FINALLY I am hearing scared people rumor around about a supposedly mixed-hat attack against DPOS blockchains (like BTS, STEEM, EOS & MORE). I find it interesting, but not scary. Not with these people onboard!
The Proof of Work people (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Unobtanium & More) are not giving up yet, and this time some University Fresh-Students eyed DPOS-systems and with a small anonymous donation in their direction I bet that the "other side" are doing what they can in order to get governing power in DPOS in order to change the direction in the main chain.
This can be great learning - No reason to panic
Only if they are successful of course can this be a way to learning and correcting mistakes, if there is any (I think they will fail miserably like everyone else who have tried for the past 8 or so years).
PoW Mining = Good for Power Plants - DPOS = Good for the environment & Much Faster!
The main difference between DPOS and POW, is that POW requires a lot of electric energy to work, so much in fact that it now shows that 3% of the worlds power-consumptions goes to crypto-currency mining, which is stupid, since in the virtual world there is no real mountains to climb or rocks to divide - POW is completely governed by outside factors (Many POW coins have been 51% attacked when profitability has been low, and caused many many coins to be delisted from exchanges and even exchanges going bankrupt because of sloppy security.
While Bitcoin & Ethereum stress to solve blocks, we can focus on expanding features instead of constant maintenance to stay technically alive!.
When people fall in love with their stock, currency, cryptocurrency and hear that a competitor has faster transaction time, SUPER SMART CONTRACTS + More under development, I have often seen what I call Fear of getting REKT (FOGR) and Denial of Reality (DOR), but it is the first time I have seen such dedication from hodlers i en eller annen POW/POS Shitcoin clone being so sure of themselves.
WORST CASE SCENARIOS
The top 19 witnesses are charmed/tricked or threatened to accept a bad fork... Which means that an unknown amount of people would have to physically locate all 19 witnesses to accept the fork, which would be picked quickly up by stakeholders and developers to sound the alarm, re-instate witnesses and roll back the chain to before the mal attempt and most likely we would have a big town hall meeting to breath easy with our fellow steemians.
A Group decides to acquire enough steem-power in order to be able to vote in their own people from witness 1 to 30, these witnesses will have a new fork installed that we cannot do anything about, lest the rest of us acquire more stake to battle - which for both parties will be expensive and probably we would not react fast enough as the "new mal fork" could for example allow for 1 block powerdown or 3 sec powerdown which would give all of the participating malicious players to get back and sell their STEEM in 1 block or 3 seconds and re-fork back to the earlier fork as the malicious "whales" would have no SteemPower but only liquid STEEM to be dumped on exchanges. It could all start and be over in 60 seconds.
Can you think of another one?
POW & POS Networks has been hacked multiple times with a variety of success. DPOS has afaik never successfully been hacked
- Bitcoin once was hacked to pay miners millions of Bitcoins - the mistake was fixed and the chain rolled back for integrity
- Ethereum once made a DAO which ended up splitting the community into Ethereum & Ethereum Classic under the slogan "code is law".
- Multiple low-traffic POW Blockchains has been delisted from exchanges due to double-spend attacks carried out successfully with almost no miners on the network. Even going so far as to "inform the exchanges about new Block Explorers"
- Even Merged Mining coins has been hacked from the get-go to provide a certain address with a never ending supply of coins, which happened in ORGcoin back in 2014 when the developer simply turned off all warning and instead made the network allow intended transaction go through. IE: Instead of a warning about not having enough coins in the wallet to send a trillion coins, it would just send a trillion coins.... and register on the blockchain.
- The list goes on and on and on - Many tokens/blockchains has been released for all the wrong reason, they will eventually be found out if they have not already.
Do I believe STEEM DPOS is in danger?
No.
Why not?
The whales, developers and witnesses/block-producers in STEEM have met each other, love the platform (which is STEEM the Blockchain) and would work together any time to prevent bad things to happen to STEEM. 24/7 there is always some competent people watching over their businesses, and if something does not work the way it should be, you can be dead certain that special phones will be ringing to wake up special people to aid STEEM at a moments notice. STEEM is the blockchain with the greatest fire brigade known to man, no matter the day to day politics - if the main chain is under attack, it will be mutually defended victoriously!
Us Steemians build together the best blockchain with the best people who will continue becoming better and better and better year after year after year... Nobody is quite like us
Hope to see you at SteemFiesta in South America 1-5 December. Check out the @SteemFiesta page more information and surprises! Oh - and also come and visit me on SteemSpeak Discord at: http://SteemSpeak.com (redirects)
Sincerely,
@fyrstikken - Please vote for my witness, @fyrst-witness at: https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses
Thank you :)