This behavior from somebody that has essentially unilateral control of the platform does not fill me with confidence about the future of the platform. In fact, I think this is the greatest threat Steem faces.
I'm totally opposite. I think this is one of the things that make Steem flourish.
I've seen what happened with Bitshares. Dan was doing all the time groundbreaking theoretical work but shareholders were too divided to actually support him, even when it was clear that the project will decay if nothing gets done (which eventually happened). Now I'm really excited to see him having so large stake that he can dictate pretty much everything.
Platform is still in beta, so now it's the time to try all new different things. When Steem grows bigger, it will be more and more difficult to do changes. We are still in a phase where it's ok to screw up with parameters because they can be reverted without much harm.
That being said, I'm not sure if I support this new change to the voting system. I haven't seen anything like that anywhere so it's hard to imagine how it will actually work in real life.
I totally agree. Inability to take decisions was a hard lesson taken from BitShares. Let's learn from this.
Agreed, there are plenty of "let us build consensus and do nothing" alternatives out there in the crypto space. As the platform grows it will naturally be harder to make such changes, but while it's young let's have the benefits of dynamism. Hard forks have been normalized in the Steem space and that's excellent. Since both the P2P system and the primary website are now open source, you always have the opportunity to deploy a competitor which takes the opposite approach and requires wide consensus before anything changes.
No you don't, the license forbids it.
The license forbids you to create your own blockchains? Pretty impressive license!
The context of the above comment implied using the original code with a different blockchain or a fork, which the license indeed forbids
Oops, I glanced over the P2P part not realizing he meant the steem blockchain.
This will probably hang over us until it's tested in court. For the good of the community, maybe you should deploy one and invite Dan to sue you? Better now than 10 years from now.
Nice of you to volunteer me. How about the novel approach of volunteering yourself?
@smooth I imagine you can more afford it than I.
It was a joke, of course. You are right to highlight it and put pressure on them to remove the ambiguity.
Its very very unlikely that the founders would be willing to risk a lawsuit to stop a renegade blockchain, even if they could figure out who deployed it (which i feel like it would be tough).
Theyre playing way too close to the edge to risk that. Especially with things like peerplays.
Obviously the best person to do it would be Satoshi Nakamoto as with his 1 million BTC he can bury Dan and Ned under a mountain of lawyers.
Yeah, it's hard to see how Steem could have recovered from the hack if it was truely decentralized. We would be still discussing what should be done.
I think that it is natural that the developers have this position of power on the system, since after all, they have spent a lot of time dreaming it up, working out the bugs, and implementing it. Dash directly funds the ability of devs to do this, I don't know how the distribution goes on Steem with this particular aspect.
There will of course be competitors to Steem arising, and the ability to adapt and change is very important in a competitive market. The best ideas should win, and the people will vote with their dollars who that is, as well as their comments and now both up and downvotes.
Bitshares has also blockchain based funding for workers. I guess Dan considers it somewhat failure because it wasn't very effective. Opinions of what should be done were too diversified and not enough stuff got done.
I think the Bitshares' system is brilliant and the shareholders are the biggest problem. Too many people with too big stake who didn't share the vision that Dan had for Bitshares.