I've got to say that's a very interesting and thoughtful comment, @king.bee. Bear in mind that people can vote for candidates and proxies based on more than just a singular issue. A lot of people, myself included, didn't want to see either a chain split or centralization of the chain.
With that in mind, I can see why some folks may have spread their votes out equally among both sides. "It's a vote that says, come on guys stop being idiots, work it out!" It's a vote that's equivalent to no vote at all. But to address your comment, which I find very interesting and even struggle with myself.
I choose not to vote for president. I choose this path because, in virtually all the cases that I am aware of, Presidents order the killing, death, or murder of people, and there are always innocent people who get swept up in the collateral damage.
Now, if I choose not to vote for President (because presidents kill people) and a Hitler comes to power, does my non-vote make me responsible for all the murders that Hitler commits?
Or inversely to your comparison, if you vote for a U.S. President and they order troops overseas to commit war (large scale killing,) does that make you responsible for collateral murder because innocent bystanders were killed, and it was tracked back to your ballot?
In this instance, the 300 didn't even know they were voting against a hard fork. You see, the criteria indicates they had to unvote the offending witnesses or proxies before the HIVE announcement. You might conclude they were voting for centralization, but they could have been AFK from the chain. They could have been voting for gridlock in hopes that cooler heads would prevail.
And of course, most distastefully, they could have been voting for centralization, but these folks did not have the verboten stake. They were regular stakeholders who probably purchased their holdings. If we don't respect their opinions, it will get around that dPoS on the new chain is a lie, and that'll mean that potential stakeholders will feel less secure in buying the stake. Of course, all of this happens over time, but it will eventually have a cascading effect that could lead to a colossal fail.
I say if legit stakeholders want to vote poorly or wisely, we should allow them to do just that. It's how voting works in the real world, we don't take people out in the streets and shoot'em in the head for voting for red or blue when they "should have" voted otherwise.
A lot of this problem is baked into the cake that is the blockchain. To be quite frank, we suffer from too much transparency. In the real world, wallets are not transparent, voting is a private affair, and bathrooms have doors. In blockchain land, everything is a bit topsy-turvy, and this creates problems that wouldn't otherwise be there.
I believe you're overthinking the issue. If folks voted the brand spanking new sock puppet witnesses and then AFK'd, they reveal rather lax exercise of their authority during turbulent times - after they'd supported the agents of a Communist Takeover of Steem.
No matter how you slice it up, it comes down to voting in support of the enemies of freedom. If anyone wasn't capable of grasping the consequences of their actions, I don't consider them competent to wield that authority. Everyone that did was rightly not provided influence over governance of Hive IMHO.
The purpose of Hive is to enable people to exercise free speech in order to create a free society. People that oppose that, as all voters for sock puppet witnesses did, should not be given any power to do so on Hive.
Voting for elections IRL has consequences IRL too. It is a historical fact that revolutionaries are rightly executed by the institutions they seek to destroy. What other option makes any sense at all?
If my actual flesh and blood neighbors sought to enslave me to the CCP, I would be right to kill them, to defend my life and freedom. I would have no other choice. Hive did not do these totalitarians any wrong by simply not giving them free power to seek it's destruction.
Doing anything else would be suicidal.
Did we prevent a communist takeover of Steem? As far as I know, "the commies" have that now, and in doing so they made us look rather foolish. They made us infringe upon the dPoS of the largest stakeholder. Had we gone dhimmel's route, we would have gotten to the same place, but without preemptively infringing on dPoS.
Excluding Justin would have come after he forked and as a result of it. Witnesses would simply choose not to follow the path of the fork by maintaining the old code (a boycott), and the chain would have effectively forked because of Sun's actions and the decisions of those who chose not to follow.
At that point, Sun is on his version of Steem, and the Community, we are on ours. That is when it is appropriate to isolate his stake on the sister chain that sprung into existence because he chose to fork with an inorganic consensus. His stake and STINC's stake (and socks) can be ignored, but regular voters who bought stake and have a dissenting opinion should not be excluded, otherwise, the entire voting mechanism is fugazi and they may as well just hard fork the chain to auto proxy only designated witnesses of the current top 20's choosing. This, for the "protection of the chain," of course.
Then what do you have? You have centralization because we forked up in trying to avoid it? At that point, the CCP can simply come to the top 20 at a later date after they're all comfortable in their lofty and permanent positions and simply buy them off. And we'd deserve it for not allowing free and fair elections. A glaring example comes to mind.
Bush Jr. Logic
The terrorists hate you because of your freedoms, so
we have to hide those from you so they can't get'em!
Steem isn't the real prize. We are. We prevented our being taken over and subjected to a Communist Totalitarian dictatorship, and we did it by creating Hive. Enabling Hive to be attacked from within is suicide, and those Quislings that did that on Steem are rightly not given free influence to do so on Hive.
Note, we didn't take anything from anybody. We didn't take the Steem of the Quislings, or @justinsunsteemit. They still have those, and the benefits of the governance they voted for. Hive isn't Steem. Hive is intent on maintaining freedom of speech and resisting censorship, and there's a group of users that demonstrated opposition to those goals and acted to censor and eliminate our free speech before we made Hive.
You're arguing that not giving them free influence on Hive is harming them. It's not, and the argument is nonsensical. If you arm your freedom fighters and claim territory as a free state in a war when your country has been attacked by the troops of a despot and conquered, are you somehow obligated to arm your enemies because they now occupy your nation? What about the Quislings that sought to install the dictator over you?
As to decentralization on Hive, we don't really have it. An oligarchy based on massive ninjamined stake has long controlled the consensus, and still does today on Hive. Most of the Steem that exists was mined. All Steem extant that wasn't mined is what has come from the rewards pool, inflation on the mined Steem.
At least the Hegemons of Hive demonstrably are intent on free speech. However, none of them are immortal, and eventually every one of them will die and their stake will end up in someone elses hands (or sooner), who will or won't agree that free speech is desirable. Just like @ned and Tron. Sooner or later enough stake will accumulate in the wallets of Hegemons that do not desire free speech, and then this community will be centralized just like Steem.
Unless we change how governance is influenced. Either we add a mechanism(s) to stake to influence governance of Hive, or we'll eventually see enough stake be centralized to seize Hive. It's a mathematical certainty.
But, so is my death. I don't expect to live forever, and I don't fantasize that Hive is decentralized and can't be taken over. While we're here, we might convince the oligarchs to limit their power and actually decentralize governance of Hive. How likely is that? It doesn't seem very likely to me, tbqh, but it's not impossible, at least.
Don't forget that the Carter administration created al Qaeda. Shrub didn't. He just continued using them, and 9/11 was just another terror operation to increase the wealth and power of the banksters politicians serve. Government is just like Tron's sock puppets on Steem. Good evidence of this is the lack of laws or executive orders to manufacture critical national security goods like medications, ventilators, and hospital beds in the last two months, and that when our 'representatives' in Congress were briefed by intelligence on the pandemic as far back as December, what they did do was sell their personal stocks before the crash.
They don't represent us. In recent decades the banksters have determined that automation means they don't need to parasitize us to maintain their quality of life, as has been true throughout history. The Agendas 21 and 30 set a goal of <1 billion people as a sustainable goal. The Georgia Guidestones halve that. Why do we expect the puppets of banksters to act to save our lives, or the economy we depend on? Banksters just conjure money out of thin air (and do so such that we owe them every nickel they conjure, plus interest, because it's loaned to the government before dumped on the investors in the stock market, like Pelosi and Burr, and we're the taxpayers that pay the debts of government from taxes on our wages).
Sustainable development starts with genocide. Pandemic is the genocidal weapon of choice apparently.
Hive presents a slim chance an actual free and decentralized society can be created. It's the only one I know of presently, so I'm here to make that happen.
I'll probably fail, and die.
But, I'll die free.
Lot's of politically interesting statements in the above post, many of which I agree with. I think you kind of glossed over the fact that the result would be the same with dhimmel's solution, however we would have gotten there by respecting the rights of stakeholders and witness voters. Maintaining the rights of Steemians and or HIVEians during times of crisis is what ensures them for the long term. Now that we've set a precedent that you can vote for whoever you want just as long as you vote for the "approved" witnesses. As far as quislings are concerned what do you suppose America should do to the people who vote for democratic socialists like BS?
We have not taken anything from anyone. Anyone can run whatever code they want on any devices they own, at any time. All we have done in moving to Hive is prevent our provision to Tron of our community as a property he bought from @ned.
What right have Quislings to Hive tokens?
We have set no precedent you surmise. We have followed those of our ancient forefathers in voting with our feet, and not giving our enemies our wealth to harm us with. We have taken nothing from anyone, but built something out of their reach.
As to American voters, I observe they will get what they have allowed. What I would recommend is what Hive has done: to leave them to the harvest they have sown, but the savage murderers in power today have claimed many of their live, and I grieve their coming desperation.
What I have to oppose is the covert oligarchy that surely seeks to prevent real decentralization of Hive now. I hope that honest and rational discussion of our current vulnerability to exactly the takeover that has seized Steem being the inevitable fate of Hive if we don't end the ability of stake alone to effect governance will convince them we must act to prevent it.
Almost missed this, thanks for your reply
@king.bee. I've addressed your query
about quislings in this other thread.