Why Did We Choose This Path?

in #steem4 years ago

Our chain was dying but the tech and social aspects had potential. A top crypto figure with a lot of pull comes in and invests big. We break our own DPOS rules to pre emptively fuck him in the ass because of some shit ned may or may not have promised. The guy we fucked over didn't even know what hit him and had to resort to calling in big favors to defend his own stake. Now he wants out. In this process we piss him off, lose most of the devs, break our own dpos rules, piss off 3 big exchanges, lose the domain name, add about 70-100m of selling pressure and most of the stakeholders seem to be patting themselves on the back.

Even before all of this, left to our own devices we were trading at a solid 12-15c.

Sigh, you couldn't make this shit up.

Now I must be completely fucking mental because I feel most of the community and existing stakeholders sort of went out of their own way to fuck ourselves. Why did it play out this way?

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We break our own DPOS rules to pre emptively fuck him in the ass because of some shit ned may or may not have promised.

Incorrect. The code to freeze Steemit, Inc's accounts' voting rights was in place but it simply wasn't activated, yet.

Also, the first thing Justin Sun did after he had purchased Steemit, Inc was to announce publicly that he was going to dismantle the blockchain.

Now I must be completely fucking mental because I feel most of the community and existing stakeholders sort of went out of their own way to fuck ourselves. Why did it play out this way?

Because with a single point of failure in charge of everything, there is no point of being a blockchain. There is no censorship resistance and thus no selling point. For scaling reasons, Steemit, Inc could just as well have moved the back end over to a centralized database.

The issue was not voting rights, they prevented powering down and cashing out.

Of course, they did. Otherwise they simply could've powered down and used other accounts for voting.

Saying someone "could've" done something is meaningless considering there was no action or even a signal of intent. Suspicion of others does not justify attacking them.

The very first thing Justin Sun did after he acquired Steemit, Inc was to tell the entire world that he was going to destroy the Steem blockchain. There would be a one-way token swap from STEEM to a TRC10 token on Tron and that the entire ecosystem would be moved over to Tron. After that he backpedaled saying that, the chain would be left to exist independently - for now.

Those are hyperbolic exaggerations. The only relevant point is he did not initiate a power down or signal intent to affect STEEM governance. In fact he has stated the opposite, that he has no desire to be involved in the politics of governance on STEEM.

Those are hyperbolic exaggerations.

Absolutely not. Do you really not remember what the Tron foundation announced to the world on the 14th of February?

https://www.coindesk.com/steemit-sets-up-shop-on-tron-network

The only relevant point is he did not initiate a power down or signal intent to affect STEEM governance.

How would initiating power down signal interesting in taking part in governance? How would that have been a demonstration of aggressive intent? Yes, he said that he wasn't going to get involved in Steem governance but that was just BS. How would you be able to dismantle the chain except by taking control of it and implementing whatever hard fork you see fit?

In fact he has stated the opposite, that he has no desire to be involved in the politics of governance on STEEM.

The context of that was after having being met with fierce resistance in the middle of a battle over governance on Steem.

Justin Sun thought he had bought the commmunity when he acquired Steemit, Inc and that it was his to move over to Tron. Turns out this acquisition was different from any of his prior acquisitions. You can't buy people.

Good post

Under your leadership, Steemit/Tron would of had all the time in the world to subvert this chain while hiding in the shadows. The soft fork was a great way to see if he was hostile. Not only did he turn out to be hostile, this is the most flagrant attack on decentralization, maybe ever. Good thing the people in charge here know when to take action rather than pussyfoot around. Youre dreaming if you think this known scammer was ever going to help us at thus point.

How steem blockchain community and witnesses ensure this will not happened again in future please share if you have any idea about this?

They'll need to fix the major flaws in the governance system so a single large stakeholder can't take over. Either by limiting the number of witnesses any one account can vote for or making it so MVESTS are distributed evenly between all your witness votes.

The soft fork was a great way to see if he was hostile. Not only did he turn out to be hostile

Bs, you can not hit somebody and when he hit you back say oh he hit me back so he planned to hit me before i hit him.

great causality chain lol

I think the witnesses got complacent and didn't fully understand the influence Justin Sun holds - as you correctly point out, he's a top crypto figure. I had been warning everyone since the announcement that he owns Poloniex and is in bed with Binance. A lot of Steemians will retroactively argue that, "See! This is why they did it!", but that makes no sense. I don't believe much of what Justin Sun says, but I do believe him when he says he has no interest in governance and only did this to defend his assets.

Witnesses will also argue that it was a defensive move, but censoring millions of dollars worth of fairly purchased assets is as aggressive as it gets, temporary or not.

In the end, what should have really happened is a diplomatic agreement between the witnesses, stakeholders and Justin Sun. Instead, the witnesses fired shots first, and now we have war.

To be clear, Justin Sun's ( and exchanges') methods have been absoutely despicable, but the dude probably spent a couple dozen million, you can totally see why he would fight tooth and nail to get it back.

The best case scenario right now is to release Justin's 75 million with an emergency hard fork with a fast power down, he will have no reason to bother with Steem after that. The price is going to be suppressed in the medium term, but it'll finally lift the shadow over the ninja-mine long term.

All attempts to talk about it before the soft fork were ignored. The PR machine talking about how the "blockchain & token" would shift to Tron marched on.
February 17th:

I know it's difficult to have the full context of the soft fork but it was necessary. Justin Sun bought Steemit Inc, not Steem.

Thats a dishonest take of events. You pick and choose what you want out of the timeline and ignore the rest.

I don't believe much of what Justin Sun says, but I do believe him when he says he has no interest in governance and only did this to defend his assets.

Has no one considered that he simply wants to appropriate steem, a blockchain that is notoriously controllable with the ninja mined stakes, and I'm not just talking about neds. Because basically, 90% of the core development work has been done and we're now at a point where with the right focused marketing and contacts steem could be used to onboard huge amounts of people from various mainstream markets/medias.

I think Justin Sun is lying his ass off about everything, creating smoke and mirrors about governance etc when what he wants is to decimate any governance and take full control of a blockchain he can then pump millions into marketing as his product. Essentially hijacking the last 3 years of dev work that has got steem to the point where online subject specific communities can be created, and we're months away from SMT's being potentially launched. This opinion I see spouted that he doesn't understand steem is crazy. He could pay people $1000/hour to explain all the weaknesses and nuances of steem if he wanted, and probably has done already.

He is a master manipulator and knows how to act like an ignorant, arrogant social media dictator, when I think that half of it is bluff and bluster. There is no better way to win a war than to lull your enemy into a false sense of security of inflated expectation of strength. I'm pretty sure that don't give a fuck attitude he has on social media is real, but that doesn't mean the guy isn't a master strategist.

We'd all be well advised to assume the worst in his intentions and the levels he is misrepresenting both his blockchain knowledge, and ability to divide and conquer. If you go into every meeting, or interaction with that assumption, then the little psychological tells will become obvious and counter strategies easier to formulate.

Just my opinion but I think the fact he's pumping money into buying steem to try his best to insure his hostile take over has nothing to do with ego and just wanting to win! It is because he wants steem's technology, a technology that would take Tron foundation many years and millions/billions to develop themselves!

If they can win this takeover and hardfork with the contacts he has on the exchanges, he won't give a shit that all us die hard steemians stay with the forked non-tron chain, because he'll find a way to weasel his forked steem as the main recognized version on the major exchanges.

In this scenario we'll be fucked as well as forked... that's my analysis of what he's up to.

We reached out. Only got more PR filled with indications of deprecating the Steem chain and somehow moving everything over to Tron. Hindsight is 20/20 only if you're looking at everything.

So things go a bit nuts and will remain that way for a few more days if not weeks to come.

I have always loved the idea of steem being the start of web3, a decentralized place where creators and curators had ownerships. Both forks have shown me that a truly decentralised web is a long way off and the content creator will continue to get screwed from a long time to come.

I am not sure most of the community was happy with what the witnesses did. There were plenty of post and comments about how they felt it was the wrong thing to do and that it was a knee jerk reaction.

The back lash from Sun/Tron was what has pulled a lot of the community in to try and retake, that which we were told could not happen, back from a single entity. I was not the only one that mentioned the possibility, other did also, we were told it could not happen, it happened.

The social side the small stake holders liked the social side of steem block chain; The investors all they saw was dollar signs in their eye balls like Scrooge McDuck, and the witness saw the potential loss of their control, everyone had their hopes and fears, the social side of more people on steem block chain, the investors lots of money because of one man's name, and the witness, the fear that they could be replaced at a whim.

Now things are slightly different. The social users see steem block chain as being potentially sold off and transitioning to a centralized authority telling them who they can talk to and what they can talk about, the investors see the dollar signs turning from golden glow to blood shedding red as their token of choice is slowly devoured, and the witness while maybe staving off a disaster have lost the respect of many long term steemians and may never regain the trust they lost.

Now I must be completely fucking mental because I feel most of the community and existing stakeholders sort of went out of their own way to fuck ourselves. Why did it play out this way?

My view on the happening.

Plenty of people disagreed with how it was handled they just didn't get an opportunity to express a point of view.

then we moved straight to... "What's done is done".

It's a very interesting situation.

Congratulations

I take my hat and salute you soldier because it seems just a few of us see things this way, but as we say in my country "tienes la boca llena de razon" ...your mouth is full of truth, what steem witnesses did was terrorism before trying to talk the guy, what JUSTIN AND THE EXCHANGES DID WAS EXTREMELY WRONG TOO and it doenst matter wrong is wrong either if its a big or small fkd up, but the guy try to protect his investment as any other normal human would he pull a few favors and got all the SP he needed, steem witnesses broke their own rules and now we have to vote for them so we can have some what or sort of decentralization because its true that with Justin controlling all 20 top witnesses there is no decentralization but at least with the old top 20 witnesses we are in some what decentralization territory, its a ton of bullshit from both sides but this butt hurt withnessess try to lock Justin up before he even did any moves with the power he bought thats pure terrorism right there, taking hostage someone just because they fear of what may happen even if its good or not just because they guy had that much power

It's a shitstorm for sure. I wish people would just talk before taking drastic action. Maybe we can get something out of this in the end, but I hope lessons have been learnt. The Steem technology is okay, but people fuck things up. But then it's people I really care about and we built some cool communities that I'd hate to lose.

piss off 3 big exchanges

Oh come on... They used their users coins to governance this blockchain but we are to blame for pissing them off?

Just check what tron is. It's empty, no users, only shitty gambling apps that no one uses. Sun has the money, that's true, but he's not interested in running decentralized blockchain, it's just a buzzword for him. Do you really need to have an owner so much?

Also, once he aquired bittorent, devs from it also all quit. Was it our fault too?

Just do some research about Sun, he's not a type of guy that works with others to build something valuable. It's all about his image of this millionaire-kid and how awesome and rich he is. Also obviously he wants more $$$ and in his mind he can do this only by fully controlling his projects.

To be fair - I can totally understand Justins motivation from his perspective - defending the assets that he legally(!) bought. But it's like he's not compatible with the idea of decentralization.

edit: edited the comment slightly, sorry I was was rude <3 I know that you just want all the best for STEEM.

But it's like he's not compatible with the idea of decentralization.

If that's true then it seems to me that the issues should land squarely on Ned's shoulders. He sold out to someone who doesn't give a fcuk about this place or the foundational ethics which says all you you to know about Ned.

And thanks for the assessment of the Tron blockchain. You're saying it's basically nothing.

Yeah I made an account at Tron to check it out.
Can't say I found anything I liked about it. Gambling , porn, bots and ton of hype of Justin patting himself on the rump, telling everyone how awesome he thinks he is.

Thanks for checking it out so I don't have to:)

I'm so sorry. Hope you recover from it.

I don't think enough time was given to establish communications before pulling off the softfork. Which ultimately was seen as an aggressive act. (Because it was.)

From there it all went a bit mental.

When you put it that way... It's just one narrative you can go with. You can also go and say, hey we did kinda fucked ourselves, but we also went more decentralized route and proved the world it can be done, which can bring more eyes and people might realize that we are kinda cool. Time will tell.

Wake up. Steem is done.

What is done? If you think about the price of Steem it was done few years ago. Community is still here, when community goes then it's game over, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Price for sure, but may I ask you who will pay the cost of servers, developers and marketing?

Which devs? What marketing? Who pays anyx.io, minnowssupport, pivex and other public nodes? Who pays steempeak, busy esteem and other frontends?

You're absolutely right that steem desperately needs an vaiable economic model (ads, financial services, gaming?) but it can't be a single person that can pull the plug at any moment.

Who will replace steemit inc.? There were 7 people.

Do you think they quit because of the soft fork? Is this why they also voted for the old witnesses yesterday?

Nobody in tech is irreplaceable

Marketing is clearly not in the stars for us, there are a lot of coders here that are quite capable, cost of servers is not a problem.

All three maters are a big problem. We'll see who's right.

Sigh.
My ideal outcome is that the Tron team figures out what’s going on and stays locked in with understanding Steem. Sun obviously had interest in Steem when he purchased Steemit. Sure the welcome was rather rough with that soft fork, but perhaps he has thicker skin than we think.

There just needs to be better communication all around.

I’ve read and listened more than I talk about this takeover commotion. However, I think if Ned had only consulted the selling with Steemit inc to his staff and witnesses more likely none of these commotions would’ve happened.

I don’t think we can blame the witnesses for freezing his account, and him enlisting support retrieving it. Both sides need to have discussions that they can both agree and/or find some common or mutual agreement that’ll benefit everyone.

I 100% agree that this purchase definitely turned out the worst way possible.
However, we can not give this fault to the community.

From the beginning he was spreading hostile statements (Swapping STEEM for some Tron token and taking all dApps to Tron) even after making contrary statements shortly before.

During all this time, not being open at all to communicate openly with our community to find out what he is up to.

Thus, either he is strongly incompetent or actually hostile.

As a defensive measure witnesses froze the stake to avoid having him vote in witnesses (although I do agree that I would've supported only excluding him from voting witnesses).

Finally, he completely took this to the next level and used exchange funds to vote in centralized witnesses (which could easily result in the death of Steem) just to secure his funds (which were only frozen, never removed).

So, he put himself in this predicament.

In my opinion the best we can get out of this is true decentralization either by having him out of the game and financing development for the ex-steemit employees through the SPS or by opening a new chain after he took over with the exchanges another time to impose his immediate powerdown schedule.

I feel it is highly irresponsible of you to not vote any of the witnesses that are fighting for days trying to protect this chain from the takeover.

Excellent.
Finally, someone said it aloud.

As well intentioned as the Soft fork may have been, it was seen as an act of aggression, and as they say, "a person's perception is their reality".

As a result, we saw a fairly heavy handed retaliatory act. Presumably the pseudo-witnesses had time to rollback the Soft fork and unlock Sun's invested funds, so now we wait and see what happens as the witnesses start to resume their previous positions.

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@trafalgar, I don't know what is right or wrong but one thing i can feel and that is, Steem Community is moving ahead more strongly than ever. Let's hope for the best and stay blessed.

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That's the biggest question I have for the folks wishing to maintain their control of the chain because that precisely what this is about.

Are they willing to invest money, Steem has been a shitshow for content creators, its just witnesses and devs who earn anything from here for the last couple months. This kind of relationship could not go on forever, something had to break. They should have allowed Justin the opportunity to get things moving again

Ned could have sold to the wirnessess who could have somehow found financing.

The witnesses are all broke, along with some of the developers, they all depend on community who buy the Steem tokens and rise of Bitcoin to keep milking the system.

The real power struggle here, is that some of them would be losing that power, that's what a lot of this is about. Someone finally putting money behind Steem and they are pushing him away

Like all things capitalism (which isn't an endorsement of communism) it's incredible good for a few...reasonably good for about 20% (Pareto)...and pretty well sucks for about 80%...
But Jay Dyer is 100% sure he knows what GOD is so everything's okay:P

This is powerful thought here, we can have a lengthy thread of this but we likely trigger the capitalist vs communist and in today's age, this can get very interesting lol

As someone who was influential/all over the EIP proposal to allow larger stakeholders to sit back and upvote for curation ROI, to what extent were you involved in the process to combat this outcome? I saw no post or comments, so I presume that engagement was on Slack or Discord? If none, your views and influence would've been greatly appreciated over the last couple of weeks.

Now imagine this:

Our witnesses didn’t take any action, and he executed his brilliant plan. Token swap...would you want that? Because he would. I guess you wouldn’t have a choice...Just like that all of your 1mill+SP would be gone...

Now you do have one. Why on earth would you trade your 1 mill+ SP for tons of worthless TRX? I mean you are free to do so but I highly doubt you will...

As soon as he understood that he shouldn’t have tweeted all this shit (his plan so to speak) and started giving empty promises, it was already too late. He was exposed.

The good thing is we exposed what those 3 exchanges really are too. A bunch of opportunists and gold diggers...

A gang...

@traf,
I agree & disagree! @justinsunsteemit has/had no idea what STEEMIT. He played his game and we are too. I like this decentralization & I hate exchanges who are abusing our funds to control blockchains. That was a very damn thing by abusing customer funds. (A type of fraud)
@justinsunsteemit still have a chance to build this chain, if not something will happen, sometimes it can be a good thing for all of us! So, I wish you might help the community witnesses at this point. Because you are one of largest stakeholder of STEEM chain and I wish you might get the right decision as always!
$trdo

Cheers~

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We break our own DPOS rules

We did nothing of the sort. This is a republic. Our elected representatives came to a consensus (that’s what witnesses DO) after trying to communicate with an unresponsive Sun.

I would argue about your term elected. Basically two big accounts elect them to their positions. Not sure about republic.

Did you manage to swap your token to TRX already? as was announced on first day of purchasing STINC.

They said if you don't your token on STEEM chain will be rendered worthless.

Given the leverage the STINC website has and the quality of the team, I think it was worth easily 15m$.
Tokens came with string attached and you've been here long enough to know that.

I think everyone freaked out because it seemed like the blockchain was just going to be migrated over to Tron and become some sort of centralized dapp.

"top crypto figure"
c'mon... I really don't care who it is, I'm not going to let someone come in and buy out the top witness positions so they can do what they want with the chain.

"Even before all of this, left to our own devices we were trading at a solid 12-15c."
the price of a highly inflationary currency like STEEM is not relevent. Especially with the mass sell-offs from Steemit Inc. in the past. Lots of promising projects were breaking ground despite the price, the price is a bad way to judge what was happening on the chain.

and yes, @ned had no right to sell Steemit's stake as his own personal cash

You are aware of the 100M ninjamined steem that will likely enter the market at some point. That's probably not avoidable anymore if he wants out and we don't just fork out his stake. It will drop steem below 1 cent, thats for sure. You are not a poor guy and can profit from that. Once his steem is in the hands of others, we can start new, no legacy issues left... time to moon.

That only takes one thing... More time than we want it to take.

hello dear, how are u ?

What is your goal even here? You want him to exert absolute power? You want him to let his exchange buddies get out in 24 hours after what they did?
You want him to EXIT and dump all the Steem tokens from Steemit.inc?

I really dont get it..

Our end game is to lift up the chain and get the best out of all this. Your end game seems to be to get it all burned to the ground just so you can make a statement over the SF.

@trafalgar Thnks for supports Boss :)

Please help me. Check out my post. And please support me.

My post link

Unfortunately none of this surprises me, these actions are truly delusional. They'll be lucky to escape prison.

Cg

Something that might put a smile on your face, in the midst of a crisis ...

Steem wars part 1..The Empire has a hissy fit.
https://steemit.com/hive-100421/@lucylin/nxkuvibq

You're not making sense.

Justin Sun: We don't want to vote.

Witnesses writes code that prevents them from voting

Justin Sun: NO! We are voting in our witnesses because we don't want to vote!

Ah but the code they wrote in the softfork prevented them from withdrawing or using that steem also. The steem was essentially useless and the exit from that was never entirely clear. If it solely removed voting rights then who knows.

This isn't exactly what happened.

The way I see it, if we didn't lock his stake, he wouldn't have had to try and reclaim it.

He did what anyone would do if they felt threatened and had one shot.

What? Lol. He wants out?
Just stepping in for the morning. Lol

Maybe we'll become best friends after having a big fight!

No, he's not interested in creating any value by working with others. His tweets and last steemitblog posts are so full of lies and tron shilling that it feels like watching North Korea news. Maybe he's just not used to run a project that's actually used by people.

From the looks of it - you're right. But from the bright side - all that happened has united the community even more. And top 10 witnesses are back!

He wanted control over the network. He doesn't want it if it's decentralized.

A Blockchain Soap Opera :)

i never really understand wtf is going on around here. some day someone will have to write the definitive book on this history of steem. it will probably sell 137 copies (sigh). ty

i had no idea what he bought. and he thought he bought everything, so did not care to make few calls. If the meeting happened few days after he bought non of this would happen. I we are to believe that he does not want to rule it is easy. he makes a signed contract of planned development and use of his stake, and we continue.

Kindergarten

I partly agree and expressed similar thoughts in a comment under my last post.

And thanks a lot for your efforts in the slack!

I cant honestly believe youre supporting someone colluding with exchanges to subvert the governance of our chain and that now wants to exert complete control over Steem.

Im extremely dissapointed.

He tried to take over in a unfair way.Why are you not considering that?He has no respect to our community.He attacked us,not we attacked him.

Removed. It's good to have a discussion.

Congratulations @trafalgar!
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