@kevinwong - My greatest concern and reason for holding a few different crypto's is security from things such as civil asset forfeiture which is going to become more of a problem as the currency wars escalate. Bitcoin is rock solid in that regard as are several other crypto's.
My interest in Steem and Steemit is because ultimately it could become the next FB. I haven't read the Steem white paper so I don't know for sure the level of security, but I'm pretty sure that if authority wanted to shut it down, it could (correct me if I'm wrong). Is the Steemit website fully decentralized? I'm a software dev for the past 20+ years so feel free to get technical if you wish.
I know the blockchain is decentralized, but as for security in Steemit, the master password is sort of hot wallet-ish and being powered up through Steem Power definitely is.
However, anyone managing to remember their 12 -24 word seed and storing on a hardware wallet like Trezor using duress passwords makes it nearly impossible for authority to take control of anything significant.
Authority in all forms will soon become desperate and that's when things will start to get ugly. I expect this to happen sometime over the next 2 - 6 years.
Nope, Steemit is not a decentralised application. However, it's easy to just come up with another interface, as with the likes of Busy.org. About security here's an old post on it: https://steemit.com/blockchain/@dan/steemit-releases-groundbreaking-account-recovery-solution
I think the game will have so much movement and layers that it'll be a headache for any auths to do anything significant anyway. 13-week powerdown + account recovery for Steem is good enough imo. Not a jedi-level security expert here though. Btw, what do you mean by
Referring to the latter part of the sentence.
I mis-spoke. The first part was referring to the fact that my master key is on my computer and the second part that when powered up I don't really have access to the funds. But then again, that's committed to the network it would seem, so nobody else has access either as long as it's tied up in the decentralized network (not sure how that works exactly). I know that with bitcoin, encumbrances function in this manner as proof of ownership. I don't hold any of my other coins with an exchange, but prefer cold storage.
PS - thanks for the link!
That was an interesting article (by Dan Larimer?). It introduces a new wrinkle should a government request or try to coerce anyone to seize assets.
Has there been any discussion of including a "warrant canary" in the case an account holder becomes deceased and nobody has the key? Is the "account recovery partner" allowed this function?