[IMAGE: https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/lukestokes/igbhq9p4-image.png]
Call to action: Remove your STEEM from centralized exchanges.
If you've followed my philosophical rantings here for almost 4 years (especially as of late), you'll know I'm very interested in increasing human well-being and creating a world we all want to live in. I think violence distorts human decision making and voluntary interactions via share agreement are a much better model for structuring society. As I explore these concepts (and especially lately after reading people like Thomas Campbell), I come to similar conclusions that we might be in a consciousness training simulator as individuated units of consciousness collectively part of the absolute unbounded oneness. Different religions and spiritual brands have different words for saying essentially the same thing.
We're here to learn and grow up. We're here to evolve our consciousness.
It's easy to get freaked out over what Tron and centralized exchanges have done to take centralized control over the Steem blockchain. It's easy to point fingers at others. It's much, much harder to look at ourselves and find the fault within. The Steem community (and most cryptocurrency communities, to be fair) gave their tokens to exchanges so they could maintain liquidity and participate in speculation. They chose this over controlling their own store of value. I've been running the Exchange Transfer report for years to highlight this activity and make it clear.
Centralized, custodial exchanges have too much power in this space.
I've been saying this since 2013 when friends of mine didn't listen to my warnings and lost BTC on MtGox. Have we learned our lesson yet? Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems only work when there are enough sufficiently decentralized actors participating in the governance process. Distributed consensus is obtained when sybil attacks are made economically too expensive and enough people believe the story of the value creation being proposed to protect it by their direct involvement.
This means we have to take personally responsibility if we want to see these systems function correctly.
It also means, if you leave your votable tokens on a centralized exchange, you are giving up personal responsibility and you are directly weakening the security of the network.
Example:
@binance-hot has over 31M staked tokens.
Vote Weight
31,732,006 SP
These will require 13 weeks of power down to become liquid. These are what you believe to be "your" tokens if you have STEEM on Binance (or any centralized exchange, I'm just using this as an example). In reality, they are not your tokens because you do not control the private keys. Binance can (and will) vote with them.
They only have a million liquid STEEM:
31,731,800.885 SP
1,194,314.050 STEEM
3.728 SBD
What will happen if everyone tries to withdraw STEEM funds?
Let's find out.
If you have STEEM on a centralized exchange, withdraw it to your own Steem account. Vote for witnesses that want to protect the chain and keep it decentralized with future improvements to prevent this from happening again. Let's start a movement to take personal responsibility and direct ownership of our store of value. This is what blockchains and cryptocurrency are all about. No central points of failure. No third party counter risk. No rulers telling us how to peacefully co-exist.
I'm on a path to evolve my consciousness and take more personal responsibility. I'm becoming more convinced this is the very reason we exist. I hope you will join me by taking your own path to personal development, self-knowledge, and self-ownership.
If there are fractal patterns in this universe, if the sacred geometry symbolism does actually have significant meaning to our existence, then what we do internally in our hearts and minds can change the external world we see around us. The only thing we can control is how we deal with our own shadows, fears, and avoidance.
It's game time, and we're being asked to level up.
The Steem/Tron/Steemit situation is evolving quickly so if you want to follow along with my thoughts, you can do so on Twitter. I may post summary updates here as time allows.
Here is an honest question for you from someone who has been on steemit for 2.5 years. Why should I vote for any witnesses that supported the softfork 22.2?? They may have started this entire war! Nobody knows for sure what Justin Sun was planning but now he has to make an example of this or look weak. They literally put him in a corner timeout for no reason and now he needs to do a show of force. It's a classic war move. Read "the art of war"
I explained (to every witness post I saw) that this would happen if they made a pre-emptive strike against a guy with a lot of money and power in the crypto world... But not only did they not listen, only 1 witness actually replied (not in the top 20) and gave me a shit answer basically saying I have no idea what I'm talking about.....
And here we are, exactly where I said we would be... (HuH, I guess I do know a thing or two about business and peoples reactions considering I was a company owner and a person who bought out companies). I know I know, my real life experience somehow doesn't apply to the crypto world right? LoL..
Now you want me to trust these same witnesses who wouldn't even give me the time of day to reply? Because they obviously think they are smarter than everyone else right? Now my choices are literally between bad or worse... Damned if you do, damned if you don't..
I am not writing any of this out of anger or trying to be mean or aggressive, so please don't take it that way. I just don't see any good coming out of any of this so how can I support any witness that supported softfork 22.2? It's an honest question that I would love a REAL answer to..
I honestly feel like both sides are fucking me right now! Both sides did something dirty and now everything is FUCKED! Not cool at all.. I just hope that we steemians, as a community, can push through all of this nonsense.
Honestly @lukestokes you might be a little more amped up now because of the stress of this and you have more time invested in this in the last month and more money invested here as well.
This whole thing is more of a sideshow for me at this point because after I didn't get my proposal funded when the SPS launched that was sort of the point where I took my funds out for the most part and moved them to other chains. I gave it a solid 3 years of thugging it out here and at that point I had to see the writing on the wall.
EOS despite its issues, I have been stacking since mid 2017 and I have never sold. I just keep stacking more and more and more even when others have had doubts.
Hahhah. @lukestokes Man I know you are stressed out but when it boils down to it I'm apologizing online and I will apologize in person. It's not that big of a deal.
The thing about losing partial control and a cash cow. I don't see how that isn't true and it isn't meant to be mean. It is just stating a fact in my opinion.
Plus I have always said I know you aren't a scammer and you mean well. The main disagreement I have always had about your stance is that Witnesses only need to process transactions.....etc. And I always took a stance that there were other more deserving Witnesses that were doing that and providing a ton of other value like @partiko and there are a lot of other examples that fell out of the loop and left.
That was the main thing. Well and the whole thing about Ad revenue. I had said this place needed Ad Revenue long before the price imploded to create a feedback loop and give bloggers an additional revenue stream instead of just trying to rely on price speculation.
But all those disagreements are not really a big deal. It is just a difference of opinion.
That have been points where I have been really frustrated with this place but now I just don't have as much of an investment so I'm just sort of watching what happens and chiming in some.
If you've been here 2.5 years, then surely you remember all this drama last year, right? Many, to this day, think the witnesses made the wrong call by not forking out the Steemit stake. I couldn't agree to do that for the reasons I mentioned in that article as it would be a direct confiscation (IMO) of property without just cause.
The temporary soft fork to maintain the status quo until the the intentions of the new owner of the property could clarify many conflicting messages was, IMO, a very different matter. The war started (again, IMO) when an outside entity bought up 20% of the STEEM, the main interface (steemit.com), and the main company behind protocol development and told all the apps they are going to involuntarily move to TRON and the "old STEEM" would move to Tron also. There was no debate, no discussion, no coordination of consensus. This was a single human saying they can dictate the future of an entire community.
Are you okay with that?
If you were an elected witness and the majority of the token holders and app developers who voted for you and trusted you to protect their time, investment, and chain that runs their applications turn to you to take immediate action, would you do nothing? Would you say, "Sorry, I'm okay with one person determining your fate. This chain isn't decentralized at all and we are powerless to protect your investment."
It was a very difficult decision. One of the hardest I've ever had to make. I tried to think about it in terms of first principles and property. If I missed something here, please let me know.
"for no reason"? For someone who has been here as long as you, I'm surprised that's your perspective on this. Again, engage with the community of stake holders, application developers, and witnesses entrusted to protect the chain and you will hear a different story. There's a reason Tim Cliff was voted out. That's DPoS at work. They did not support his decision to not implement the change. To his credit, he still wanted to support stopping voting, just not transfers which is the same position I held, but decided to go with consensus. As to the power move, how much more of a power move would it be if the community takes the chain back? There are already 2 out of 20 voted back in.
[IMAGE: https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/lukestokes/rY0Z0IJq-image.png]
> Now you want me to trust these same witnesses who wouldn't even give me the time of day to reply?
We've all been very busy, some with very little sleep since this all started on February 14th. A witness job is not easy and if consensus is determined (as I feel it was), spending time responding to every person who disagrees and is not part of the consensus opinion is not always a good use of time. Their opinion is the minority so it's not the direction things are going. What benefit is there to try and change your mind? It's on you to change the minds of all the token holders who voted for witnesses and disagree with you.
> I just don't see any good coming out of any of this so how can I support any witness that supported softfork 22.2? It's an honest question that I would love a REAL answer to..
Because, IMO, they took action they felt was appropriate at the time to protect your property from the exact thing that happened yesterday morning, a single person controlling the whole chain. Even now, there are real problems with what's going on here. These nodes may all be running on a single server running a single price feed. As a STEEM holder, aren't you concerned about that?
> as a community
The community voted. They support witnesses who signaled for v0.22.2. You were in the minority. From that position, I can understand why you feel shafted. That's the problem with a democratic process. Everyone doesn't get what they want.
Is there a better approach or should we let the minority dictate to the majority how things should be?
First and foremost, thank you so very much for taking the time to reply to my question and giving me some real answers and incite that I hadn't gotten prior to this reply. I truly appreciate it and respect you for taking the time to explain things to me from your perspective. However, I do have a few additional questions and comments that maybe you will find time to go into further detail with me.
> told all the apps they are going to involuntarily move to TRON and the "old STEEM" would move to Tron also. There was no debate, no discussion, no coordination of consensus.
I never heard, saw, or read this statement! Could you please tell me where you referenced it from? I'm obviously not ok with that, no one person or one entity should have that power over Decentralized Apps. But do they? Couldn't the Dapps just choose not to follow to the new chain? I mean its not like steemit runs splinterlands, next colony or holybread. If we decided to fork away from steemit couldn't they just stay with a "steem classic" chain (without the ninja mined stake) or something of the like?
I feel like you misunderstood me and think that I am for centralization, that is definitely not the case, but I also don't want an oligarchy making decisions without the input of the community because that's how we end up in the position we are in.. Your right, the democratic process is shit! LoL. And believe it or not, I'm not trying to say I'm right and you are wrong.. I am just trying to get some real answers here cuz I know I dont know everything. Sorry if I sometimes come off as frustrated I just feel helpless and until you I haven't gotten any real answers..
I am happy to know you didn't take this decision lightly, It is affecting a lot of peoples time and investments so I really do hope that it all works out in the end. I will always be on the side of the steemians, I love this community. I will always want decentralization. But I refuse to just accept without questioning because I need real answers before making decisions. As an Anarchist I suck at blindly following the crowd!
Thanks again for your reply and the time it took you to write it. You sir, have earned my first witness vote since the reset.. Take care.
Hey Luke,
Firstly, I hope you're well amidst the drama. I also hope it isn't too long until we meet in person again.
So much I could say around the whole affair but I'll stick to the key theme of your post. While I agree 100% that people should take personal responsibility of their tokens, a blockchain cannot be architected on this premise.
A DPoS blockchain should assume that people won't take personal responsibility for their tokens (and won't vote) unless incentivized to do so. As crude as the Steem hyperinflation was, it was at least an attempt to incentivize users to hold Steem in their own wallets (somewhat).
I'm certainly not suggesting hyperinflation is the answer, however, if the concern is with the concentration of tokens (and by proxy influence/ voting power) in Exchanges/ third party intermediaries, then solutions must be sought within the game theory of the protocol.
Else the assumption needs to be that centralized Exchanges will be large stakeholders (and key influencers) in any DPoS eco-system.
The Steem status quo, where there is this weird reliance on the benevolence of the largest stakeholders (whether the stake was obtained by ninja-mine or custodianship or bought OTC), is fundamentality flawed. As we know, DPoS is designed for the largest stakeholders to have the largest influence.
If anything, a DPoS system should incentivize active engagement (and vote participation) from its large (long term) stakeholders and their interests should be aligned with the Witness and wider community. Particularly if those stakeholders are Exchanges.
Steem should want as many of these Exchanges invested in Steem's success as possible. As we know Exchanges will play a key role in facilitating greater liquidity and adoption... at least until we get to the point where Decentralized Exchanges become the norm.
TLDR; if we want to mitigate against Exchange influence it must be done via incentives and protocol game theory rather than hoping for a change in people's outlook on life. Otherwise, Exchanges, as large token holders/ custodians should be incentivized to actively participate in voting to ensure their interests are aligned with the Witnesses/ larger community.
Nanzo
