How to fuck a DPOS blockchain
Hello friends, acquaintances, and all the people that hate me.
I want to try to be factual in light of current events. I know there is a silent majority that still has no idea about what's going on with our blockchain. I will try to shine my light on it, in the most neutral way I can.
I'm not a witness, never have, never will, mostly because I don't want to have to be corrupted to be successful. However, I'm the lead dev of DTube, a popular app that has always supported STEEM since it's inception.
Ninja-mined stake origin
When STEEM and SteemIt were born, a decision was taken to ninja-mine a large portion of the STEEM supply (40%+), and put it in accounts owned by the SteemIt Inc company. Ned Scott, the original founder of STEEM, planned this stake to be used for the development of the chain. And he actually tried to use some of these funds, although the general consensus is that it has been mismanaged.
He also made a promise to the community that this stake would never be used to vote for witnesses. The logic was simple, if SteemIt inc voted for witnesses, Steem's DPOS would be a rigged system, and no investor would ever come in.
14 Feb: Justin Sun buys SteemIt Inc.
A livestream gets put on YouTube and DLive, gets <100 views. Ned has to post and pin on twitter so that the community understands it's real.
Justin Sun already owns other cryptocurrency communities, such as TRX and BTT, both valued higher than STEEM. The STEEM community starts getting scared of TRON's intentions. Could STEEM be eaten up and ported to TRON by force?
Follows two weeks of total inactivity from SteemIt Inc or TRON staff. Very little communication whatsoever, just a quick release of communities, a feature that had been on the test-net for ages. Also an announcement about a STEEM->TRX token swap on Poloniex that is now deleted. But it's available on web.archive if you want to read it.
On a personal opinion, I think that had Justin Sun, the new owner of SteemIt inc, interacted with just a few posts or comments on the network during these two weeks, STEEM community would have considered him as the messiah of this blockchain. He wouldn't have needed to vote for witnesses to control them.
22.2 Protective Attack
15/20 old-running witnesses updated stealthily after a private meeting. Freezing SteemIt Inc. accounts. With no respect for private property whatsoever.
It's safe to assume that the coins would never have been unfrozen. After all, once you get used to power, it's hard to let it go. This belief is reinforced by how some of the organizers of 22.2 reacted to its success.
We should also note that 22.2 was greedy. Freezing 30% of the STEEM supply, would normally increase STEEM's value. And guess what, Witnesses make a shitload of STEEM everyday when they are in the top 20.
The main argument that decided the community to follow this move, was the argument of 'We don't want to merge into TRON'. It's important to note that preventing from this did not require locking funds. It would only require to not patch for the upcoming hard-fork that would enable a TRON merger.
22.5 Hostile Takeover
Now that's where it gets really dirty. Justin didn't only own TRX and BTT, he also owns Poloniex, a medium sized exchange, and also exerts influence on Binance and Huobi, two major exchanges.
So yesterday, 20 new witnesses nodes got elected with a majority stake coming from these centralized exchanges custodial funds. 22.5 launched in production using closed source code, nobody knew what the network was doing for hours. After the code got open-sourced, we realized it just reverted 22.2: Unfreezing SteemIt Inc accounts. Now they also use these funds to lock down witnesses rankings and breaking the original promise given by SteemIt Inc 4 years ago.
Needless to say, STEEM isn't decentralized anymore, it's rigged by one single entity. They have full control over the changes happening, and can push them without any form of consensus. And sadly, they clearly stated that they want us on TRON, no matter the price.
Most of the original SteemIt Inc staff also resigned yesterday with cryptic and similar messages. @andrarchy @vanderberg @gerbino
Comments sections of those three posts is amazing, you can see how the exact same witnesses who decided to freeze SteemIt Inc funds 2 weeks ago (and ultimately made SteemIt inc staff lose their jobs), are acting casual sending good words like "my respect to you", or "thanks for all you have done". Fucking ridiculous.
I love STEEM, what to do?
So on one side, you have 20 greedy hypocrites that don't know how to get shit done. On the other you have a billionaire retard who has no idea what STEEM is but has a professional team working on turning STEEM to a TRC-20.
The future doesn't look bright. Some people are talking about a "community" fork... but I doubt the fork would ever have any type of financial value compared to the original STEEM, and dapps will likely stick to the network generating the most rewards.
Maybe the best is just to cash out (through binance?!) and get some BTCs before the next hard-fork hits and turns the power-down into a 3 day process.
I ve never been a consensus witness but I definitely stand by the necessity 22.2 was, especially at the light of what happened next. Nothing to do with greed, but yea its easy to give the blame and do nothing.
It's hard to do something when you are banned from any form of "secret private meeting". I woke up one day and saw what happened.
And I'm doing my part. I have my witness votes going to those that didn't do 22.2 or those that I think didn't do it out of greed (your case considering you werent top 20 ever).
Under the 22.2 Protective Attack header I think this is a pretty flimsy straw-man summation of the main reason for the soft fork : "The main argument that decided the community to follow this move, was the argument of 'We don't want to merge into TRON'. ".
Surely, the main reason for the soft fork was that despite Justin Sun's promise not to use the Stinc stake to vote, breaking news in the days before the soft fork was that Justin Sun had already broken identical promise not to use Tron genesis stake to vote in Tron's version of block producers. I get that you don't like the top witnesses, and in some specific cases even agree with your opinion of them - but to pretend that there was not a clear and very real possibility that Justin Sun would break his promise and use the Stinc stake to vote is basically indefensible.
There is a good argument to be made that all prior top witnesses bear responsibility for failing to already put in place a trustless way to ensure the ninja-mined stake was used as intended/promised (for funding development and onboarding new users, and not voting). If that had already been in place, probably a good chance that the sale to Justin Sun would never have happened in first place. Seems very unlikely he would have paid anything for just Steemit, Inc the company with its handful of employees, and steemit.com which is by everyone's estimation a shitty sorry excuse for a pukestain masquerading as a website.
This! We relied on off chain assumptions and wishes... However, I think the problem is more that the consensus mechanism is flawed. 20 consensus and 30 votes was never going to be unexploitable... We just hoped it wouldn't happen.
I never understood the "ninja-mine" narrative. everyone that joined the blockchain knew that there was a founders stake mined. other than that I fully agree with your narrative. this whole mess could've been avoided by just hardforking (or just not running the merger-fork) from the witnesses and then see where it would've led.
Agree. I guess 99% of current Steem community members (except few early miners) bought their stake from those ninja-miners anyway (same as Justin's purchase).
Super agreed. Most of us who Steem powered up at the avg purchased price of $3-$4 per STEEM never care about the Ninja mining narrative.
THANK YOU for writing a real fucking post about this! You are the first non-bias, honest post Ive read since this shit started.. Its like you took the words right out of my mouth!..
I blame the top witnesses for this war, i mean they are the ones who striked first and out of total speculation cuz they think they are so fucking clever.. lol.. i commented on most of the top 20 witness articles explaining why this was gonna blow up in our faces but no one even bothered to reply.. Now they are begging everyone to vote for them again after they literally fucked everyone! Just cuz someone is are good at computers doesnt mean they know how to run a business! Well besides run it into the ground... 🙄
Anyhow, thanks again for a real truth article.. Now lets hope for the best but prepare for the worst! Take care friend..
I wrote the same things about the initial witnesses actions of 'throwing the toys out of the pram'.
And also the expected reaction by justin ( a little over zealous imo, but hey).
All that being said - We are where we are, right now.
What do to next is the question.
Honestly? I don't know right now, but you can't take back what has been done (from both sides)
Now hostilities have commenced, you have to choose bow out or pick your side.
I'm always gonna be on the side of the non tyrannical.
(rebel without a clue, and all that)
As idiotic and naive as they may be - (the witnesses in this case), at least it leaves the window of opportunity open in the future.
With tyrannical regimes? Not so much
It's all very exciting though, isn't it? lol
I'm prolly just going to power down when they make the short powerdown window to let the exchanges get their funds back.. At that point when people have access to the steem in their exchanges it will probably tank even more.. I don't have high hopes and i refuse to participate in either because 15 witnesses making decisions is exactly like an oligarchy, and those to are obviously tyrannical, no matter how nicely they spice up the words and make you feel like you matter ;) aka "decentralization in DPOS" lol..
I understand what you mean.
I was hammered when pointing this dynamic out, over the last 30 months.
It's always been an oligarchy.
I remember reading more than one of those posts you wrote. You were Right. Although I'm sure you'd rather be wrong than stuck in this position right now.. LoL, at least that's how I feel as I wonder how my 2.5 years of investing (my time) on steemit will end up paying out..????
It sucks that we are all suffering from the actions of a few, but isn't that how it always works out in the end? We humans love believing we are free and have choices and control but in reality, it is all just an illusion. We are all just along for the ride! !BEER
Thank you for this summary, and for giving a different point of view to the community. Most of them are biased by the posts in the trending since few weeks.
To get to know you well I know how bad diplomat you are and your post made me laugh, but is that because you have the will to always say the truth? Probably...
I also know how hard you worked for the success of the dtube project and how much you have contributed to the success of STEEM in recent years, without making any concessions and much more than 90% of the witnesses.
Steemit Inc. screwed all of us, and did not respect their engagement/promises, this happened to me with many projects and some other chains, so I'm not so mad, I already got the experience and didn't get hurt so hard by this. But what would you have made if you were the lead of Steemit (I'm not talking about Tron)? What are you gonna do for avalon/dtube? Don't you want to keep the governance of the chain at some point and a way to fund developments for the best of the project?
We don't share the same vision but at least we have many common points, and we made the same choices, we refused any form of corruption and did not pretend to run a witness node for years, simply because we were interested by ideas and improvements, rather than the power and the money. I have no doubt that dtube could have been of the top 5 witness if you had the will to do so.
I was also disgusted to see that the same hypocrites who speak to community of the well-being of the blockchain are the same who are the most corrupt. Not all of them for sure because there are still some people with a good heart/will too, but still most of them. People also think that witnesses are intelligent people and good technician/devs, while many of them are not better than scriptkiddies and have an IQ around 50. I'm not blaming anyone for not being intelligent, don't get me wrong, but I blame them for giving this impression, it can be simply the dunning kruger effect who affect them.
Those hypocrites are the same ones who applied a softwork without warning anyone, when I made a call to gather all our forces, and they forced Tron to make this takeover. Today they still downvotes publications and comments that do not go in their direction. It's funny when those who talk about decentralization and freedom are the first to carry out censorship on this blockchain by different ways and does not assume any form of criticism.
The community fork will result in a big failure in my opinion (but I may be wrong) and I don't even trust that the new chain will be decentralized, from what I have seen until now.
Steem will not die in my opinion, it made us understand the good and the bad of DPOS and above all the flaws of its governance. So we will keep it in our mind and that even if the chain halt one day or is merged on Tron.
We also met many great people and will keep interacting together so if somebody lost something, it can be money, it can be power, but we all gained some friendships and some experience, and that's probably worth.
Dan Larimer himself said that witnessing is a brainless activity
Probably a fair write up of what happened.
Certainly the base of this is the "ninja mined" stake. In my mind, it's a bit of bullshit term as the term "ninja mined" suggests it was done sneaky as if it was unknown. More bullshit.
Let's just call it what it was: A Founders Stake.
Ned and Dan birthed the token and took a big stake in the beginning when it was nothing more than a pile of rocks. No one cared until the pile of rocks had a few gems in it giving some value. It's been talked about for years that this could happen, and yet nothing was done. Everyone sat back and raked in their tokens and sang Kum Ba Yah.
Most have also known that centralized exchanges are bad! Come on. Common sense.
Fast forward and you are here to what we have today.
Predictable? Yes. Preventable? Maybe at some time in the distant past. Now? Get ready for a hard fork so they can power down their stakes and retain control.
My 2 cents, which probably isn't even worth that.
I agree with most of your assessment besides that 22.2 was a greedy move. That move enforced what had been previously a verbal/written agreement that Steemit stake was for developing the platform and not for interfering with governance or for personal gain. JS bought the Steemit stake and then claimed he wanted to destroy the Steem blockchain by converting it to Tron. Whatever that's supposed to mean, it was clear his intentions were not consistent with the encumbered nature of the STINC stake.
That went far beyond that and froze STINC out of their accounts for virtually all operations, not just witness voting. They could not use it to develop the platform under those restrictions. The 22.3 which @timcliff put out addressed their promises without going further. Not sure what this 22.4444 is now trying to do.
Thanks for the clarification. I imagine restricting "virtually all operations" was essential to make sure the STEEM was not transferred or delegated to unencumbered accounts. I agree it was a bold move and a type of censorship. However, the unfair distribution of STEEM is an existential threat to the network and ultimately the community needs to pursue what's in the best interest of the community and continued existence of the platform.
My feeling is that we should seek a universal solution that will not have us targeting specific accounts. The time to debate some idea will be after getting the chain back into decentralised control.
The 22.4444 version is basically the same code as 22.1 (and 22.5) with a different version number. The 4444 is just in symbolic protest. The current 4444 version that is being run is not restricting any operations (the same as before the soft fork). Hope that helps :)
Thanks for clarifying Tim.
Yes, not all witnesses did it out of greed. But some did for sure.
I like your style lol. Anyway, creating and maintaining a new chain is fairly easy. Just dig through the sofa for some coins and then find some coders on fiverr.
If the Steemians really believed in their technology, they would have restarted the project on a sound footing long ago. But they're clinging desperately to that version because they're too afraid of failure. More importantly, they're afraid of losing their own little personal comfort.
Apparemment la secte n'est pas d'accord avec toi mdrrr ! A part lécher des c.. ici on ne peut rien dire mdrrr ! En touscas, que cette BC soit détenue par 20 témoins ou par 20 comptes détenu par une seule personne, ça revient strictement au même. Quel investisseur laisserait sont argent entre les mains d'une bande d'illuminés qui se prennent pour des Dieux vivant.
Ils ont tellement pris goût au pouvoir que leur procure leurs malheureux Steem, qu'ils pensent que le monde tourne autour d'eux. Et que tout peux s'acheter avec des votes.
Bref, pas le goût d'épiloguer tout est tellement clair. Eux ne voit pas encore ce qu'il se passe réellement car ils ont la tête dans le guidon et se battent actuellement avec l'énergie du désespoir.
Reprendre le contrôle de Steem ne leur servira strictement à rien. Au final, ça restera un projet bancal, dirigé par 20 gourou chelou qui sortent de nulle part. Le seul moteur de ces gens, c'est faire de l'oseille et se maintenir en tête. Ils aiment la décentralisation tant qu'ils ne sont pas perdant. Si un jour leur business venait à être menacé, ils révéleront immédiatement leur vrai visage.
La preuve, il suffit de dire la vérité pour se manger une flopée de downvote mdrr, sont ridicules ces gens. J'ai bien fait de me tirer il y a belle lurette, mon Dieu !
I really appreciate this breakdown... so much swirling info that i think its overwhelming for most.
I know some think you are a dick and hate you... but to me it is obvious you are the good kind of dick that steem needs. 🤣
lol.. 😂
Not funny imo :(
Those 3 individuals worked for steem for a long time (I remember seeing vanderberg in lisbon), and to me, it looks like they were pushed out and semi-forced to write those articles yesterday.
Yeah sorry for those former employees too. I was laughing because I also thought those witnesses comments on the articles are fucking ridiculous.