Hello friends, acquaintances, and all the people that hate me.
I want to try to be factual in light of current events. I know there is a silent majority that still has no idea about what's going on with our blockchain. I will try to shine my light on it, in the most neutral way I can.
I'm not a witness, never have, never will, mostly because I don't want to have to be corrupted to be successful. However, I'm the lead dev of DTube, a popular app that has always supported STEEM since it's inception.
Ninja-mined stake origin
When STEEM and SteemIt were born, a decision was taken to ninja-mine a large portion of the STEEM supply (40%+), and put it in accounts owned by the SteemIt Inc company. Ned Scott, the original founder of STEEM, planned this stake to be used for the development of the chain. And he actually tried to use some of these funds, although the general consensus is that it has been mismanaged.
He also made a promise to the community that this stake would never be used to vote for witnesses. The logic was simple, if SteemIt inc voted for witnesses, Steem's DPOS would be a rigged system, and no investor would ever come in.
14 Feb: Justin Sun buys SteemIt Inc.
A livestream gets put on YouTube and DLive, gets <100 views. Ned has to post and pin on twitter so that the community understands it's real.
Justin Sun already owns other cryptocurrency communities, such as TRX and BTT, both valued higher than STEEM. The STEEM community starts getting scared of TRON's intentions. Could STEEM be eaten up and ported to TRON by force?
Follows two weeks of total inactivity from SteemIt Inc or TRON staff. Very little communication whatsoever, just a quick release of communities, a feature that had been on the test-net for ages. Also an announcement about a STEEM->TRX token swap on Poloniex that is now deleted. But it's available on web.archive if you want to read it.
On a personal opinion, I think that had Justin Sun, the new owner of SteemIt inc, interacted with just a few posts or comments on the network during these two weeks, STEEM community would have considered him as the messiah of this blockchain. He wouldn't have needed to vote for witnesses to control them.
22.2 Protective Attack
15/20 old-running witnesses updated stealthily after a private meeting. Freezing SteemIt Inc. accounts. With no respect for private property whatsoever.
It's safe to assume that the coins would never have been unfrozen. After all, once you get used to power, it's hard to let it go. This belief is reinforced by how some of the organizers of 22.2 reacted to its success.
We should also note that 22.2 was greedy. Freezing 30% of the STEEM supply, would normally increase STEEM's value. And guess what, Witnesses make a shitload of STEEM everyday when they are in the top 20.
The main argument that decided the community to follow this move, was the argument of 'We don't want to merge into TRON'. It's important to note that preventing from this did not require locking funds. It would only require to not patch for the upcoming hard-fork that would enable a TRON merger.
22.5 Hostile Takeover
Now that's where it gets really dirty. Justin didn't only own TRX and BTT, he also owns Poloniex, a medium sized exchange, and also exerts influence on Binance and Huobi, two major exchanges.
So yesterday, 20 new witnesses nodes got elected with a majority stake coming from these centralized exchanges custodial funds. 22.5 launched in production using closed source code, nobody knew what the network was doing for hours. After the code got open-sourced, we realized it just reverted 22.2: Unfreezing SteemIt Inc accounts. Now they also use these funds to lock down witnesses rankings and breaking the original promise given by SteemIt Inc 4 years ago.
Needless to say, STEEM isn't decentralized anymore, it's rigged by one single entity. They have full control over the changes happening, and can push them without any form of consensus. And sadly, they clearly stated that they want us on TRON, no matter the price.
Most of the original SteemIt Inc staff also resigned yesterday with cryptic and similar messages. @andrarchy @vanderberg @gerbino
Comments sections of those three posts is amazing, you can see how the exact same witnesses who decided to freeze SteemIt Inc funds 2 weeks ago (and ultimately made SteemIt inc staff lose their jobs), are acting casual sending good words like "my respect to you", or "thanks for all you have done". Fucking ridiculous.
I love STEEM, what to do?
So on one side, you have 20 greedy hypocrites that don't know how to get shit done. On the other you have a billionaire retard who has no idea what STEEM is but has a professional team working on turning STEEM to a TRC-20.
The future doesn't look bright. Some people are talking about a "community" fork... but I doubt the fork would ever have any type of financial value compared to the original STEEM, and dapps will likely stick to the network generating the most rewards.
Maybe the best is just to cash out (through binance?!) and get some BTCs before the next hard-fork hits and turns the power-down into a 3 day process.