All hail Justin Sun!
Definitive supreme leader and master of the Steem blockchain!
https://steemit.com/tron/@steemitblog/an-open-letter-to-the-community-hf22-5
https://steempeak.com/steem/@lukestokes/your-stake-in-steem-on-centralized-exchanges-was-just-used-to-take-over-the-steem-blockchain
Justin Sun has used his connections to centralized exchanges and convinced them to power up enough stake (of other people's money!) to hostile takeover the blockchain and reverse the soft fork. Not your keys, not your crypto.
From here, they will enact a hardfork ASAP to reduce the powerdown cooldown from 13 weeks to a matter of days so that the exchanges can unlock their money.
Let's parse the optics.
Justin Sun could have waited until after the meeting with the witnesses to perform these actions in the event that the meeting with the witnesses went badly. What can we assume from taking this action preemptively? He wanted to put himself in a position of absolute power prior to the meeting so he can dictate terms free of any perceived leverage that the community may have thought it had. In fact, it even seems that he delayed that meeting so he had time to pull this bull shit. Power play.
Soft Fork 22.2 was maliciously structured, intending to freeze a handful of very targeted accounts and taking away their rights and possession to their owned asset, and may be deemed illegal and criminal.
May be deemed illegal and criminal? By who? The government can't even figure out what to do with Bitcoin. This is a laughable statement. There are no laws. This is the Wild West.
I find this statement to be especially ironic because the actions that Steemit Inc. and Justin Sun perpetrated recently are the ones that will be made illegal in the future.
Decentralized network consensus can't be regulated. The witnesses got together and froze some accounts. How is freezing bank accounts illegal? It happens all the damn time. We acted within the rules of our own consensus. Deal with it.
That's how consensus works. You only own the property if the network comes to consensus that you own it. To make the claim that coming to consensus is illegal is insulting and willfully ignorant, especially coming from the ones to developed the network in the first place.
Even more ironic is the reason we froze those bank accounts. We froze them in an attempt to prevent the exact thing that just happened! And now Steemit says they performed the action because of what we did? IRONY!
The precedent has been set!
This news is huge, and extends far beyond the Steem blockchain. Justin Sun and Steemit have just proved that all the money on centralized exchanges can be used to hostile takeover a network against the community's wishes. Projects like EOS and LISK can be taken over using the exact same strategy.
The group behind this could essentially do this kind of attack to any Steem community member, on any terms they want.
LOL
You mean just like you've proven the centralized exchanges can now do this to any other DPOS blockchain? I'm not sure if they realized the can of worms they've just opened. Also, what do you mean "the group behind this"? Those are our top 20 witnesses you infantalizing toolbags. You make it sound like we were attacked by a group of hackers and you are setting everything right. You can fuck off with that subtext, thanks.
The biggest slap in the face is the fact that they now have to change the powerdown period to days so the exchanges can unlock the stake that they shouldn't of legally been able to vote with in the first place. Changing the powerdown period so drastically like this is in direct opposition to what the entire network wants (except the elite majority shareholder).
Total Rockefeller move.
John D. Rockefeller has been famously quoted as claiming he never did anything illegal. The catch is that dozens of the tactics he employed were made illegal after the fact because he had such a monopoly over the market. This is a defining moment in DPOS history, and it applies to every DPOS chain (and maybe even POS).
The actions that have been performed today will 100% be made illegal sometime in the future. Multiple centralized exchanges have stolen money from their clients in order to manipulate the governance of our blockchain, and now they are going to use that power to change the rules and get the money back in a timely manner. This one reason why the 13 week powerdown exists in the first place. We don't want stakeholders to be able to maneuver around like this and exploit our consensus.
On a side note
Comcast Xfinity no longer blocking me from Steemit.com. Coincidence? Probably, but it really makes you wonder how much influence these big players really have with all the centralized corporations out there.
This situation seems pretty dire in the moment, but I'm actually kind of excited by it. Steem is now at the forefront of a hostile takeover and is showing the entire world the meaning of "not your keys, not your crypto". It's moments like this that will push the entire space to invest more development in atomic swaps and decentralized exchanges. Again, how ironic that Tron was offering an atomic swap situation to appease us just moments ago. That's the exact kind of technology that would stop them from having this power if implemented on a large scale.
The problem is not with DPOS
Everyone points to DPOS like it is inherently centralized. It isn't. The stake was simply centralized during the genesis. For example, if any DPOS chain had an initial distribution of a trillion coins (one million coins given to one million unique individuals) that chain would be the most decentralized one on the planet, even with only a million users at the beginning.
Of course even with a great distribution like that centralized exchanges prove that they own the keys to every coin that enters their ecosystem.
Conclusion
The actions performed today were clearly illegal (or will be soon™). Centralized exchanges operate under the pretense that everyone's coins are liquid and free to transferred whenever the client wishes. This is currently not the case. Multiple exchanges are currently insolvent, and they did it on purpose to manipulate the consensus of our sovereign nation. They are even now in the very process of bending the rules with their newfound power so no one notices what they've done on a practical scale.
Everyone should demand their Steem be sent to their wallet from the exchanges asap as a form of protest.
It won't be effective, like all protests, but it is something.
If you thought the process of decentralization was going to be a trivial one, like we had already made it there, you were solely mistaken. I have not started a powerdown. Nothing has changed for me.
I repeat, this changes nothing.
I knew this was possible 2 years ago when I first got here. I read the rules, and I've been saying "wow, that's stupid" for two years. The events occurring today are not a setback, they are a form of progress that shine light on a problem that the vast majority of the world was ignoring. Steem on.
Centralization isn't a deal breaker until the corruption sets in. This space is too new and has too much to prove for corruption to be an issue at the moment. There isn't much to corrupt and doing so before we've matured is unprofitable. I can continue to blog here and develop apps regardless of how this all turns out. All we have to do is wait for a better platform to be developed if this one doesn't pull its act together. That being said I'll probably be focusing the vast majority of my future investments toward the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains for at least a couple years. The time I spend on Steem will be investment enough going forward.
P.S.
I hope that the witnesses get back all the block production money that has been stolen from them. A little bird told me Justin Sun, Steemit Inc, and centralized exchanges don't need anymore stake.
Also, now we know how Bitcoin Cash feels. They are the real Bitcoin, after all. I look forward to the hardfork and having 24k coins on 2 separate platforms. I wish them both the best.
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