I'm leaving the Whaleshares platform. Whaleshares is completely closed source.
Hello all,
A while back, Steem had a messy hardfork with lots of problems, and at the time it seemed like things were going no where. A whole host of Steem clones seemed to spring into existance, and to diversify a bit, I decided to dip my toes into Whaleshares.
Big Mistake
Take all the things you hated about Steem. Well, nearly all of them exist in much worse and bigger in Whaleshares. In Steem, one might argue that the trending page is just circle jerked voted up by bid bots and/or whales. In Whaleshares, instead of bid bots, it's Whaletokens. Same fucking results.
Whaleshares removed their trending page
Yep you heard that right. Let that sink in. Whaleshares doesn't even have a trending page anymore, derp.
Whaleshares added their own RC system
Did you hate the new RC system in Steem and come to whaleshares to escape that? Well guess what? Whaleshares has it too now. They call it DaBa.
But on to more important things
Pro-tip: Don't piss off your large investors
I've been treated with huge amounts of disrespect by some of the top Whaleshares witnesses. I guess they think I'm evil because I have the gall to charge interest for my loans. Yea, because my time is worth nothing apparently.
In particular, the ignorant fuckhead @bushkill. He once said to me (paraphrasing) "We don't want your kind here". Oh..my kind. I'm literally a crypto-currency multi-millionaire. You don't want my kind in your system, buying up the tokens I love? Well ok, dumbass, wish granted, I'm leaving your retarded platform, and you can dance your victory jig as the price of WLS crashes to the floor. You win...idiot.
Whaleshares = amateur hour
Most of the top whaleshares witness are lacking in technical skill, and are clueless about money and economics. Not all of them are bad, there are a few good ones, but it's not enough.
The last hardfork was handled poorly. It came with little announcement and broke nearly all the services that relied on the old apis. This even included the Rudex gateway, which is only way to buy and sell WLS on a market, oh oops! There are still many services that still haven't been fixed yet as of this writing (Afia-bot and steem2wls).
Closed source: the straw the broke the camels back
You know, I was still willing to put up with all the bullshit above, but then today I learned that the Whaleshares blockchain code became closed source. I was reading this post here:
https://whaleshares.io/@steem2wls/update-on-steem2wls-and-questions-that-need-to-be-asked
And there was this interesting quote:
On Steem, most consensus witnesses check the code of a hard fork before updating their witness and approving a hard fork, but the recent Whaleshares HF2 was never published as source code, only as a compiled version. This requires witnesses to trust the developers and eliminates the decentralised nature of blockchain development. A malicious hard fork could do anything from forking out individual accounts over introducing backdoors to altering past transactions and balances. Even though Beyondbitcoin performing an exit scam can be considered unlikely, centralised development without oversight is a danger for any Blockchain and discourages potential investors.
Yes as a potential investor, consider me discouraged. I looked into it further found this:
https://gitlab.com/beyondbitcoin/whaleshares-chain/commit/59c39355a17ae87bdc376d66c56a911195f724ca
Right from the horses mouth, regarding version 0.2.8:
(source of this version is in private repos)
The front end UI had already gone closed source a few months ago, and now blockchain itself as well. What is the need for this? Are they worried about Steem stealing the changes? Come on..
The system being closed source is a deal-breaker for me. I'm not going to pour thousands of dollars into a closed source system. God knows what's happening under the hood.
So I'm Leaving
- I shall no longer accept whaleshares accounts as collateral for my loans.
- I shall no longer accept WLS as payment for services. The only exception would be for existing whaleshares loans.
- I shall no longer be supporting whaleshares in my City of Neoxian discord.
- If you owe me money on the whaleshares blockchain, obviously you still need to pay me. (Do I really need to say that?)
- I shall no longer be running a Whaleshares witness. If you are voting for me, then cast for your vote for someone else.
- To my whaleshares vote subscribers, I shall do my best to finish up your subscriptions. If I can't, then you shall be refunded.
- My Neox token shall no longer be redeemable for whaleshares votes (only Steem votes now).
- To those who joined my POD hoping for greatness, sorry, please consider joining my City of Neoxian Discord instead. (All those who paid the 2 wls fee have received much more in my votes to compensate)
To those who left Steem, consider returning
Steem is far from dead, and some pretty amazing things have been happening lately in Steem land. Take a look at palnet.io. Take a look at the Steem Engine, https://steem-engine.com. Read my post about it here:
https://steemit.com/aggroed/@neoxian/the-ned-s-hair-award-winner-aggroed-or-how-aggroed-saved-steem
