I know you’ve been here since the early days. A committed Steemian. I respect your decision but I would suggest not to leave yet. We are only 11mil SP short from sneaking back our previous top witness back in the top 20. All it takes is a final massive effort and spread the word so that every single user casts their witness votes or proxy them
thanks for your message, I have to say you have been one of the steemians I've enjoyed reading the most lately, thanks to your positive energy and determination.
However, my decision is final. The reason I originally came to Steem was because I wanted to help build a decentralized social network, not just another social network, even one that paid its users. The beauty of it was the symbiosis between the nerdy types that build complicated stuff (like me!) and all the cool people that thrive on social networks.
Now, the dev team is gone (or at least vanderberg, but he was the architect of steem after dan left) and even if (and that's not even a given) the community manages to get their witnesses in control again, the chain is still vulnerable to a takeover as has just happened (let's not kid ourselves, cz knew perfectly well what he was doing and he would do it again provided justin pays him enough, which we know he has the pockets for).
As far as I can see, DPoS as implemented in Steem is flawed in that respect, and I don't see an easy fix. It might be that a modified version of DPoS could do (doubt it) or that one with a different initial distribution could do (doubt it as well, if you're that dependent on initial conditions then you're not resilient/anti-fragile), it might be that another consensus algorithm might be more appropriate at the cost of performance/latency, it might be that what we want still hasn't been invented. I think there is a lot to learn from what happened, and I'll be reading and watching from the sidelines how this world evolves, until I find again a project that teases my brain and my ideals the same way that Steem did when it was created.
Cheers!
Even tho I didn't have the chance to interact with you as much as I wanted to, seeing all these positive comments regarding your contribution around here I know you'll be missed a lot.
blushing...
Thanks for everything.