Well the important question is whether or not it will damage the ecosystem beyond repair. This is all still in beta, but I would like to hear whether or not the miners / witnesses will have any say in feature implementations or reward mechanism restructuring.
I don't know Dan personally, and this project is still new. What we have so far is pretty awesome. but I do think the community should have say in changes which affects them.
The community does have a say in changes and how they affect them by voting for witnesses who then agree to adopt or not adopt the changes.
That's very theoretical... the community doesn't have the voting power to exercise their will in this way.
The problem is the main witnesses risk losing their status if they speak out against Dan. He represents a large portion of the voting pool that most witnesses need to retain in order to hold on to their position.
Whales can ban together against such actions also. Dan doesn't personally control enough to unilaterally get his way.
It really depends on whether he is willing to use the steemit account or not. Currently, Steemit controls enough stake to unilaterally get their way using the on-blockchain governance system, if they really wanted to. Things are further complicated by the legal issues with the license, which depending on how you read it, may or may not allow Steemit to make a copyright infringement claim against anyone supporting, distributing, or running a hardforking modified version of Steemit's steemd software that they do not support.
Of course, from a PR point of view, Steemit should not push through with such a controversial change if there really is broad support against it. But it is important for people to understand that as it currently stands with both the distribution of Steem Power and the licensing terms of the only implementation of a Steem node existing today, Steemit could technically always unilaterally get their way if they really wanted to. I hope to see both of those things change in the future.
granted i don't know any of the prehistory, but it looks like there was a time , a month or so ago when the steemit cleaned house among the top 19 witnesses.
There is GREAT risk to ANYONE who challenges Dan or Ned, though if all the Whales were to do so they could. This is why I still have hope for the platform. If there is something happening there is enough other Whales to make a stand and make a point.
We as minnows may not have much power but we can make our voice heard and if enough of us make that voice heard it could influence the platform.
Ultimately all we can do is choose to tell the truth regardless of the risk or conform to get approval from overlords~*~
Has that happened before?
I'm no blockchain historian, but this is the impression I get... I don't want to force anyone into taking a public stance that might put them at risk, but this is a real concern as far as I can tell.
They only did it when the hack occurred and when they had a fix for the solution. I think they wanted to be seen as pro-active in handling a situation as opposed to waiting on witnesses to update.
the point here is: right now, with the whole software still in beta and very new, it might actually be a good thing that there is still some control from one or few individuals over the system. this makes it possible to react quickly to critical situations.