Latest events regarding freezing of accounts performed by EOS block producers have triggered an expected fallout and very emotional responses from the community. As a standby block producer, we feel it is our duty to present our viewpoint on this matter.
Tokenika’s team members have a rather long history of involvement in DPOS - we have been around it since early BitShares. Our team also runs a top block producer node on the Steem blockchain, so we like to think of ourselves as rather qualified to speak out on this matter.
Like we mentioned in the final point (8) of our official Block Producer Specification posted several weeks ago, we are very much against practices in which anyone gets to overrule the core DPOS contract. We understand that in many cases this poses moral dilemmas and makes governance difficult. However, in the long term, the trade-off is much worse, as the conflicts get more complex and numerous. Bad precedents early on open up a murky world of interventionism.
In our view, block producers in DPOS should only produce blocks, remain as neutral as possible and only execute the voter’s will. However in this unusual case, it is important that the action was taken under a tight deadline, past which there would be nothing left to rescue (the phished accounts would likely have gotten emptied), and also in presence of a legal vacuum that is still to be addressed.
In the longer run, it is just as important to note the Block Producers themselves possessed no mandate to carry out such an intervention. With the future of EOS at stake, this should not be taken lightly, as it undermines the very essence of decentralisation, without which DPOS is just a slow database. Faster than Ethereum perhaps, but still dismally slow as centralised systems go.
However, having witnessed the birth and ripening of BitShares and then Steem, we understand that these are early days, EOS is in its infancy stage, and everyone is learning as they go along. We still lack a clearly stated code of conduct for a situation such as this one. Thus, a lot of hyper-critical opinions, bashing, pointing fingers and pronouncing EOS as corrupt by design seems rather childish in our eyes. Stuff needs to happen so we can all learn to govern the system better, and understand what is missing. Ultimately, there should be no confusion as to who is entitled to what actions in what conditions, and right now we need clear, smart-contract coded framework for any future interventions. Therefore, as a standby block producer node, Tokenika will increase its efforts to contribute to healthy, clearly defined governance-through-code initiatives.