Yet, as I hope you’ve learned from this post, every existing blockchain network, including the Bitcoin network, can freeze the funds in an account, as long as all the block producers on that network agree to do so. All they have to do is agree not to include the transactions into their blocks.
You are comparing Bitcoin to Steem which I think is a bit misleading considering the scale of both chains and different mechanisms they operate on. It's not that easy.
If something similar to SegWit (theoretically speaking) would happen on Steem, the implementation would be instant because there is a huge centralization of power. This means a simple culture war could lead many people to lose their stakes by a HF/SF.
However, on the Bitcoin chain, SegWit transactions are yet to reach 100%, even after years of its implementation.
You're talking about the ease of hardforking Steem versus Bitcoin. You are correct that it's much easier to hardfork Steem.
But freezing of transactions has nothing to do with hardforking. The block producers just have to agree not to put the transaction in the blocks they make and the funds are frozen. No hardfork is required.
So the technical ability to do this is simply a function of the number of block producers that need to agree to do it. Because of pooled mining on Bitcoin, there's not a lot of coordination required (there's just a few major mining cartels or at least that was true last time I checked). Now you could argue that someone could fire up a huge mining pool of their own and get their transaction published that way, but that's not a small undertaking.
I was speaking about the first version of "SegWit" which did not require a hard fork. The second one "SegWit2x" does, but wasn't pushed because of a lack of consensus and other technical disagreements.
Which lead us to my point. Even though there are concepts and technical similarities as you stated between the chains, one can mistakenly conclude that our situation is the same as the one on the bitcoin chain.
We should not, in my opinion, deal with the issue with an approach that plays more on the similarities of technical concepts, but rather on the different values and effectiveness of these concepts on different architectures and blockchain models.
That transaction consensus constitutes a higher threat to chains that are highly similar to our chain, thus, such technicals characteristics need to be taken into consideration while approaching the question of freezing stakes or any other form of transaction refusal. As you can see, a technical concept can carry different weights according to which environment you put it in hence why a precision could be made when writing about such a thing.
I beg to differ, such consideration is important to anyone who wants to invest or build a new blockchain. If specific types of chains are more prone to the abuse of "transaction refusal" or other attacks, then yes I think it's important to mention it even if the technical definition of such mechanism is the same on all types of chains.
You can't just add a DPOS and POW chains in the same bin when it comes to the potential risks such a mechanism could represent.
That "few of people" can be easily achieved on Steem than Bitcoin. That's my point. Think about it in terms of risk management for example.
The number of block producers that need to coordinate to refuse a transaction is about the same both for Steem and Bitcoin.
On Bitcoin 15 mining pools control 91.8% of the hashrate vs the 15 top witnesses positions in Steem that are needed for consensus.
So in terms of the number of actors that need to coordinate the risk is about equal...the difference is in the cost to carry out such an "attack".