I guess I'll give my two Satoshi's on this. Also I won't leave you in suspense, at the end of the day, I support this move. Although it makes me sad that it came to this.
In case you live under a rock and don't know what's going on here's a simplified timeline.
- Ned/Steemit Inc. Ninja mined a huge stake during the birth of the Steem blockchain. To simplify, they gave themselves a huge stake to start off with.
- Ned promised that this stake would not be used for governance or voting and would only be used to further the progress of the Steem blockchain.
- For the most part, but not completely this promise was maintained.
- Fast forward to present day. Ned over the counter sells his stake and Steemit Inc. to Justin Sun of Tron, without telling anyone, apparently not even the staff of Steemit Inc.
- Tron/Justin Sun do a media blast right after the sale saying that the Steem token will be swapped for a Tron Steem like token, and all Steem dapps will be moved to Tron.
- REEEEEEEEEEEE
- In an AMA Justin walks back these comments, but with the now infamous "For now..." attached.
- Community and Witnesses talk openly about ways to prevent a worse case scenario.
- Tron continues to put out misleading(?) marketing content AND Justin Sun uses his huge Tron stake to do the very thing we'd fear him doing on Steem, he influences governance.
- A super majority of Witnesses execute a soft fork that freezes all of Steemit Inc's stake that was promised not to be used for governance.
There, so you should be all caught up, but more than likely, you already knew all that.
So, while shitty, I do think this was the right move on behalf of our witnesses. I don't think it matters as much that Justin Sun made no aggressive moves towards Steem, and that all the language coming DIRECTLY from him was pleasant. The threat he represented was existential. I know some people would say, in the worst case scenario we would just hard fork and do our own thing. I have no doubt people would try, but I think realistically if that worst case scenario played out, that would be the end of Steem.
That's not a risk I'm willing to take.
In my eyes, it's not so much WOULD he move forward with a worse case scenario. I think that there is a very good case to be made(I made it myself) that that makes NO SENSE. Why would you spend millions on something just to torpedo it? I get that, I said that, BUT when weighing the stakes, I see on the far end of the negative end of this scale, the total destruction of the Steem blockchain. It's not a matter of whether or not he would, it's the very fact that he COULD.
So now we've crossed a line that can't be uncrossed and we'll have to live with the consequences. Now we've exposed an existential threat to the INDIVIDUAL.
Now we've exposed the fact that regardless of the justification, a small group of people can decide to freeze your property on Steem. We've exposed the reality that we value the whole more than the individual.
Justin Sun didn't ninja mine that stake, he bought it, it's his. Let's not kid ourselves with what just happened. We took what was his and said "Slow down there sunny boy, why don't you tell us your plans before we LET you have access to this property that you just bought"
It's all in all just a bad situation. I know some want to say, it's all Neds fault, he's a scammer, it's all the witnesses fault, they should have done this before, this threat isn't new. It's all the communities fault, we should have voted better witnesses, whatever, I'm not really into pointing fingers. I think it's more useful to look at the current situation and figure out what's the best path forward based on where we are.
To me that looks something like this.
- Some sort of resolution with Justin Sun where his property and CONTROL of his property is returned to him.
- A systemic and codified agreement on not only what will be done with his stake, but protections over systemic threats in the future.
What if some random billionaire bought that much stake off the market and publicly stated that he was going to destroy Steem. What would we do then? I think we need to start brainstorming solutions to this sort of threat in the future. Like an extended powerdown time based on stake or something like that. - Along with that a codified solution for the individual needs to also be implemented. Without this change as well, this will always be a shadow hanging over Steem. Some have said that this would NEVER have been done if it wasn't the ninja mined stake, but if I'm remaining ideologically consistent, it doesn't matter if we think people or future witnesses WOULD do this to some random community member, it's the fact that they CAN.
So those are my thoughts on the current situation. I was hoping that everything would get resolved without much bloodshed, but here, we are, we've gotta deal with it now. Let's hope things get de-escalated from here.