Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.
The backstory and my opinion on looking at Juno Prop 16 through a Steem to Hive hard fork lens.
Have you seen what is currently happening on Juno?
It’s an absolutely wild story that essentially saw a whale game an airdrop that allowed them to end up with a shitload more tokens than everyone else.
In essence, a share of the token’s supply that puts the entire network at risk from a governance perspective.
As a member of the Steem community that eventually moved to Hive after the hard fork required to remain decentralised, this story has captured my imagination.
I take a look at Juno Prop 16 through a Steem to Hive hard fork lens and offer my opinion on the ideal outcome for not only the Juno community, but crypto as a whole.
What happened with the Juno airdop?
So to cut a long story short, the whale basically split their staked ATOM into a ton of wallets just before the airdrop.
While the ‘rules’ were that each person (not wallet) was supposed to only claim once, obviously it was technically doable and games were played.
Due to the airdrop code written in the smart contract, this meant that this particular whale was eligible for a shitload of JUNO and resulted in them receiving what is essentially a huge pre-mine.
Now the community is using an on-chain voting mechanism by other users to steal back tokens worth tens of millions of dollars.
Jesus.
With that in mind, a new proposal has been put forward to essentially draw down the wallet of whoever this whale is, to just 50K JUNO tokens.
50K being the number of tokens that the ’rules’ (yep, again just something written down in text and not in the code) said was an individual’s fair share of the airdrop.
Juno's proposal argues that reversing the decision is more than just in the interest of arbitrary fairness.
But due to the whale being able to gain a large share of the network’s voting power, it's now a matter of network security.
While this seems fair enough on the surface, it poses some serious questions.
The biggest being: If there is a way for people to simply vote away the stake of others, doesn’t that immediately make the token essentially worthless?
Comparison to the Steem to Hive hard fork
This is not a blockchain forking to rewind a hack like we saw with Ethereum and more recently with Steem.
In one of today’s CoinDesk opinion pieces from the website’s Chief Insights Columnist, David Morris compared the saga to Justin Sun’s removal of voting rights from some tokens during his takeover of STEEM.
But that was completely different
These changes are not coming about via a hard fork.
They’re coming about via an on-chain voting mechanism.
The difference is that when a community decides to fork, you aren’t stealing any of the original tokens.
For example, Justin Sun didn’t get any HIVE.
But he still retained all of his STEEM.
There was no theft here because quite frankly you can’t have something that you never owned stolen.
In the case of JUNO however, the community is voting to straight up steal tokens from a wallet just like anyone else's.
So here we have an element of trust required in a supposedly trustless system.
A completely and utter failure.
For me, it’s fun to watch the concept of blockchains involving a social element on top of their technical consensus.
JUNO’s airdrop Sybil attacker played the game within the rules set out by the smart contract.
But not those socially acceptable by the community.
A fascinating concept and a show that those of us here on Hive had a front row seat to watching when the community shifted across from Steem.
Here, we refer to the community as layer-0 because in the end there is a social element that gives tokens value.
You’ve heard the saying that something has value because others believe it has value?
So this means that the community is the most valuable element of any cryptocurrency.
And that’s exactly what we’ve seen play out in the Steem > Hive split with the community moving to Hive.
In the end, value is reflected in the respective token prices over time.
Looking at Juno Prop 16 through a Steem to Hive hard fork lens
By forking and retaining their community layer-0, the Hive blockchain has become extremely secure to such attacks.
By removing the pre-mine and using the rewards pool as the primary mechanism to continue to distribute inflation, HIVE’s token distribution is actually extremely decentralised.
If an attacker was to come and control enough tokens to pose a security risk to the chain, then they would be forced to buy HIVE off the market to do so.
This would push the price of HIVE up massively, thus being extremely expensive to achieve for the attacker.
Ultimately with the risk of the community at layer-0 just forking the chain and starting again without the bad actor’s stake.
THIS is how you achieve security.
For me, it doesn't matter how the JUNO whale got their tokens.
The crux of the matter is that they now have them and the community needs to deal with it the best way they can.
And that should never involve stealing someone’s funds.
As soon as you go down this path, the entire network may as well be a database on someone’s computer and the tokens become essentially worthless.
I would implore the Juno community to be extremely careful of the direction they head and use Hive as a prime example of how to correctly secure their network.
Best of probabilities to you.