This is not true. There have been at least two releases which were fully pushed out by the developers and blocked by the witnesses. There are other situations where developers have discussed the proposed implementation with witnesses prior to release and it was clear that some course correction needed to be made. This then avoided the situation of getting all the way to a final release which is then blocked (ultimately a waste of time and resources).

Then considering what actually made its way through, I don't even want to think about how broken those proposed releases must've been. When you referred to the "circumstances" of this release earlier, I knew it had to be bad but this isn't actually making me feel better about this release. It makes me feel worse.

A hard fork that actively kept and continues to keep new accounts from being created is a dire situation. The previous hard fork which kept people from being able to post or vote for multiple days was a dire situation. Both of those ran the gauntlet of you guys before they landed in front of us.

Did the releases you guys blocked actively come to people's houses and stab them in the eye? I have to wonder how bad those were.

Again you keep going back to "basic operation" when in fact basic operation isn't good enough.

I am absolutely in agreement when you say that basic operation isn't good enough.

Where we part ways is that I recognize that being able to have the major creator of accounts on this social media network unable to create accounts is an absolute failure of basic operation. We aren't talking about an experimental feature or change in payout rate not matching predicted numbers. We aren't talking about an expansion of functionality making updates to the blockchain a couple of minutes slower. We are talking about no new users for multiple days. We are talking about one of the big ways which keeps SP moving around the ecosystem (sometimes using methods I don't entirely agree with, but recognize are now inherent to the architecture) completely failing for the biggest investors.

We aren't talking about passing up on expanding the capabilities of the platform, we're talking about an essential failure of the architecture.

I accept that the new linear reward mechanics are crap, but they are crap-as-designed. They absolutely dis-incentivize the one thing that the blockchain needs above all which is more content creation and heavily incentivizes chasing the Dragon of figuring out what the big bots are going to be voting for and getting their slightly first. That's an entirely different issue.

We are talking about a core and basic functionality of the blockchain just not working.

We are talking about a core and basic functionality of the blockchain for literally the biggest stakeholder in the database not tested by anybody on the test net – which includes that biggest stakeholder who you would think would have a responsibility for testing one of their most frequent and most important blockchain interactions.

Didn't happen.

As far as taking responsibility, I felt that the post-mortem posts from Steemit after the HF20 screwups were pretty reasonable and that progress is indeed being made to improve the process over time. There wasn't even a public testnet at all until fairly recently, now there is. That's not everything, but it is something.

This is very much a case of "and yet you gave us this crap."

I am literally objecting to what we are being told in this specific post, how we are being told it, and what is being defended. The fact that there is a long history of this sort of behavior is almost beside the point.

I don't actually feel like the postmortem posts from Steemit after the HF20 screw ups were pretty reasonable. In part because the immediate fallout was entirely predictable and unhealthy for the blockchain, and yet… That there is now a public testnet is great, except that what we have here is a massive failure of the public testnet actually catch a significant problem.

This is exactly what the thing was designed to catch! This is the whole point! This is one of the time and effort was put into it!

Are you actually telling me that Steemit never tested a large stakeholder like themselves delegating SP in the process of account creation, one of the most important (and to a certain degree only public) functions they hold? And none of the Witnesses said, "hey, maybe we should test one of the most important functions that happens on this social media blockchain?"

"That's not everything, but it is something." What it is is a massive failure at what it was supposed to do. I feel like someone should be horrified by that. Publicly. They should probably be angry and upset.

Surprisingly, I'm not angry and upset – I'm just frustrated. I hate to see a shitty job. And yet, here I am again.

Believe me, everyone involved feels plenty of pain from their investment being down 99%, and for some this is truly life-wrecking (whether or not anyone should get in that situation is another discussion, but nevertheless some absolutely are). If pain were enough, everything would be fixed by now but unfortunately it is not enough.

Yeah, I'm not even going to try to get into that set of issues. I'm sure there are people far more qualified than me to talk about cryptocurrencies as fiduciary instruments and how reasonable they are as investment sinks. (It says everything about me that despite the multiple, loud, aggressive public exhortations, I was smart enough never to put a dime of my own money into the Steem blockchain and was only mildly reluctant to cash out as I earned to buy things that I wanted, meaning that I actually didn't lose 99% of my value – I actually got to use it. What I still sit on is purely because I don't need it right now. I feel terrible for the people who actually really need to that value and watched it bleed away over the course of couple years for reasons which were entirely predictable and which they didn't have to buy into.)

Pain is not enough, but pain is a good start. Nothing quite teaches like pain. Suffering is an educator.

But I'm not talking about financial suffering because, really, all value on the Steem blockchain is fictional. The things that have driven down the value of STEEM are a lot broader than this most recent hard fork, even though it is exemplary of the kind of thinking that got us here. What we need to see is some responsibility and some awareness that that responsibility to the public has been failed. What we need to see is that someone cares about that failure of responsibility to the public and not a regular infusion of doubletalk, evasion, avoidance, and straight up disinformation.

I appreciate your position. You are being the loyal company man and I get it. I avoid that position myself (and luckily my employers have always been wise enough to recognize they should never put me in that position) but I've seen it enough times. You're doing the best you can in a bad situation.

What I need to hear is that you know it's a bad situation, that you know why it's a bad situation, and you recognize how bad the situation really is. Because as much as I appreciate the interaction, I really don't get the feeling that anybody acknowledges how bad this really is.

The introduction of RC followed by nobody being able to do anything on the blockchain because nobody had enough RC was pretty damned hideous. This is not quite that bad, but it's a situation where a social media platform literally can't add new users. Technically, multiple social media platforms if we accept that digital applications define multiple platforms which use the same backend database. Delegation, which is one of the backbones that drives the mobility of SP on the Steem blockchain for good or ill, is broken.

Now, if I were still dabbling with data mining the blockchain and trying to discover patterns which reveal hidden bot networks, this would be a gold mine. With delegation from major players no longer playing a role in moving SP, an interested party could really work on figuring out those chains of delegation and how they interact and how big an impact bot farms not being able to use delegation from big players actually is. But I'm not because I had my curiosity beat out of me.

This is a bad situation that never should have happened. It's exactly what the public testnet was designed to avoid. It's exactly what Steemit themselves should have been responsible for testing. It's exactly what the Witnesses should have been on the lookout as entities responsible for the long-term stability and growth of the blockchain (which is what a lot of them keep telling us is one of the reasons we should be voting for them, even if it's rationally not what they're really responsible for).

It just should have never happened and the possibility shouldn't have been there for this to happen.

You agree with that, right?