I've had some time to decompress.
I'm thinking about some of the things I said before this all went down.
https://steemit.com/steemtron/@edicted/look-out-fam-justin-sun-is-at-it-again#comments
I think you're missing one of the most important points here. "Steem" is just a name, and what that name means is controlled by the exchanges and to a lesser extent the apps on the platform, with steemit.com being the top one by far.
So this means that no matter what changes we might implement with a fork, be it changing witness voting or removing the steemit stake entirely, it won't do anything. Justin Sun and Tron own the name "Steem", not legally - no one owns it legally - but effectively.
Let's say we create a fork that removes their stake entirely. They just simply start up their own witness nodes using the original codebase (which is what the exchanges are running already anyway) and then their chain is "Steem" and we just have a new chain with a new token and new name that has no exchange listings and few apps.
"Steem" was owned by steemit inc, and is now owned by Justin Sun and Tron and there is nothing that we can do about that. If we want a chain that is not owned by anyone we can make a fork and effectively start over with a new token and new name.
My point was to push a hardfork through the system to increase network security and gauge how much of an obstructionist Justin Sun is going to be. You are 100% assuming that he's going to reject any hardfork put through by the witnesses. You sure? You sound sure.
There's still a reason to do it: to prove it to everyone.
Not everyone's as sure as you.
Obviously they aren't going to let us easily fork their stake away,but vetoing an obvious improvement to network security is much harder to explain again. You'd know that if you were a real politician, but the "#1 witness" of this blockchain hasn't made a top-level blog post in 2 months even after being sold to Tron.Maybe the truly foolish thing we are doing with this DPOS governance thing is assuming that developers can also be effective politicians at the same time. Not easy doing 2 full time jobs at once.
Yeah, so that was overly harsh.
But what happened after that? We actually did fork away Steemit Inc's stake! This put Sun on the back foot and caused him to make a very rash decision. We got the best possible outcome we were going to get.
Do you know what would have happened if we had allowed Justin Sun to centralize this chain directly with Steemit Inc's stake with all the time in the world to prepare? Nothing. No one would have cared; Steem is just another flawed DPOS chain that got bought out. We would have never got the attention of people like Andreas Antonopoulos or Vitalik Buterin.
A lot of people are trying to make the argument that this never would have happened if we didn't implement the soft fork. Really? Look how it went down. Look at what lengths Sun goes to in the quest to maintain control. That alternate reality is a fantasy that doesn't exist.
Crossing the Rubicon
Justin Sun has declared war on the Steem blockchain, and much like Julius Cesar, it looks like that war is all but won. However, time does seem to be an issue. He purposefully delayed the meeting with witnesses to perpetrate this act of war, and even Steemit Inc said they were going to need 4 or 6 weeks of absolute control before they could give the chain back. How much more time do they need now that the developers just up and quit?
Granted, the developers could have been fired. They clearly aren't allowed to say anything by law (non-disclosure agreements). However, it would have been nice if they actually did quit because they were ordered to fork the powerdown period to a matter of days, and they refused. This would be a pretty big setback for Justin Sun's hostile takeover timeline.
Judging from the rumors I've read the process of reversing the softfork was a complete hackjob orchestrated by Tron developers. I'm on record as saying the biggest threat to Steem is the Steemit developers themselves. I even went to far as to say I hope they quit if this turns out to be a hostile takeover.
They did quit.
So that actually gives this community a lot of extra time to react to what has happened. Look at how long it took our experienced dev team to get things done. Can you imagine how hard is going to be for Tron devs to sift through that very poorly documented and disorganized code? As someone who has experience trying to work with the Steemit API... yikes!
Vote for witnesses
Apparently, all the exchanges have backed out and are no longer supporting Sun's coup. We actually aren't that far away from retaking the chain with legitimate votes within our own consensus rules.
But you know what really enrages me?
Seriously Dan? Go Fork yourself.
Dan is the reason we are in this mess to begin with. Being able to vote for 30 witnesses was his idiotic idea, and he did it on purpose in an attempt to maintain control of the system he built. This mechanic should have been forked away ages ago. I hope the witnesses realize how big of a deal this is right now.
If governance voting was 1:1 we would EASILY be able to vote in enough witnesses right now to veto all upcoming hardforks. Do you know how devastating this would be to the exchanges that betrayed us? They would be INSOLVENT FOR MONTHS. Instead, we're in a situation where we have to regain the entire chain or nothing at all. 1:30 witness voting is a centralized all or nothing governance mechanic that should of never existed.
What to do now?
To maintain leverage in this situation, we have to hardfork away from the chain. We have to do it before Steemit Inc and the exchanges push a hardfork through that lets them powerdown and unlock all their funds. Once these funds are liquid hardforking them off the platform becomes more difficult if they're transferred to shadow accounts.
Unfortunately, it looks like everyone who had Steem coins on the exchanges might lose them in an emergency hardfork. Those funds were used to attack us and if Justin Sun issues an ultimatum before users can get their money back then we'd just have to delete those coins along with Steemit Inc's stake. Either that, or we'd have to trust the exchanges to give the money back to the correct owners after the fact (unlikely). We'll have to see how the timelines work out. Steemit Inc's dev team quitting might make the difference.
Justin Sun still seems pretty confident in this situation. Like he's going to offer us some deal that we can't refuse and the hardfork will never materialize. I guess that would be nice to have the chain handed back to us. Although I don't see how that's possible considering recent events. He knows we would just try to fork his stake away again, this time permanently.
DPOS works
The attack against our chain was a known issue. We didn't get hacked in some crazy way like IOTA or Ethereum. This situation is actually evidence that DPOS works like we think it should work. There isn't some crazy backdoor in the code we didn't know about. The measures that Justin Sun took were extremely drastic, and patching that security loophole is a trivial procedure. Fork all ninja-mined stake off the platform; disable governance voting for exchanges; enable 1:1 witness voting. Sorted.
Conclusion
The only thing we did wrong was not disabling the voting rights of known centralized exchanges. In hindsight, this is a no-brainer that every DPOS chain will be forced to implement in the future. There is absolutely no legitimate reason why any centralized exchange account should be voting on governance. Taking away the voting rights of those accounts is a win/win for every DPOS chain with zero drawbacks. People are trying to say that DPOS has failed because of this, but the solution is a trivial fix (one that we've already implemented against Steemit Inc itself).
Steem has had a rough 2 years. Many of the users left are diehard zealots. You can't bully zealots. Zealots are ride or die. There are going to be 2 different versions of the Steem blockchain going forward. It would be nice if everyone sold their TronSteem (Steem) for Steem Classic as a show of solidarity. If the value of Steem Classic is higher than Steem, we could probably eventually convince exchanges to give us our name back.
Crypto is about automating governance. Governance revolves around community. Justin Sun thinks he can buy our community just like one would a corporation. Can he? I guess we'll find out.
The value of a blockchain is 100% reliant on the community that backs it. If TronSteem has no community, its value will drop to zero.