First of all Thank You All who are voting for BlockSmith and supporting our efforts! We are humbled and grateful that you have confidence in us.
There are many of you! Our 4 million votes are coming from a lot of small wallets. In fact, all our votes come from small wallets. You can see by the following chart
http://eos-bp-votes.dapptools.info/s/api/block-producer-votes-stack-html/1/70
BlockSmith has exactly 0 whales. We are now left to consider why this might be the case.
We consider our technical ability, were we inadequate? We were booting the system with eos-bios from stage-1 through stage-20, while simultaneously running gear on the ghostbusters wireguard network. We have 2 full time engineers working, which is double most teams. I find it hard to make the case that we were not technically capable, or not proven to be.
Perhaps we didn't get our message across strongly enough, or broadly enough? Well... We reached all the small wallets that voted for us, of which there are many! Thanks again. I find it hard to make the case that those 15 whales don't know who we are.
So what was it then? Perhaps it was our business model? We pledged from day 1 to NOT get involved in any kinds of cabals, insider groups, kick-backs, back-scratching, under-the-table stuff with other BPs and Dapps. We made that crystal clear, Total Independence, Radical Transparency, Full Disclosure.
BlockSmith has also been on about following the rules, the Constitution, the Ricardian contracts. When Bitfinex was talking about opening the chain with tokens they don't own, we pointed out publicly that this was a violation of the Ricardian contract for vote_producer. If the Whales don't care about the Constitution, why would they respect arbitration? If you are a BP and 3 people control you being in the top 21, then you have to do what those 3 people say, or you're out.
I'm not a whale, and I don't know any well enough to ask them why they have not voted for us, so I can only speculate. But if you look at the chart, you'll see all the whales clustered up at the top, compressing the number of standbys to, at present, 31.
Anyway, I'm just speculating. I'm curious to know what you all think.
As fellow block producers, this issue resonates strongly with us.
Now that we've all built something with so much potential - we must educate our community to understand why its up to all of us to keep EOS from becoming centralized - and avoid the age old failure of allowing the few to control the fate of the many.
We're hoping as more tools come out and provide deeper insights (into voting), the greater transparency that will result will provide EOS tokenholders with the power to vote responsibly.
In solidarity, EOS Van.
Hi Craig, i feel your pain my brother. I always considered you our twin BP too, like twinned towns, i thought we shared a lot of commonalities. Now we share another in that neither of us managed to make it even into the standby bp range yet. I bet you also decided to declare for bp when the plan was 21+100 too, before the goal posts were moved! Please hang in here and let's see what we can arrange with the other BPs about reducing the threshold. I like the idea of changing the minimum from 100 to 50 EOS / day. Please see the validation channel document for more details.
Hang in there @eosblocksmith, its a marathon, not a sprint. I also believe my BPC venture @eos.detroit is undervalued by the chain, but what we must do is continue to diligently work to promote and advocate for our respective candidacies and values. I feel like some of the BPCs are "charging their laser cannons" as I like to say. ;-)
The game was just starting, show the community the code, the dapp instead of complaining.
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This is indeed frustrating! Yes, I hear all the "hang in there" comments and the "we're just at the start", but if the start is like that, it is disappointing indeed, no matter how one looks at it.
The only positive thing I see in the chart you shared is that the top BPs also did get a substantial amount of votes from the small wallets too (more than the other BPs). However, for those who have the romantic vision of blockchain really decentralizing and democratizing resources, it is a disappointment for sure :(
All the more reason to educate and mobilize more voters. While I admit it's a terrible analogy... let's drown the whales with voters. :)
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