Steem - Less of a Good Investment than it was

This is a brief notification for those following me. With HF20, I believe we are seeing and experiencing the result of an update without the support of Hive account@dan. This is how I am interpreting this event.

In the past Hive account@dan would consult with his other projects like Bitshares and Steem (maybe he still does with Bitshares?).

From my perspective, we may be seeing the drastic difference of Steem's ability to operate without Hive account@dan involved. HF19 was a very smooth event. It was released, it changed a lot of things, but the systems remained operational. HF20 has multiple glaring bugs, and when I was reading the list of the patches which are being implemented tonight, I thought to myself as a programmer... and no one thought of these consequences in advance?

When you write new code, you have to understand how that code is going to affect your system. You have to pre-conceive what problems are going to arise from what you wrote, and write the code to ensure those bugs do not happen. With blockchain, it's hard to perfectly bug-test in advance, meaning you have to anticipate bugs in the live system and prevent them in your code.

HF20 did not do this sufficiently.

We now understand why SMT's are not here

To me this reveals, at the very least, a weakness in the Steem blockchain's operation going forward in the near-term. This weakness is the development team (I am not insulting the dev team, I am sure they are doing their best, blockchains are difficult systems to deal with.) We now understand why we do not have SMT's implemented yet. They are unable to deploy such a system within a reasonable time-frame, without there being so many bugs that would crash Steem.

How important is this?

Long term it is hard to say how important this realization is for us who are investors. It may just be a speed bump along Steem's path toward long-term success. I hope that this is what it is.

At worst, this is now a systemic problem the Steem blockchain is now married to. Bad development that cannot deliver what the community wants.

In my viewpoint, what we are seeing is a fundamental event, affecting our investment perspective of the viability of the Steem blockchain long-term. It is uncertain how important this event is.

Witnesses are our Governance

Witnesses need to take note of this event. I am not saying it's so bad, let's all turn on Steemit Inc. I'm sure they are doing their best and they can improve.

The key is, do they improve going forward? This is important because if this is a long-term problem, the only way to ultimately save the viability of this project will be a witness-led path forward to solving the issues we are facing.