Just try to get 16 witnesses to agree on anything. It is damn near impossible.
So to think that something like you pose would be agreed to is absurd. It will not happen.
If it did, those against it could fork, and remove those witnesses from the new airdrop.
Either way, there is protection in place.
So even in the scenario where you'd actually want the network to take someone's funds away, it was very difficult, and the naysayer pop in to and act like anyone could have their money stolen from them because Steemit-Inc had their premine taken away (that wasn't even acquired fairly to begin with).
Actually nobody took away the premine from Steemit. As far as I know, Sun still owns all that STEEM unless he sold it.
It is true he didnt get any Hive dropped to him but that is not stealing when he never had it in the first place. When people fork they can choose to drop to whomever they want. The Witness could have forked Steem and given themselves all the new Hive and nothing for the rest of us. It wouldnt have been smart but if that was their choice, nothing we could do about it.
Cant steal something from me that I dont have (or never had).
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Just hijack the nodes. If they all run the same code, one exploit fits all.
You can't just hijack a node, you need the private keys of 16 of the top 20 to do anything. Even if you hack all of the top witnesses you only need 6 to do a recovery of their keys to invalidate any malicious fork. It's not as simple as you are making it out to be.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Witness node servers hold their own keys and very likely also their source code. Just add your patch, recompile, reboot to fork.
It depends on how you define it.
If you use WEB2 logic no money was stolen.
If you use WEB3 logic money was definitely stolen/taken.
It doesn't matter what the WEB2 branding is of this community's token.
Whether we call it Hive or Steem is semantics in WEB3.
Semantics in WEB3 is the law in WEB2.