Alright, so anyone who has been following my blog will not be surprised. I have mentioned multiple times that Steem is going to see a fork unless Justin Sun wills it another way. Last week, Steem witnesses made an aggressive maneuver in blocking Steemit Inc's accounts. I warned then that,
Make no mistake, however, Justin Sun likely wields far more influence and wealth than the entire Steem network combined, the ball's absolutely in his court.
I and others have also repeatedly mentioned the close ties between Justin Sun / Tron and CZ / Binance, him having controlling interest over Poloniex, and if he really wanted to, he could easily takeover Steem in multiple different ways. It's obviously not just Justin, he's working with others, but for fun, I'm going to just call the operation Justin.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Justin responded amicably, and was looking to come to a truce with Steem witnesses.
Don't know what has changed, but obviously, that's no longer on the table. (On second thoughts, his first response was probably just a deliberate attempt at bait-and-switch. Well played, Justin.)
I have been highly critical of DPoS for years now, and this is why. Let's get this out of the way - Steem was always effectively centralized, and now we have absolute evidence of that fact.
It's easy to play the blame game, but in this case, the blame squarely lies on a totally garbage consensus mechanism that'll fail in many situations - Steem being one of them. Blame the game, not the players.
The witnesses fired the shots first by censoring Justin Sun's assets. (Just to be clear, this is a technical statement, not a matter of right or wrong.) Justin Sun fired back by taking over the entire bloody chain to restore his assets. You will probably be biased one way or the other, but the cold hard truth is that both of these are valid measures that are possible under the very flawed code.
My issue here is what Binance and Huobi have done. As it's forever been said - not your keys, not your coins. (PS: Actually, I may be mistaken here. Maybe they did approach a few whales and get their consent for powering up. In that case, it's fine. Would like to see a statement from the exchanges.)
As for current witnesses, they have two options - agree to being Justin Sun's slaves, or fork to a new chain that is a bit less centralized. The new chain, let's call it Steem Classic, will probably only be worth a fraction of the defacto STEEM that Justin currently controls, but at least they'll have something to work with.
I've forever been advocating for 3 day power down times, so there's that. I'm assuming that'll mean they'll also reduce the payout period to 3 days.
I have many other thoughts, but I'll conclude this one, for now.