RE: Meeting between Justin Sun, Korean Stakeholders, Steem Witnesses and Steem Foundation 12/03/2020
What a waste. He doesn't comprehend - or pretends to not understand - that the chain cannot be changed without consensus from the witnesses at large and so therefor no guarantees can be made.
I can't see this going well at all. He wants all these concessions but gives absolutely none in return. He wants downvoting gone, powerdowns to be in line with Tron, his stake to be given full rights with no guarantee that he won't use them to centralize the chain unless the witnesses can guarantee what they cannot. It's a poison pill.
I wish I had an answer or a horde of cash to unlock this stalemate.
For what it's worth, Justin is the one making the demands and he's asking big, making the witnesses come to him with concessions.
Witnesses / the community should reverse this tactic and make the big asks (demands) or the chain forks by a certain date, even if it's a year from now. We should put forth everything we want out of this and make him come up to our level. If we keep at this game, either an eternal stalemate or a gradual capitulation of the community will occur.
We should be pushing for what we want, not asking how we can get him to let up. We might as well be crying uncle.
Reminds me of my relationship with my daughter's mom. MGTOW is the only solution I've found, and it kind of destroys the current relationship with daughter, but allows her emotional freedom from conflict, and opportunities for more wealth / security when she's older.
Be Tron's Bitch, or Fork it.
If Fork -- then, prepare to suffer for a few years, but ultimately hope for a more resilient chain and community.
Long term conflict and stalemates just drain energy.
Justin had the right idea -- in a detached from consequence / strategic analysis sense.
Go for a coup.
If you can't coup, then you enter war of attrition, which drains emotional and financial resources from all parties.
It's the old baby and bathwater routine, mixed in with a toxic power dynamic.
Seems like the best thing to do might be to not act -- HODL and continue onward, and wear out his patience.
That makes no sense. Justin is not asking people who might one day become consensus witnesses to announce that they won't freeze his stake, he is asking the current consensus witnesses to promise not to do it.
Saying that they must give a vague answer about decentralization is bullshit. These individuals cannot promise others will not produce blocks for a soft fork that freezes his assets, but they absolutely can promise to not do it themselves. And they most certainly can announce that they would refrain from adopting a soft fork that froze his stake.
I'm not saying I'm on Justin Sun's side here, I'm just saying I'm calling out the bullshit answers.
I'm sorry, but that's untenable promise and I think that's exactly what he's asking. he wants to ensure that he can do whatever he wants, and while I believe he should have his stake, he needs to make promises to the community that he won't use it in certain ways, namely to take almost total control.
The top witnesses may be able to "promise", but like you said, that doesn't mean the rest of the community will allow it. I would for one remove my vote if the power down was reduced too much. The exchanges deserve the bed they've made and reducing the power down time too much puts the entire network at risk. That's the witnesses point when they say they can't really promise that now or ever. They can promise to try. That's really it.
I would also remove my vote if they took away the free downvotes. I was wrong to oppose them in the beginning, and have seen their use better the network overall so far.
My larger point here is that Justin is making the demands, when it should be the other way around. I've done some investigating on Tron and it's filled with junk apps overall. Nothing but gambling apps and Sun controls something like %40 of the network. There's no reason to really believe it would be any different here. With Sun being able to move exchange stake in and out rapidly, I have a feeling the same kind of apps would spring up on Steem and ruin it.
EDIT: Also, I believe that the witnesses have said they would unfreeze it so long as they could come to an agreement about what he would do with it, which he refuses to do. So...
We're on the same side, I agree with a lot you said, except for the free downvotes, I'm with the Korean community on that.
Still, I really believe the best move here is peace. We should never freeze people's stake, freezing stake by 17 consensus witnesses will result in Steem losing all respect by the rest of the crypto industry. There is absolutely nothing fucking decentralized about 17 people deciding to freeze someone's assets.
We might as well let the current witnesses state that they themselves will not accept a fork that freezes his assets. He is fine with a soft fork that takes away his voting rights! That is a big concession. We will not get that without giving something else in return.
Its time the children stop being allowed to make decisions for this chain. Business involves compromise, and we need to give a little in order to get anything. Having the current consensus witnesses announce that they won't freeze the Steemit stake is a reasonable compromise.
It can be an "if" statement involving a prerequisite, but the consensus witnesses should give him that.
Everybody needs to understand how this will go. His stake is non-negotiable. Sue Ned if you want, but he feels he cannot just reverse his deal with Ned, which means he is stuck dealing with the Steem community. He will not simply give up his stake as a dev fund. That's not in the cards.
Also, Ethereum Classic is not a fraction of Ethereum, and Steem does not have a fraction of the pull with the top exchanges that Justin does. We can get seriously screwed here. I'm talking next to no liquidity... Will you care about a crypto platform with no liquidity?
Even if you say you will, I sincerely doubt you actually will.
Agreed! "We should never freeze people's stake, freezing stake by 17 consensus witnesses will result in Steem losing all respect by the rest of the crypto industry. There is absolutely nothing fucking decentralized about 17 people deciding to freeze someone's assets." 👍
No, I care about liquidity, but I do think it's okay to banish an exchange that acts irresponsibly or one the presents a serious conflict of interest, especially Poloniex, considering Sun owns a stake in it. That exchange, plus his stake is far too much power. I can accept a little LESS liquidity if it means taking exchanges out of the staking equation. We already have other exchanges hopping on board.
I agree his Steem should be unfrozen and that we have to contend with the faults of dPOS and I can safely say that as much as the witnesses jumped the gun, Sun has blasted trust out the window by using the exchanges to vote himself into power, which is what I think he would have done to begin with. He's demonstrated that he is far less trustworthy than he proclaims. He claims to want to protect the "sanctity of private property" but is more than willing to violate EVERYONE'S if it means getting what he wants. He claims to not want to be involved in governance, but won't remove a single sock puppet.
I'll believe he's willing to give up voting rights the minute he relents on some of his sock puppets. The witnesses have already said they'd unfreeze his stake, so we need to see him act in good faith to let the witnesses govern. They've been voted in and we need to see it through with them at the helm for now.
Doubt it, most of the crypto industry seems to be behind us atm. Plus in the early days of steem we were the laughing stock of the crypto industry BECAUSE of the existance of the ninja mined stake. You can find any nunber of articles calling Ned a scammer back in 2016 and 17.
if you are ok with no downvotes you are ok with this account https://steempeak.com/@indicate just scroll a bit and look at the comments.
I have absolutely no problem with self-voting and you really should not either. Do the math and you'll realize why I say that. Ultimately Steem was designed to reward in SBD not STEEM in a healthy economy, and SBD rewards is greatly related to supply/demand of STEEM.
Buying a bunch of STEEM to stake for self-voting may be "selfish" but it is still demand that shrinks the overall supply. It would take over a decade for someone to self-vote themselves an equal amount of STEEM than they had to buy to self-vote. That means these selfish voters are paying us all in advance for the privilege.
However, the solution to self-vote "abuse" if one decides to call it that never was downvotes. The best and most effective tool for this "abuse" was the payout threshold put in HF22. The payout threshold did a lot against self-votes. Now it really required the community's collective stake to reward at a good rate, since self-voting rarely got past the payout threshold and would be cut in half.
Don't believe me? I know, I sound like a terrible heretic saying this, but the argument that all that self-voting is bad for Steem because it reduces the quality of content is wrong when you look at the numbers. Since HF22 is Steem more popular online? Nope, its less popular. Because what really draws crowds to Steem is that SBD $$$ number looking big next to everybody's posts.
Like it or not, people staking to self-vote actually increase that number and that can lead to talented content producers coming to Steem to get some of those big SBD $$$ numbers. The self-voters and the bid bots were blamed for Steem's lack of progress, but that's all bullshit. The reason Steem never went anywhere was that nobody worked hard enough at promoting Steem.
100%
but you are going on this from a point that he is losing his stake by self voting. because if he bought steem 6 months ago, self voted full for 6 months and sold yesterday he would have money invested + money from self voting. can't currently load his page to see who much he invested and how much he extracted from rewards.
His initial "investment" would be less worth only if shit like today happen, or everything crashes, or we all start to bot autovote ourselves. As long there is small % of people doing it, they profit and we are the fools for letting them do it. And yes i do agree that HF22 was a good thing to make it less effective. But again, all he has to do is set up bots and set autovote.
could be that self voting is even less effective in the healthy economy. I was getting almost nothing when SBD was really active, and we are in no SBD theritory for a long time, so i can admit i never did a real research of how all that would work.