As I was reading through this post and read how you agreed with most of the reasons for the softfork but stopped short of agreeing to implement it.. I wonder if you had thought about the principle applied when a person is in a mental health crisis?
When they are a threat to themselves or others, temporarily removing their rights and freedoms in order to protect all until the crisis passes? Now, I'm not suggesting Justin is in any kind of mental health crisis but it seems to me the analogy applies to the chain.
You've identified what could be real threats based on potential intent and decisions made by the largest stakeholder. Maybe that time out on his property rights is needed to avert harm to the community? Time created to work toward a real solution for now and the future.
I didn't add or remove witness votes based on their support of the softfork. While I have concerns about it, I don't consider them strong enough to want to push back on the decision. (even if it is more symbolic than actual push)
The decision by all accounts was arrived at through an unprecedented coming together and collaboration of witnesses and stakeholders. I think that is something to be celebrated and I do commend that.
Having said that, the effort is diminished by the number of top witnesses and stakeholders who chose to drop your witness vote rather than just respecting your right to thoughtfully disagree. It smacks of ganging up and takes away from the good collaborative work that was done.
Not that doing so would make a wit of difference to their standings, but I've given serious consideration to dropping votes on those who participated in the ganging up. That hasn't been removed from my table
The mental health analogy is a good one and there are many parallels to the current situation. Incarcerating criminals is another one.
The use types of decisions are really difficult, and I am not 100% black and white on my views. I look at all the details of the situation that we are in and try to make the best decision given the facts on hand.
Appreciate your words of support. Everyone who has unvoted me has done so with the intention of protecting the chain from a credible threat. I don’t hold any bad feelings against anyone who took their vote away.
let's hope when things start to clear up and calm down.. that you'll see them back.
Many of these vote removals were not done to punish those in disagreement but once again to protect the blockchain from instability by having different versions of nodes producing blocks.
Tim has been informed of, has all our respect and truly deserves his spot in the top 20.
that's good to hear @arcange ... and as you can see I've not hastily gone off unvoting any witnesses. I'm sure that has you breathing a sigh of relief that my little stake wont change your standing LOL
Following your allegory, @shadowspub, it is as if the top 20 witnesses have allowed a potentially dangerous deranged person to ramble around the community for 4 years and then have only chosen to lock them up when the witnesses are being threatened directly.
It has always been my base belief that any stake holder wants this project to succeed. We may not all share what that success looks like. Yet without that belief DPoS is a broken experiment. So let's look for a solution to majority stake which would affect all accounts and not targeted ones.
There was a profound change in the 'deranged person' which shifted him from a mild concern to a grave concern due to a personality change.
While you can see the action being in response to a threat to the witnesses but that is a bit like saying a cop will only lock up a suspect if the cop is being directly threatened. Neither statement is true. The action was taken to secure the chain so it remains in the hands of the community and the governance of our choice.
The pause created by the SF will allow for full communication and learning if both parties are on the same page or not. While I hold concerns about the precedent created by the SF, the stake involved comes with a lot of baggage and promises made about said stake. We don't even know if the seller passed that information on to the buyer or chose to leave the buyer in the dark.
It is the witnesses which are under threat of being redundant. You can try to put your degrees of deranged on things yet this problem should have been dealt with long ago if the overall community were the true concern. It was a weakness built into the creation of the project (Ninja stake) and no one would stand up against it due to self interests. Now that those self interests are at stake we are seeing a knee jerk reaction which violated the trust of the chain.
What will be different on March 6th? Nothing. A majority stake holder can still threaten the chain. This is a stress test to evolve DPoS against such threats and we are failing miserably in my opinion.
you are right it should have been done when it was first coded into HF 14... hindsight is always 20/20. The witnesses gave Ned the benefit of the doubt that he'd keep his promises and the didn't trigger the code.
You're wrong about it being their self-interest or that it has violated the trust of the chain.
The group of witnesses and stakeholders who came together to make the decision was pretty much unprecedented on this chain. They are continuing to work together to come up with solutions to mitigate the issue in the future so this doesn't happen again. Those solutions will likely require a hardfork not a softfork. This was an issue I very clearly asked questions about at the Community Discussion held in The Ramble last Tuesday.
IT was a two hour discussion about the softfork.
March 6th and it's earlier meeting on March 4th will be steps towards building some bridges and understanding. No solutions are promised that day including lifting the SF. It's going to be a process not a one and done event.