As @MrViquez pushed me to resume my Steemit career he kept me updated on all of the political happenings that I typically ignore. To be honest, mostly I just watch his mouth move I like his mouth and don’t process any of the information. I did catch that Steemit Inc had been purchased by Tron, hm, interesting.
This mysterious shadowy figure meant very little to me at first. I didn’t waste any brain power on the logistics of being bought out, I just posted. As I reacclimated to Steemit however it became very hard to ignore, very quickly. Without the distraction of those kissable lips I was able to discover that this had been a really big surprise to everyone, except Ned and Justin. Well that’s interesting.
But why did Ned sell Steemit? Why did he do it like that? Are people happy? (They we’re not).
Next thing I know @MrViquez is telling me that the witnesses cockblocked did a soft fork to hold Justin’s stake. Well that seems a little rude. It did. It seemed a little rude, okay? He just put a lot of money into this, isn’t that a good thing? Won’t that help our blockchain? Won’t this get us some much needed attention? Why?...
So I listened and read and listened and read and listened and read. OH THAT’S WHY.
Because he was making tweets and posts then deleted them making it seem as if he wanted to absorb the steem blockchain and everything involved into Tron and/or take total control of a decentralized platform. I finally got to getting it and BAM.
I get a wake up call from MrV at eight in the morning, the hostile take over had happened.
They came like ninjas in the night. They “borrowed” steem from user exchange wallets and used that stake to knock out our top 20 Witnesses. Witnesses that we as a community voted into their spots. Naturally I hopped on Steemit to check things out, I read the Steemit Inc post and a bunch of comments on it. First thing that stuck out was the 1-3 day power down, clearly a way to cover the asses of the exchanges that participated in the coup. Second thing that popped a flag for me was the way they described the top 20 Witnesses.
First of all let me say while the top 20 is in fact a small group, they were voted in by the community. There are other Witnesses that didn’t support the soft fork, this is true, but guess what? They didn’t get the votes they needed. That means that small group reflects the majority of the community.
Did we need the soft fork? Maybe we didn’t. Maybe Tron was well intentioned from the start, maybe the community overreacted a bit. Maybe just maybe people that have invested years of time, money, and heart into a platform being caught off guard with such a enormous change happening (publicly at least) within such a short time frame an wanting to hit the breaks to figure out what’s going on is perfectly normal and if Justin and the Tronies actually wanted to improve the platform they would have understood that and resolved the misunderstanding amicably instead of taking total control of the platform, implementing a hard fork to cover their asses, using stake to downvote, and blaming the tyrannical behavior on the Witnesses being naughty.
Was it right for the witnesses to essentially freeze Justin’s assets here? You know what, no it wasn’t. He paid for it fair and square and as much as we may not like it, anyone coming in with big bucks could have posed the same threat. I understand why it was done, the rug was swept from under Steemits feet and the community wanted to protect the block chain.
Was it right for the new Steemit Inc to use exchange funds that weren’t theirs to flex? No. Is it right for Steemit Inc to say that they’re centralizing to protect decentralization? No. They say that Steemit won’t be absorbed or disbanded unless the community decides it so… they literally in the same post explained that they took away the community’s choice because they didn’t like it. Almost everything said in that open letter was self-contradicting.
MrV is optimistic. All I see is bullshit.
We seriously need some reps from Tron/Steemit Inc to get their asses in a discord or something and hash this shit out with our vote appointed representatives (OUR top 20 Witnesses) where we, as normal little fish can swim through and ask our questions and express our concerns because there is a lot of wrong to go around in this situation and not much actually being done to right it.
I realize this has been much more of a rant than an actual post, and no I’m not bothering to filter through with pretty pictures and markdown and spellcheckers. Coming from an average Steemit user with very little stake, just a lot of emotional investment, this situation had been a tornado of confusion, opinions, and feelings. Its hard for me as a user currently involved in the major discords to paint the full picture of what’s happening here, and there is an unknowable amount of users that have even less of a clue what’s happening right now than I do so of course its only natural for chaos to insure.
End Rant.