The title of this article may have surprised you. Steem is a blockchain! Nobody “owns” it, and therefore nobody can ever buy it!
To a degree, you would be correct. However, in a sense, someone does control the blockchain: the witnesses. Steem is secure as long as at least half of the top 20 witnesses are honest, and the witnesses are voted for by people like me and you: users of the Steem blockchain.
So, here’s the basis of how someone could take control of Steem: if any one party controlled 11 of the top 20 witnesses, they could manipulate the blockchain however they wanted. This means double-spending, censorship, and generally modifying the blockchain however they desired. This is the dreaded 51% attack, adapted to DPoS (Steem’s consensus algorithm).
Well, you might say, the community would catch on and re-cast their votes immediately. There’s no way an attacker could maintain control!
But you would be wrong. Once the blockchain is being controlled by a third party, that third party can censor transactions on the blockchain by building alternate, longer forks. Essentially, they could “freeze” voting on witnesses, and maintain control indefinitely.
The reason this attack hasn’t been executed is that nobody has that many votes. No single witness could split their votes into eleven parts and still control a top 20 witness. Unfortunately, a sufficiently rich attacker could buy power and use that to vote his own witnesses, essentially overruling the entire rest of the blockchain. So, just how much would this cost?
To launch this attack, one would have to control, at minimum, witnesses #10-20. That means each of the new, malicious witnesses would need more steem power than the #10 witness. Visiting https://steemd.com/witnesses shows that the #10 witness, @smooth.witness, currently has a little under 65,000 MegaVESTS, or 65,000,000,000 VESTS. According to this site, that equals about 32,000,000 STEEM, or (at current prices), about 32 million dollars. Multiply that by 11, and we have 352 million US dollars.
That seems like a lot, but several large corporations could totally pay that. And if they did, They could control the blockchain for good.
So, what can we do about this?
The answer is simple: VOTE FOR WITNESSES! Seriously, do it right now. Go to the “Vote for witnesses” page, and upvote some of them. It doesn’t even really matter which ones. ANY vote for an honest witness increases the cost of an attack, and according to this article, only 1.5% of active accounts actually vote. So use your votes! Help strengthen the blockchain!
If you really don’t know who to vote for, you can also delegate your votes to a user that you trust. Pick a user, and type their name in the delegation box. Doesn’t really matter who, as long as they will use the votes. If you want to, delegate them to me, @joshmackwilliams.
Voting costs nothing, but it helps to strengthen the blockchain against a hypothetical 51% attack. Vote for witnesses, and you’ll be doing the entire community a favor.
Thanks for reading! If you agree with this article, please leave an upvote and/or resteem to help spread the word and keep our blockchain secure.
TL;DR: Always vote for witnesses! It costs you nothing, and decreases the likelihood of an attack on the Steem blockchain.
Disclaimer: the contents of this article are based entirely on my own knowledge (or lack thereof) of the Steem blockchain. Take all of this with a grain of salt. If you notice any errors, please don’t downvote the post. Instead, just leave a comment, and I will edit the post accordingly within a few days.