At first look, my reaction is that witnesses have gone mad. While I understand the reasoning behind this, I think it is an extreme measure that undermines the blockchain integrity. Once acquisition happened those stakes were no longer ninja-minded.
If this is a negotiation tactic to bring the other side to table to work out a mutually beneficial and long term solution, I think it is smart.
I don’t think this is a good permanent solution. Sounds like “we were scared of a hostile take over, so let’s attack first”.
Let the power battles begin!
Sorry I can't agree on this point, particularly in so far as the transaction was described as acquisition of the company. I fail to see how the identity of the sharesholders of a company, or a change in the list of shareholders, changes anything about a particular block of stake that was ninja mined to support development of the ecosystem.
If the stake alone was sold (not that there is any evidence of this), then I would think either there would or should have been disclosure of any baggage associated with the asset (whether legal, reputational, unrealized risks, or pertaining to strategic business considerations surrounding the use of the asset). If not then it seems like something for the parties to the sale to work out.
Seems like essentially if you do something bad, its ok as long as you sell it off.
If I steal a car and sell it to someone, they get to keep that car regardless of what the true owner says?
If this was really something bad, witnesses should have taken these measures long time ago. Inaction has legitimized the stakes long tine ago. Ned himself said they Steemit Inc do not owe anybody anything. Witnesses didn’t do anything then either. So justifying these measures with claims of “ninja-mine” are not reasonable. These stakes are fully paid for.
I expect a fight back to protect their investment. Hopefully mutually beneficial resolution will be reached.
I share the concerns of potential hostile take over, but I don’t think keeping funds hostage is a good way to achieve any fruitful results.
So now we are going to pick and choose which things Ned said we decide to decide are important and which are not? And we're going to do so by selectively quoting the ones that are most self-serving to Ned? I don't think so.
I agree action should have been taken long ago. I also see incremental reasons to take action now. The straw that broke the camel's back so to speak.
"Ned himself said they Steemit Inc do not owe anybody anything."
I don't give a damn what the guilty party has to say. It makes 0 sense that you would.
Stinc stake was never legitimized, simply tolerated to a point.
If it was legitimized Ned wouldn't have hidden millions of steem in exchanges.
He knew he had to run.
Witness inaction at that time doesn't mean anything except that they were lazy and inert when they shouldn't have been so.
Personally, I foolishly wanted to believe that Ned had at least some interest in ensuring the success of Steem. He co-founded the thing after all. I think many people had a similar opinion.
When Ned showed that we were indeed fools for trusting him, and that our hope was useless, it was clear it was time to take action. I agree this should have been done long ago, but it was done today.
If it didn't happen today, the same thing would be said in the future about it should of having been done sooner or that witnesses were just lazy.
There is no legally binding document or protocol-based evidence Inc stakes belong to the community. Some announcements of roadmaps or blogposts of a companies intentions don't mean anything. Companies, especially startups pivot all the time.
Most importantly I don't like witnesses acting as a central bank and taking measures that affect the funds, regardless whose they are. I hope this is just a negotiating tactic and produce some meaningful results without diminishing the confidence on the chain.
Pivoting, once you have given your word, is called lying where i grew up.
No doubt ned was not reliable.
Anybody that can tolerate associating with that kind of energy is suspect, imo.
Doubly so when it pronounces the demise of three years of my work.
I don't much like this, either, but i would rather see js prosecute ned for fraud than to allow ned's lies to wreck the chain.
Which may be the intended outcome.
He's got his ball and has gone away.
Well, is thats your approach, there is no legally binding document that says that the witnesses cant do this soft fork either....
Wanna play hard ball? it goes both ways.
lol, expressing an opinion is playing “hard ball”?
My reservations are very simple, all funds should be safe and secure for the chain to be reliable.
I don’t have a strong position one way or the other. Just trying to make sense of things. As I read other comments I am learning more.
Feel free to play ball elsewhere. :)
I wasn't referring to you lady, but to Justin Sun, we can either play the game in a moral and ethical dimension or a legalistic one.
What Im saying is that you are denoting any other agreements that are not legally binding documents as invalid and irrelevant, and if thats the case, then why should the witnesses follow anything but strictly legally binding contracts?
See my point now?
Your argument makes no sense because no one said the ninja mine is okay. When it is sold, then the bad action has been done. Ninja mine for profit = bad.
But the person who bought the stake is not responsible for the actions of the previous holder of that stake.
If I sold you 1000 Steem and was abusing my stake, upvoting myself 10 times a day, does that mean that you should now be downvoted by spam preventers?
And to answer your car example, if the car was sold illegally, then yes, it still belongs to the original owner. However, if the transaction was completely legal, then it belongs to the buyer. Other problems are not his to deal with.
Tron acquired their stake fairly.
You're mistaken about how stolen property works, though that analogy is so strained as to be entirely irrelevant here.
But as a matter of trivia (and so you are better informed), in fact if property is stolen then even a 'legitimate' buyer has to give it back to the rightful owner and then get a refund from the seller.
What Netouso said is 100% correct. You even have laws in place for this exact thing.
The person who bought the stake doesnt get to keep the stake no string attached. If he has a problem, Ned is the person he should get reparations from..
You have a very strange definition of fairness, and that stake came with strings attached, it swapping hands makes no difference, the strings are still attached.
This is true. The Steem community has been, as @starkerz noted recently, quite naive, lulled into trust by @ned's lack of pecuniary intent and avarice. This is a trustless platform, or should be. The founder's stake has continuously been claimed as solely intended for use by development initiatives, and this verbal (written) allegation has sufficed to preclude concerns of it being deployed to centralize governance of Steem.
However, that threat has always existed, mostly due to the 30x multiplication of the influence of substantial hodlings of stake over the witnesses. It is this mechanism that made of the founder's stake a centralizing threat. As long as the substantial stakeholders could trust @ned not to use that stake, their influence on governance was dramatically increased, and they clearly benefited from this.
This temporary solution but points to the need a decentralized trustless platform has to prevent concentration of influence on governance through code that enables some stake to wield more influence than other stake. Eliminating the 30x multiplication of the influence of substantial stake on governance eliminates any threat of @justinsunsteemit, or heirs, beneficiaries, or assigns to exercise instant governance of Steem. It also makes all Steem equally influential, from large or small stakeholders, in witness elections.
1 Steem = 1 witness vote is the fair and equitable way to solve the problem temporarily mitigated by this soft fork, as well as the undue influence that has heretofore inured to large stakeholders over the majority of the community.
I think other measures like significantly decreasing amount of witness votes an account can cast would produce better results and further decentralize the chain.
Some users have tens of thousands of accounts. How much does limiting the number of witness votes they can cast per account affect them? Sock puppets will get around any limitation on witness votes per account, to greater or lesser degree depending on how limited witness votes are.
If you reduce the number of witness votes an account can cast to one, @justinsunsteemit can spread his stake to 20 accounts and replace the consensus witnesses at will.
Frankly, equity really demands 1 steem = 1 witness vote, and you can see how the present system is inequitable and centralizes governance now if you read this.
It would still be based on SP you have. Instead of having an ability to vote for 30 witnesses it would be less, maybe like 10. So that one stakeholder can’t decide who all consensus witnesses are.
I don't think you grasp that splitting your stake across multiple accounts causes the limitation on witness votes to be split across the accounts as well. It's true that it would reduce the amount of stake each account could vote with, but the ~75M Steem is still enough split 20 ways to be a deciding factor in consensus witness elections.
Consider this as well. If one stakeholder has 1M Steem each witness vote cast is for 1M Steem, meaning that stakeholder applies 30M Steem worth of influence on the witnesses. Another stakeholder has 10 Steem, and each vote for witness they cast is worth 10 Steem, meaning they deploy 300 Steem worth of influence on the witnesses. The difference in influence on governance between the two stakeholders is not 999,990 Steem, but 29,999,700 Steem. This is how the current witness election mechanism effects centralization of governance by multiplying the influence of substantial stakeholders 30x.
I reckon influence on the witnesses should be equitable, and 1 Steem = 1 witness vote increases decentralization of governance of the blockchain 30x from current conditions.
I think we are on the same page. We both want to see decreased amount of witnesses votes per account. Your idea is basically to lower to 1 vote per account, still based on Steem/SP you have. It makes sense. I like it. Not an easy task to convince the witnesses.
I find that nothing worth doing is ever easy.
No matter what rules you come up with someone with 150% as much stake as all the other voting stake put together is going to be overwhelmingly dominant to the point of breaking all hope of decentralization.
There are some limited mitigations possible, which carry security tradeoffs (since you are, in effect, deliberately enabling a minority which you can't know is "good" or "bad" in any instance) but they're partial at best.
you are not listening, reducing the amount of witnesses an account can vote would have no effect in this situation, Justin could just spread the 80 million steem in several accounts, do you understand this or do you need a further explanation?
For example limit the votes amount to 7. Now show me how you can spread 80mil sp to take over the chain. Consensus is 17, you need to split 80 mil into 3, which is 26.6 mil each and not enough to vote in all 17 consensus witnesses.
Aha, ok, you vote in a fraction of the 17 witnesses that are needed for consensus, say 12? Then how is consensus achieved without the approval of those 12 witnesses? ;)
You spread your 7 votes from the 73 million SP across an overlapping mix of 17 witnesses, which is 30 million each. That's probably more than enough. Currently top witnesses get around 45 million but that is with everyone having 30 votes as well. If you drop the 30 to 7, then the other witnesses' vote totals will drop too. If we, probably conservatively, estimate that totals drop by half, then totals are down to 22 million, and 30 million is easily in control.
If somehow that isn't enough, which I doubt, then you buy a small amount of STEEM to net up the total, campaign and count on at least a few people always being easily swayed to anything or confused, and/or you offer a few people to pay for their votes. It won't be hard to get what you need, even if this means the rest of the stakeholders are voting, say, 90% against you.
No plausible voting rules are going to contain 71% of the active voting stake from taking control. It won't happen. (And if you could, it would greatly weaken the chain by allowing small minority, potentially attacker, stakes to exert greater influence).