Thank you so much for this post, for those people like me that are interested in the details but not as technically savvy as those involved in development, this DPOS history lesson is very comprehensible.

On a slightly different topic, CZ and Binance have just released their 'apology' letter to the Steem community that was less than satisfactory. It includes veiled threats to the Steem token and Steem users.

Hopefully, the STEEM community and TRON will reach a consensus in an efficient manner. If they fail to reach an agreement and it poses potential risks/damages to STEEM users on Binance, we reserve the right to take corresponding actions at the consent of our users.

So, effectively they still RESERVE the right to interfere in Steem's governance in certain cases.

Simultaneously, this seems to somewhat contradict other statements in the letter, specifically that Binance states it will,

stay neutral and has no interest in on-chain governance beyond the Binance ecosystem.

As a community member, I find this troubling as CZ also recently tweeted that Binance is considering integrating some form of off-chain 'voting' mechanism from their website.

Interestingly, if we implement this vote feature, Binance users collectively will have, by far, the deciding vote. People who care may need to deposit to Binance to vote.

This thread includes statements, such as "we don't want to do this.." but "we may be forced to implement this now".

These are clear and continued threats to Steem's governance structure by a centralized entity and outside party.

Personally, I'm completely against this as it poses yet another clear threat to on-chain governance and decentralized protocols. I don't trust binance or investors with no 'skin in the game' to have undue influence over any blockchain. In order to vote, users should stake their tokens directly to the blockchain, imo.

As someone who operates a crypto-exchange what are your thoughts on this?