually has a communication platform and the largest stakeholder (likely controlling stake) can't decide what he is doing and why,
Each day you get to wake up to find out if the project you are building is still viable due to unpredictable behavior by a stakeholder with jittery fingers and no long term plan?
At this point, I have to stop respecting anyone who is willing to build a business here. It's unacceptable behavior.
Hear hear! @whatsup that's the spirit we need now IMHO. F em ALL
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I have been assuming from Ned's sudden silence in December that Steemit is in some sort of an agreed quiet period with an unknown party. 60 days from Ned's last post would be Feb 4. 90 days would be March 6. Of course I could be way off-base, but this wallet movement could be consistent with that guess. Guess we'll find out before April if that assumption is right.
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I hear ya. It's disheartening. They should communicate more. But their actions are theirs to make. They aren't accountable to anyone. The shares/stock/STEEM isn't based on Steemit Inc. We need to get over looking at them for everything. The problem with that is the code is controlled by them, unless the witnesses accept other code that gets developed outside of the Steem repository on github... Until then, Steemit inc will stay in control...
I totally agree their actions are theirs to make. But when they have a new plan each day, it is going to be hard for developers or investors. I am completely against the "fork".
I am also done pretending they are headed anywhere.
I have only one question. Why such an important thing as code still stored on a centralized site like GitHub, and there is no project like "git over blockchain".
This must not be allowed to happen! It would destroy the integrity of the blockchain. It would destroy trust. It would mean that anyone can be robbed for some arbitrary reason.
Yup, pure disaster, which is why it would never happen.
I think we would just get 2 chains. The result would be similar to the ETH DAO event.
Not really since ETH is proof or work and Steem isn't. The Steem blockchain can't split like that since the majority of the top 20 witnesses would have to go along for the fork to even happen. Then the remaining witnesses would not be able to carry on in their own chain since the code in the chain would not allow it without the majority of the witnesses.
Yeah. It cant happen. Good point.
Thanks for clarifying that.
Accepting that change would literally kill Steem for everyone, no one would trust it.
Agreed.
Thanks for your insight into this situation, it's hard to tell wtf is going on and Stinc's silence is really making matters worse by the day. We need clear communication at this time but we have none. If Stinc is in trouble they need to come clean so that the community can react properly and support where support is most needed. The total lack of communication over almost the last 2 months is unacceptable imo. It leaves Steem rutterless.
You're welcome :) Glad to offer some insight from what I can see. Lack of communication does suck indeed. It wouldn't be an issue so much if we had a non-Steemit team controlling the code :/
I commented on this talk of forking the other day. Seems like suicide to me to attempt to devalue the original Steem mined, as it would send a clear message to any current investors as well as future ones that their investment could be devalued as well.
I do wonder though whether they actually feared such a thing or if this was a convenient excuse to continue exiting the chain. Not for me to know at this time, but I can say that overall this is yet another straw on the continuing worries running rampant here. I have seen many posts, one of which recently was a screenshot of Dan saying that Steemit.inc was in control of Steem back when he left. Not sure of the validity of the shot, nor exactly which post I saw it on in the comments. There have been many posts of late crying doom and arguing over the future or lack of.
Maybe foolish here, but I am going to continue holding. If this is an exit and everything folds, it will hurt to lose the money, but have lost much more in my life to outright worthless endeavors. Will hurt more that the hope I have seen here didn't pan out. But...just maybe... this is a defining moment and those who are stampeding for the doors will envy those of us who stick around giving this a chance to go through these growing pains.
just to note, enough top witnesses did actually seriously discuss this proposal in various channels where enough eyes saw it, that it is not at all unreasonable that Steemit took action to start mitigating risk by moving Steem off platform. One would have hoped that all top witnesses were smart enough to categorically and immediately reject this, but the actual honest to goodness truth is that more than just one or two top witnesses literally did discuss doing this.
Good to know there is some discussion among the witnesses, even if just a few.
Thanks, I was unaware any of the top witnesses were willing to tear the chain apart. Hopefully they will not remain top witnesses for long.
I doubt they are pulling out, given what I concluded here. Steemit is in shambles given the work that was done since Dan left, which isn't much... I read his words too. I trust Dan more than other developers in crypto.
Maybe things will turn around ;)
I agree that something like this shouldn't even be considered. It would mean that no account would be safe and that anyone could be robbed blindly by a simple vote.
If Steemit Inc actually saw this as a real threat, they could simply vote for 10 of their own witnesses who would guarantee that they retain control. Hopefully they don't feel that their Steem would be safer on an exchange than in a wallet.
On the bright side, if they move their stake to the exchanges, the remaining accounts with staked Steem will get a higher percentage of the inflation. The bad news is that without the inflation to sell, Steemit Inc will have to be looking to other sources for income, including advertisements.
Yup, it would never happen.
Yup. It's theft and akin to being a pirate as you say. Witnesses wouldn't accept this. Steemit Inc. seems to have panicked in this case...
Get it? Pirates vs. Ninjas! 🤓
LOL, funny guy :P Pirates want to steal the ninja-mined stake
Do we know who are the Pirates?
Pretty much. They're being coy.
Now I know even less than before.
But thanks for your time anyway.
I don't see it as panic but, wouldn't you be cautious? Also, the mrdelegation account only cut some delegations meaning they would still be affected and it holds something like 18 million itself.
It is cautious can't blame them as I said, but for something I don't ever see happening, so panicked as well...
@krnel, thank you for sharing with us your thoughts. I am not a tech geek, so I don't knyiw how reliable STEEM Blockchain is. But, in my view, Steemit Inc. is moving away his STEEM, because they're going to sell it. They simply need Fiat. And, of course, Steemit Inc. understands very well that crypto is in Bear Market and the price of STEEM may drop to $0,10 and less ... So, they just want to sell at higher price. That's my point of view.
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If there’s a huge dump, that could mean all ninjamined coins were sold and everyone can get in for cheap.
@inertia, what do you mean "ninjamined"?
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Might not matter anymore, if it ever did. But Steemit, Inc.’s Steem was mined earlier than most, so people who saw that cry sour grapes and call that practice ninja mining because they got it before anybody realized it might be valuable.
@inertia, you mean "premining"?
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My understanding was it wasn't premined or ninja mind, it was just farmed for a few days while only a group of friends essentially had the know how of the system, and releasing code wasn't done promptly or on some elitist we must be notified forum.. shrugs they needed their 10% donation in the end to promote the system as they did,.. however... Transitioning to a for profit company running non block chain traditional revenue streams system makes sense.. steemit is not steem.. steem marches on while some will possibly leave steemit for more free options, most of which charge their 10% now for posting and such... iirc pretty much every app that allows posting does this.. it's not like steemit runs their own bid / buy bots... Past that, it's not hard to also use some other cms type systems to completely ditch steemit and run off a static site somewhere like GitHub.. steem marches on.
** Shrugs ** I'm stoned, what do I know ^>^
Steemit's stake came from the original mining that took place to start the blockchain.
@taskmaster, you also mean "premining"?
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No, that’s different.
Got it! Thank you.
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Honestly, who would buy all of the coins they try to dump. Maybe they'll put a sell order in, but there's barely any volume to chip away at their overall stake of tokens. Am I off here?
Place a sell order at $0.05 of 20M Steem, and you will be surprised how fast the left sell-wall (at $0.05) will meltdown and dissapear. You will be surprised.
After all, less than 300 BTC will be required to waporise all that.
300 BTC !
The buy walls are on standby.
Been trying to wade through this information from your posts and a few others, to determine what's going on, @krnel, and I guess I'm at a loss in putting cause and effect together. True, there's steemdev, but as you said, it would take a super majority of the top 21 witnesses to effect change. So, unless I've got the top 21 read wrong, that's a no starter. The fact that the proposal even exists, though, is somewhat disconcerting, especially since there was talk not that long ago of doing something similar—somehow shutting out Steemit, or locking up, their SP.
I'm not sure if one action leads to another, but as you say, if it does, taking precautions is better than not.
If there's another reason, a titanic/iceberg scenario, that would seem to be just a good an answer as any. Steemit Inc is on its way down, and doesn't really want everyone else to know.
So, what assurance do we have? No communication from anyone at Steemit Inc other than company-speak from a memo in the power down wallet entry that most of us would have never seen anyway?
And yet, I've been relatively calm throughout all of this, and I don't know why. I feel like I've either become totally unhinged from reality, or somehow, everything is going to work out. It's when people start freaking and calling for the equivalent of nuclear counterstrikes is when I get nervous. FUD has a way of destroying projects/economies/lives faster than actual facts do.
Thank you for keeping what I believe to be a level head through this, and for reporting out this information. I for one do appreciate it.
Glad to help clear up the picture ;)
Didn’t the EOS protocol get a lot of challenges from behavior that was similar? The immutability of a blockchain is important to remain trustworthy for its users! Thanks for coming back and clarifying!
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You're welcome. New info made things more lear as to why a move was being done.
@ned is speaking right now on http://mspwaves.com/home/listen/
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I could not catch it. Can you kindly make a post if you have watched it live? Or, will there be archive copy?
The witnesses will always act in the interest of the blockchain, not of Steemit Inc or any other party. That's a given and should be said first and foremost. There's a lot of opportunists out there who can code. All of their attempts should be taken seriously but not panicked over.
This is just a fork. A fork is worthless unless accepted by the majority of witnesses by stake weight. No one will accept some random fork unless there's real reason behind it and all agree. Remember that the chain can be rolled back if absolutely needed. It would be a mess but its a possibility.
When Steem was created Steemit Inc ninjamined a huge amount of tokens. Dan rolled back the chain (as I mentioned above) to do that when users figured out how to follow Dan's nonsensical instructions for the mining ask. Restoration of any state prior to the current block state is possible but not advisable as a normal day-to-day activity. It's akin to having major surgery.
Yes it's not going to happen.
Interesting follow up, thank you. I just read your earlier post on the subject now and this followup adds details that are overtly a cause for concern, but as you say, the top witnesses will not vote on this fork. Overall though it does look like crypto (several hacking stories lately), and particularly steem is being attacked by some bad actors. rewriting code to move someone's coins hey? Mmmm...
Well I hope the ptb, the witnesses that run the show at the top are not too centralised.
Well it's a group of 19, so it's centrally controlled by them hehe, but not as central as 1 person. Although, one account, @freedom, pretty much picks who gets into the top 19... so...
Big SO there, and this anonymous central figure having so much control is what has lead to my complete and absolute disillusionment in this experimental ecosystem. I'm only sticking around bc there are knowledgeable people and I'm playing tech and crypto catch up so that I may be a more informed citizen in the 21st century.
But, as far as the failed economics of this blockchain go, it just feels scammy and scummy. Time will tell.
Have any of you ever wondered what happens if freedom dies? Not the philosophy but the investor, we will then be forever stuck with the one party system circle jerk that facilitates this shitastrophe. Totally great for future investors and mass adoption 🤐
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The blockchain should set up a kind of witness voting system where the votes decay over time. So that inactive/dead voters with large stakes don't control what happens to the top 19 unless they vote again.
I have heard this b4. Very much support such scheme
Very good suggestion.
If freedom dies, more freedom for the chain then? They are a "one party" system, no?
I agree on the disillusionment from the centralization of power in this "new" economy, (plutocracy isn't new lol).
OK, perhaps one party system is a bit of an over exaggeration haha, but again I'm disillusioned and for good reason..
It seems that many of the top players are beholden or in bed with each other in some form or fashion.
Protecting investments is critical, I get that, doing it while manipulating a system and not being transparent about is not a good look. Especially, when the populous is as informed and inspired to figure this out as this one is. I applaud you for your due diligence and hasty investigating..
Plutocracy is nothing new indeed, nor is oligarchy, so maybe I'll stop seeing the cheerleaders tell us all to get out and vote when what they mean is lobby or convince me of your worth with some worth.
Democracy and capitalism are not synonymous
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Yes, look at community "leader" and witness kevinwong with his dupe account etherpunk to take in $30-$60 per day from 4-6 shitposts each day. Great way to lead by example and make Steem a success, eh?
Steem is infected with greed, just like the regular world. It's a scamma's paradise as I wrote about. Many old timer big accounts now, are involved in shady scammy shit.
Interestingly enough I've learned quite a bot, I mean bit from Kevin Wong and do believe his intentions are to not just make a bit of loot but also raise awareness as to the absurdity of this system which rewards the shitposters with the means to exploit it.
If I were on the outside of the top witnesses forever looking in and had zero confidence in their integrity I'd probably be doing the same TBH..
By not talking the money from the rewards pool it's just going to go to some other schmuck out there. At least he isn't making propagana posts like therealwolf and telling us all whatever is rainbows and unicorns whilst being the creator of smartsteem and facilitating this nonsense directly while making a great living and kissing every ass on his way to the top..
But, because he is sooo dreamy and perfect he can do no wrong. I'd rather my spammers admit to their shenanigans than play politrix and use every God damn opportunity to self promote..
A scammers paradise indeed, but one has to pick their poison and I choose to have more respect for honesty, and actual good ideas as to how to curb this train wreck. Also those top dawgs are so politically motivated they won't even really reply to my accusations or opinions as theyre fearful whereas kwong will give feedback and explanations that aren't grounded in a desperate need to be in the inner circle jerk..
At least full-time geek left the party, that made me smile, he was another savior nobody asked for. I got caught in the crossfire of the flagwars as an innocent newb an that my friends is how you birth blockchain terrorists and revolutionaries that give zero forks and support anything that might lead to radical change that destroys the elite circle jerks..
The fact that this system is not functioning as well as we would like or as well as it could, is testament to the human element in one sense. The human error or the weak link being human nature. But then again I could be wrong there. Maybe it is the fundamental design flaw by the originators, Dan and Ned, or whoever. Perhaps a combination of both.
The top witnesses should be made aware of your feelings about the state of steem,, especially if there are many of us who are disillusioned. Let's see if we can get it through to them somehow. Surely they would take it seriously and act to improve the situation?
It sounds like EOS with its 21 top people controlling it. Curiously both are created by Dan Larimer if i'm not mistaken. t seems to be his DPos design which is causing this problem.
I don't know, seems more likely this is staged as an excuse to power down and exit scam. Ned is already on record as saying.... you know what let me just find it...
Hm yeah, I see no R&D. I see no income. In fact, isn't self-upvoting their only source of income? Which they are now powering down so... bye bye STINC. Good riddance.
The truly mind-blowing thing about all of this is zero communication. Wouldn't you at least lie and tell everyone that everything is fine? STINC thinks they can run around transferring 35 million coins around without so much as a peep after laying off 70%?
Seriously, my only consolation is that ned will never be the CEO of anything ever again. His pervasive incompetence has been recorded on the blockchain for all eternity.
Haha true
How is Steemit inc self-voting?
The communication improvement would go a long way ;)
It's ironic that a platform like steemit that is purely for communication and social networking and sharing of info has been run by witnesses or leaders who do very little of that, or certainly not enough to satisfy the disgruntled members.
Obviously we can't accurately say what anyone's motivations in this were... but if the witnesses were planning to take away Steemit Inc's stake, then people should also be demanding transparency from those witnesses as well... not just from Ned.
I quite like what TheRealWolf has been doing lately, but I'm now wondering if he was aware of some witnesses looking push this hardfork, saw Steemit and MisterDelegation's response and is now demanding answers for a reaction of events that he may have been a party to....
I don't know... I have no idea what anyone knows, or when they know... it all just seems there might be a battle playing out behind the scenes with some public shots fired for good measure.
I don't think any witnesses were planning that, at all.
Interesting to see the underlying cause! I don’t blame them but still think it’s good they did so.
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I hope they still sell :P
17 to be precise.
But I want to clarify that the PR is not accepted by any witness. As its a matter of preserving the basic properties of the blockchain, IMHO there is no possibility of anything like this happening.
Yes, it won't happen. Thanks, 17/19.
Highly rEsteemed!
If True, then it looks like one of the smartest moves done by the STINC IT Department... so I call foul. Probably their own GitHub to post a good excuse for them to bail the sinking ship. I saw this all the time in the financial industry when companies would go out of business, you would see the managers running out of the back with the office equipment. Meanwhile, the memos would always tell the hapless employees that everything with the company was FINE.
Thanks :) Yeah, but the ones at the top sold long before the managers were going out with simple office supplies :/
Ain't that the truth...
Good point.
Oh dear.
What I don't understand if this is true is, why Steemit.inc haven't explained this directly if this changes where so dangerous, anyone can understand that nobody wants his accounts stolen, so they have a perfect justification to protect themselves.
And as you said the witnesses won't approve this, so why they used so drastical solution?. I have many doubts still about this issue.
Yeah it's odd, paranoia?
Thanks for the clarity! There was some posts already about Steemit fleeing or jumping ship, which I thought was a bit knee jerk, but this provides clarity and reason. Thanks!
I hope they sell, but I doubt my previous post is accurate given the above ;)
I'm not sure... I seem to think that the large stake is sort of better off in their hands rather than in an unknown balance... Sometimes, different is not better!
Can't blame them. But I do think it's bit of an overreaction. Witnesses would not approve such a fork. Either way I'm cool with it.
Yes, quite overreacting ;)
Or maybe just an excuse to sell millions of Steem. I won't be surprised if that anon Dev is a Steemit employee, trying to deceive everyone Frank Underwood style.
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I think it needs to be qualified what this means. Pull requests to the main codebase need to be approved by steem developers. This is different. What this means is that each of the witnesses would need to deploy this code to their witness servers. I haven't seen all the code, but I imagine there would be required an additional task beyond just deploying the code as well.
Does this mean the undelegation from the other targeted dapps will be restored?
Maybe... I don't know.
What do you think about delegations removed today (musing, dsound, steemitjp...). Any link in your opinion ?
It's so they can move the SP from that account too.
@steem
@steemit
@steemit2
@steemit3
@misterdelegation
The code targets the account where the delegations are being done from... so they ware planning to move it as well when the delegations cool down is over.
Thanks for clarification.
They can do an airdrop or burn them :) That will be great.
Dafuq
confusing matter!
Basic irresponsible. Robber means steemit now.
not ashamed of this
It is as if @ned was trying to do a bad job so he can get out. Like he was begging for someone to fork STEEM.
Yea but he didnt expect us to fork his stake away ;)
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It really is something that causes a lot of distrust and FUD ... I do not know what to think about it.
The code is not running anywhere AFIK. So there is no reason to panic.
Only little more than one million Steem in the market...Who cares?
hmm .. I am not a finance / economics guy so no idea how the market plays out. It looks like Steemit Inc has an trader which uses AI and such to trade.
Wonder if steemit starts running ads if they will reduce the percent they keep of each upvote.. hmmmmmm
Thanks for a easy break down of the information 🐲💗🐉
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One of the best summaries I have read about this whole debacle, along with edicted's article.
It is wise for the steemitinc to protect their accounts @krnel but of course powering down FUDs the community so it is the compromise they have to take.
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