STEEM is now in a critical and difficult moment. Two big parties are in a conflict and it is not clear how they can live together in the same chain.
In one side, the steem community totally reproaches Justin Sun's attempt to take control of the chain and the help that he received from the exchanges. The response from the community was so clear, total support to previous witness both in votes and posts and social media.
On the other side we have Justin Sun, who become the larger investor in Steem after buying Steemit Inc, the principal company behind this blockchain. He reproaches the fact that witnesses have frozen his new accounts preventively before entering in negotiations on what will be the new vision of the company and how these tokens will be managed.
The principal question behind this conflict is the ninja-mined tokens: A big portion of tokens that Steemit Inc mined back in 2016 at the beginning of the blockchain in an advantageous way (I encourage you to read this post of @pfunk for more details). This movement was very controversial but it helped Steemit to give free accounts and to continue developing the software. They said that these tokens would be used for the community but they never said until which point or stated details on what would be the process and roadmap.
Apart of that they created the operation decline_voting_rights with the clear intention to use it in the steemit accounts and give the community peace of mind that this stake would never be used to vote (see here), however they never applied it to those accounts, and currently they can vote.
Now, the CEO has changed. There is a different vision and management, and these promises are gone. He for sure wants Steem to be successful, and wants to continue SMTs and communities, but his vision regarding the Steemit stake is different.
In conclusion, the community thinks that this stake somehow belongs or need to be used in pro the community. And Justin owns this stake (in a legal purchase of tokens) and wants freedom in the way of using it, like any private property.
We need a solution to solve this conflict, and both parties need to yield in order to reach a middle point.
Proposal
My proposal consists in two points:
- Steemit Inc accounts lose the possibility to vote (for witnesses, proposals and posts). This will be applied not in a softfork but in a hardfork, meaning that all witnesses will have written this rule in their code.
- Power down of 2 years only for Steemit Inc accounts. Concretely 1 payment per week during 104 periods. This rule will have effect during 2.5 years, and after that it changes to the normal rule of 3 months of power down.
The community will be sure that this stake will not be used to vote for witnesses and compromise the governance. And they will be confortable that the power down of this stake will take much more time (8 times a normal power down) to not affect a lot the price in a hypothetical dump.
Justin Sun/Steemit Inc will have freedom to manage his stake, but he cannot use these tokens to influence the governance, and the power down will take more time (see that during the power down, each week he will less than 1% of the initial stake).
Code
I already wrote the first draft of this code. It applies a hardfork to migrate from HF22 to HF23, and applies the two rules that I mentioned above.
The code can be consulted here
Give your feedback
I have created 2 proposals in Steem Proposals: One approving and one rejecting this proposal. Your vote is very important. I also invite Justin to take a look to this proposal and give us his feedback.