The Drama Continues

Justin Sun owns Steemit Inc. What's he going to do with it?

Subvert our Politicians?

Currently there's ~46M steem power sitting on Yabapmatt for votes. He has 75M. So, if no other accounts are witness voting and Justin decides to witness vote he could setup 30 servers and vote himself into the top 30 positions.

-- Aggroed

Hm yeah, it's been obvious from day 1 that you should only be able to vote for 1 witness with one coin. Rather than being able to upvote 30 witnesses 100%, we should have to divide that 100% into however many witnesses as we want to vote for. How many witnesses would Sun be able to vote in if our network had these obvious voting rules? 5? 10? That isn't enough to hostile takeover. In fact, you wouldn't be able to 51% attack Steem with these rules because you need 15 out of 20 witnesses at least. You'd need 75%. I think it's pretty sad that even now during what is deemed a very dire time not many people are talking about this crucial issue.

Take away our exchange listings?

Steemit Inc has all the connections required to theoretically create a new token on Tron and then tell all the exchanges that this is the real Steem. Now I know how Bitcoin Cash felt. The whole "BCH is the real Bitcoin" argument is very much hitting home right now. You could say this is somewhat similar to what happened to them. Blockstream corporation won the hashwar and scooped the brand. Yikes.

Of course this would be devastating to Steem... having to rebrand as Steem Cash or whatever else. Although personally I think it would be nice to ditch the name entirely and come up with one that isn't trash that gets confused with the obvious gaming service. Literally everyone I say Steem to asks me if I'm talking about Steam. No, no I am not.

Lose our primary development team?

If Steemit Inc's primary concern is now integrating with Tron that doesn't leave us much in terms of core development and such. Used to be that Steemit Inc's top priority was to increase the value of Steem because they were the top stake holders. However, if the plan is to create a one-way trade of Steem to a Tron token using fear tactics such as:

That would be pretty bad... although how seriously can you take that message when it says that Steem is an EOS token. Seriously? Dan created both they must be the same... lol.

All I can say is that if this "token migration" turns out to be one-way and has a ticking clock on it, you're basically a traitor to the blockchain if you hand your stake over to Justin Sun and give him even more power over the network in exchange for his centralized shitcoin. Not to be overdramatic, but this is a form of light terrorism. "Send me your money and it will be worth something or don't and it will be worthless." This is definitely a smoking gun in terms of a hostile takeover occurring.

Lose the main condenser node that runs Steemit.com.

There's a reason why projects like Steemleo and Palnet are so slow and buggy even though they are clones of Condenser. Steemit Inc spends a lot more money on operations and logistics. I tried to test the app I was writing on other nodes but the vast majority of them did not work for me. I didn't even try to figure out what the problem was because the Steemit server API is the fastest and best one at the moment. Losing this node would be pretty bad for low level amateurs like me who are trying to figure out the API.

On the other side of that coin, I've booted up data streams from the Steemit API and sometimes it fully bugs out and sends me the same block 3 or 4 times in a row. This implies that the bandwidth being spent is 3 or 4 times higher than it needs to be.

Conclusion

None of these things has happened yet, but certainly there seems to be a lot of people worried about it. I think obviously loosing our Branding would be the worst thing. Exchange liquidity is pretty important. Barring that outcome, the damages from the rest of the threats can be mitigated a lot easier.

For starters, the Steemit Inc node is expensive. This has always been a problem. MIRA and getting off the RAM standard was a very nice start. However, there are also other ways to make these nodes profitable. Ironically, the path of least resistance might lie in a solution based on the Tron network.

I've spoken to this before.

We should basically be trading block information using peer to peer systems, not relying on Steemit Inc's Condenser node to provide this information for free to anyone that asks for it (like all the other centralized APIs out there). Tron comes into play here with their Bittorrent acquisition. I was able to predict before the official announcement exactly what this was all going to be about.

Imagine a file sharing platform where leechers have to pay seeders! You now have a system where seeders get paid to seed. This dynamic then creates a balanced ecosystem where everyone is happy. Leechers get to leech for a nominal fee, and seeders get paid to seed. It’s a win-win for everyone and will create many 1:1 users who leech just as much as they seed, effectively breaking even. This is how file sharing should operate.

Yep.

So basically instead of a centralized server providing all the information for free, you use tiny micro-charge data-streams that cost users very very little. However, when you add up all that money the servers are now generating an income rather than being a financial burden. Using a peer to peer network, you pay a very tiny bit for money for the information you're looking for. If you can find another user who wants that information, you can resell it to them and make your money back (or even make a profit if you sell the info to multiple users).

Considering how little bandwidth we actually consume this idea might be a bit overkill at the moment. Imagine viewing your Feed on Steemit.com. Steemit knows who you are following, and they know if anyone in that list has posted recently. Every time you click refresh or go to your feed the Steemit Inc server collects the information and sends it to you in a packet so your computer can display it. This costs bandwidth.

In fact, it costs a lot more bandwidth than it needs to, because by default Steemit Inc is going to send you the top 20 posts in your feed no matter what (even if they are the same as the last refresh). Somehow I doubt that anyone has done any optimizations in these areas. The lazy way is the easy way. If you scroll down it will display another 20 posts and so on.

However, if your computer already had even just the last 24 hours of Steem's blocks it would be able to generate the feed by itself without Steemit's Condenser node having to spend any bandwidth on you whatsoever. We should all be torrenting blocks back and forth peer to peer and get rid of this wholly archaic centralized way of doing things. Steem blocks are very small. It doesn't take a lot of resources to have the last 7 days worth of information. How ironic that a solution from the Tron network via Bittorrent seems the most likely on this front.

Running Steem nodes should not be expensive. We are just doing it in a very inefficient centralized way because that's the way that all corporations have been doing it. We used the wrong template. Corporations own their users accounts... we don't.

If everyone on the network was simply torrenting block information all that bandwidth becomes free... because torrenting is free. Internet service providers would be the ones paying the cost... and since we're already paying them for service, the entire network can theoretically piggy back off of bandwidth that's already been paid for. All ya gotta do is get people in the network to torrent blocks to each other.

As far as voting in new witnesses to bring it down... seems impossible to me considering the actions we can take against that and how bad it would look for Justin Sun.

I've also talked about how Steem can easily survive with zero core development for years. The real money should be coming from forward-facing dapps, not internal development. What we have now is already pretty good and we could coast on that for quite some time. Ideally, the big money maker dapps would decide they need certain features and eventually program those features themselves and get them approved by the witnesses. Not to mention we already have the SPS funding development separately.

Blah blah blah

There is so much to talk about.
I guess there will be even more if shit starts to go down.
I'll cut it here.

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