Be careful about pledging anything. Sun is trying to get presumably binding concessions in writing without having to do anything himself. Gradually chipping away the witnesses negotiation tools.
Also if the powerdown is only a week or even 4 weeks and an account should be compromised by a hacker-it would seem that freezing accounts should still be on the table to protect private property. Instead of a week before the account starts being drained by an attacker, it can be drained in as little as 12-48 hours.
You need to lock down his stake. Otherwise he'll come in and powerup again and do what he wants when he wants-including destroying the steem chain when he sees fit. Work to Substitute his steem stake with SMTs that are coded do the same thing as steem-except vote, and burn the ninja mined coins. It'll be Sun's job to find a market for his SMTs.
Freezing accounts is an inherent limitation of blockchains. It's nothing more than not processing transactions from specific accounts. While block producers can state commitments to not intentionally do so, the nature of the blockchain leaves that the only possible way accounts might be secured from freezing.
An almost unlimited array of faults might prevent transactions from being processed unintentionally. Since that's all freezing an account actually is - not processing it's transactions - there is no way to make blockchains inherently unable to freeze accounts.
The debate regarding freezing has not revealed that Sun understands this, and he may not grasp that witnesses are restrained by the nature of block production in their agreements to his wishes.
In the discussion of powerdown time, hackers are delivered more power to steal the shorter the powerdown is. Sun has just hacked the whole chain itself, and it is reasonable to conclude it is to his benefit to make hacking as profitable as possible, and his insistence on almost immediate powerdowns supports this, sadly cynical, conclusion.
While both these issues are very important, in fact the 30x weighting of stake the present witness voting mechanism creates has demonstrably centralized governance of Steem since witnesses were implemented. The issue has been vehemently prevented from being resolved for years with highly coordinated responses from the cabal benefiting from it, and remarkable manipulation of community perceptions to prevent understanding how it centralizes governance.
That reveals it's existential import to the Steem community, particularly now, after it has been used to seize control of consensus by one stakeholder with ~1/5 - 1/3 of extant Steem. It is easy to understand how 30x weighting of that stake enables complete control of governance. What is disappointing is that the legacy consensus witnesses that have heretofore benefited from oligarchical power over governance remain unwilling to fix this flaw in DPoS that threatens to completely centralize Steem today.
I have little hope that the choice between an upstart overlord and the legacy oligarchy will enable Steem to actually gain greater decentralization of governance.
Thanks!
Awesome viewpoint. It's good to see that there are down to earth people who are aware of the interest on our planet.
What is the interest so far?
So far the interest is control and less people are easier to... control and time is short so a good question might be: