Why we need a Steem Guild, not a Steem Alliance.

I am on this platform with two active accounts, and at times, like this week, these two accounts, or rather me and my reasons for having these two accounts feel like two different persons. One person that couldn't be more happy about this platform and about what it offers me as an indie author. The other person, software developer, steem library author, high-integrity system designer and information security and crypto geek, who currently feels he should be powering down and move on to some place else.

For my Hive account@pibara account, the last week has been amazing. Hive account@marylucy, an amazing talented artist and steemian from Venezuela, sent me the last of a series of twelve illustrations she did for my mythpunk novel Ragnarok Conspiracy, and I've updated the e-book on Smashwords. The e-book with illustration has propagated to Barnes & Noble, and I'm awaiting propagation to Kobo, Bol and Apple iBooks. From that point of view I could not be more exited about what this amazing platform has brought me. It allowed me to make some money from my fiction that I then was able to re-invest into improving my work. First by allowing me to run beta-reading contests, and later to allow me to run an illustration contest that helped me find and hire Hive account@marylucy.

For my Hive account@mattockfs account though, my week has been one of losing faith in where things are going with this platform. The Steem Alliance is doing a vote on the structure and power base of this new organization, and while, first reading through the proposals, and secondly looking at the way they have set up the vote, the thought that I truly don't feel I want to be part of this community any longer starts to creep into my mind.

Don't get me wrong. I love this platform, and I love trying to help make this platform better, easier to integrate into software projects, safer to use and more robust in general. When I see though how Steemit Inc treats these things and now, how the Steem Alliance follows right in its footsteps, and a few people I still respect very much are as it seems contributing to this very fact without grasping they aren't helping the platform in the way I am sure they believe they are, my hopes for a community driven impulse to the platform are quickly dwindling.

A few observations:

• Between HF20, API rate-limiting and the recent introduction of steemitwallet.com, Steemit INC has continuously shown us it won't shun disruptive updates. If there is anything we need a community driven initiative to focus on, it should be providing some sort of independent push-back and/or promotion of community code and infrastructure for attenuating capricious disruptive roll-outs or disruptive degradation of service by Steemit Inc.
• The way Steemit Inc handled the roll-out of steemitwallet.com opened up a potential phishing window, that I and others with an information security background have retrospectively criticized for being unneeded and avoidable. A second thing I feel a community initiative could and should offer would be vetting security of roll-outs prior to roll-out, making use of information security and high availability experts from the community. Again, being independent from Steemit Inc should be of prime concern here.
• There currently is zero incentive for people capable of doing a security audit of the Steemit Inc code to do so. In fact, after I found and reported a small double voting loophole in the past, I was presented with a diplomatically worded prospect of future incentives if I was to find another loophole like that and were to report it to an interested party that I gauge isn't actually in any way affiliated with Steemit Inc. It seems that if there is to be any kind of bounty system for finding any kind of security issues with the stack, Steemit INC isn't going to be doing it, so also this concept will only see the light of day within a community initiative project.
• Of all the proposals for the structure of the Steem Alliance, only one, the one by Hive account@impactn could be seen to imply any kind of independence of Steemit Inc.
• In the times before blockchain, the concept of a Trusted Third Party (TTP) was a semi-decent way for two mutually distrusting parties to communicate and do business. One of the bigger strengths of blockchain technology is that it basically does away with the need to trust any singular third party in such a way. SteemConnect, while an enabler for a large part of the STEEM DApp ecosystem is a TTP and with that is a big hack in itself on a blockchain based application stack. Its delegation model for authorization is coarse grained, and its use for mere authentication is round out irresponsible, especially with larger accounts. There are ways to use it by having a holding account that delegates all of its SP to a second account that is used with the TTP, but in the end, the TTP infrastructure should be seen as a (temporary) hack. I feel one of the prime pillars a community initiative should try to tackle is the total deprecation of SteemConnect (or any other type of TTP) in favor of blockchain and capability based alternatives. Again Steemit INC is heavily invested in this archaic facility, and serious proposals posted as issue don't even get as much as a glance. So again one more reason why a community initiative will need to be independent from Steemit INC if there is to be any progress on this front.
• The voting used by the Steem Aliance to determine its structure currently uses Hive account@dpoll.xyz (a polling platform that relies on SteemConnect) to do a stake weighted vote. This means basically that larger stake-holders and people who don't trust SteemConnect with their active key will self-select themselves out of this vote. This basically means that those voters who will dominate the election will be the relatively security-illiterate ones with a relatively high stake. We must ask ourselves as a community: do we really want to get behind an organization founded by elections where that particular group of stake holders holds the deciding votes?

If we combine these observations, we can create a short list of things we may want a community initiative to ideally provide us with, and what properties this community initiative should have:

• No special role for Steemit Inc. Period.
• No actions, anonymity facilities of funding constructs that might cast doubt on it's independence from Steemit Inc
• Aiming to do contingency planning, code, infrastructure, etc, up to the level where the community initiative might
  even end up aiding top witnesses in securing a future for STEEM without Steemit Inc is possible.
• Aiming to phase out legacy TTP infrastructure (SteemConnect) and replace it with a a set of proper block-chain based alternatives (separating fine-grained delegation of authority from mere authentication of ones identity).
• Improve the DApp ecosystem for developers, witnesses and prospect developers and witnesses. Focus on projects that improve the ecosystem.
• Aiming to streamline the process for implementing above and connect it with both Hive account@utopian-io and the proposal system by Hive account@blocktrades in order to fund work.
• Finding ways to integrate a system of bounties for finding security issues within the active infrastructure stack.
• Providing update vetting services for witnesses, looking both at security, contuity and things like gracefull degradation when applicable.

I think, looking at the above, and looking at the direction the Steem Alliance is choosing, it is easy to see, the two aren't going to fit in one community initiative. In fact, the mere existence of the Steem Alliance in its current trajectory is more lightly to frustrate than to aid progress on the above items of concern. For this reason I would like to propose the inception of a different type of user initiative. Not a Steem Alliance but a Steem Guild. A guild of Steem Developers, security analysts and Steem Witnesses that actively contribute to the DApp infrastructure in one way or the other.
I would propose the standing of individuals in the community and with it the weight of their vote be determined by the following things:

• For witnesses, contribution to the DApp infrastructure through running public full-API nodes and other infrastructure aimed at sustaining and improving the infrastructure for DApp developers and users.
• For developers, contributions of non-DApp-specific code (libraries, authorization facilities, infrastructure, etc)
• For security analysts and high-availability experts: hours spent on vetting updates; security issues found; etc
• For general stakeholders: weighted stake, pledged bounties, prior up voting behavior, payed-out bounties, etc.

I feel it is highly important to combine stake based democracy with aspects of a meritocracy. I really like the idea of a guild structure with apprentices, journeymen and masters in that aspect. Also, concepts that might fit quite decently with Hive account@impactn's proposal for Steem Alliance, that we might definitely want to borrow some parts from.

Its all just a rough idea right now, something to gauge interest in actually making something like a Steem Guild happen. I'f Im the only one who feels this is something that needs to happen, something that the Steem Alliance won't ever be able to provide for due to the issues raised above, then I know I should probably quit writing libraries and proposals for STEEM and stick to only using my Hive account@pibara account from now on while trying to ignore what is going on on the infrastructure side of things. If however others feel we can make this happen, I'm readdy to give the platform my all in terms of puting my services as a library developer (Python. C++) and least authority high integrity system architect at the service of such a guild.

I realize this post may be a bit of a rant. It is hard for me to see groups of well intending people set the platform up for increased fragility and insecurity without getting a bit upset. I hope you can all look past that aspect, and look at the merits of what I am proposing.