I am not sure which article(s) you read from the SCT, but I also agree with most of your conjectures.
I expect that both Steem and Hive will go down. I wonder who would put his USD/bitcoin to buy them. On the other hand, it is clear that there will be lots of selling pressure - people who hate current steem will sell, and people who are skeptical about Hive will sell (it was free airdrop so they even may not care about the price).
Based on this (and more), I expect that division would hurt all (in terms of price). So I tried to aid negotiations but it seems that compromise is not coming.
That seemed more like a powerplay where the SCT community wanted to achieve a highly damaging outcome to the STEEM economy, based on greed.
I'm sorry, as an observer I didn't see that as trying "to aid negotiations". More as a "wanna Kingpin" move.
SCT community heavily invested Steem (i.e., bought lots of steem) and as far as I know they(or we) also try to enhance the STEEM economy. Of cource, opinions regarding specifics may differ, but it is natural (unless it is "centralized").
As the author of the original post mentioned, it is truenthat sct or korean community tended to stay away from the governance issues. We realized that all of a sudden our vote becomes critical, and started to learn what each party thinks and we also presented our opinions.
Not sure we wanna be a kingpin(nor could we) - as far as I know, we simply wanted to actively involve and wanted to hear from both sides before making a decision.
Maybe it was due to language but it seemed to me that you initially came to the table with actual requirements, rather than opening negotiations.
Of course, when discovering you hold a decisive stake, there can be a tendency to use that power.
Otherwise, I think the Korean community is a very valuable player in the Steem community. I definitely would have liked to see more Korean witnesses (before acquisition). Maybe it could have led to the dialogue we never had but needed for thriving governance.
A split has now been reached and now you are now an absolutely defining player in the community. Defining in campaigning to keep as many users and dapps as possible, as well as onboarding new members. Here's hoping that STEEM will continue to be a diverse and engaged community. Not a localized one.
PS: I massively respect the decision to support 7 human witnesses to maintain a temporary status quo. Hats off.
I agree that some members from the sct community may have had more "actual requirements" - there's a range of people's attitudes and opinions, as in other communities.
Thank you for the PS part!
While I understand the initial reasoning, by keeping the deadlock up for so long you basically created a situation where the fork was unavoidable. There was a constant threat of another swift move by j where he could unilaterally change core concepts of the blockchain. There wasn't any negotiations happening any more, on the contrary, he blocked all of the other big stakeholders on Twitter.
You had a position to endorse negotiations, but you should have realized when that showed to be fruitless and acted accordingly. At the latest at the meeting in your discord, where he simply said yes to everything your community asked for without looking at any consequences.
Me and a lot of the other witnesses actually took the time to reply in detail to each point (I think under a proxy.token post), but you ignored us completely.
It seems that your view is quite different from mine, which is natural in "decentralization".
I think you know that we continue to try to discuss potential agreement, and we were asked to wait and suddenly there was a posting of fork and the communication stopped. I think I (or korean community) am the one who got fooled by (a few of) "hive leaders" by trusting them.
And let me clarify the last part of your reply. We did review your answers carefully (at least I did) and I mentioned/posted appreciation of sharing opinions several times.
It seems that you missed it. It is exactly the opposite of "ignored us completely".
The problem was, the answers were too general to make any concrete improvememt, so we were working on these specific details(or at least we thought).
I haven't communicated with you before, so I am not sure that we are on the same page. Let me conclude this with a simple summary:
While our views may be different, I respected your opinion and did not ignore at all, and even tried to reach potential agreement (albeit slim) until the hive post.
There are no "hive leaders", hive is a community effort. I'm again and again baffled how users who aren't involved in the governance at all come to see the witnesses as a homogeneous group. I'm here since the beginning, and have been a top 20 witness for the first 2 years or so, and you can believe me when I say that there are a lot of disagreements in this group and a lot of people only talk to each other because they're forced to do so by the voting results.
Regarding the agreement you hoped for, the replies you got made it clear that none of the changes you demanded would happen soon, because 1) some of them would break the system and 2) changes are not decided on by a closed group you could bargain with, but after extensive discussion involving the whole community (as it was happening with faster power downs before the whole j story).
You were pointed to the SPS, and it was repeatedly said that the first thing before anything else has to be stopping the centralization attempts.
It's of course up to you to feel betrayed, but to me that's only because you ignored or at least downplayed the statements you got. There wasn't any solution in sight as you kept demanding the changes you started with and did not respect the reasons those wouldn't be implemented (ever/soon). Nobody asked you to wait for something, you were asked to remove the support for centralization, which you weren't willing to do. Negotiations don't work when you put a gun on one party's head.
So I still stand to what I said before - the final reason for the fork was the deadlock you created. For weeks you gave j even more power than he already had and ignored the hundreds of users (including all big initial investors) who insisted on the dev fund being used as such and not to enrich a single person. You played a power game, and you lost it, because this is not about the power of certain groups but all of the community.
Maybe you will be happy in the end, because when we're all gone you may get what you want from j, he already promised you everything without constraints. Hive will be what Steem could have been without your blackmailing, and we all will see which chain will work out better in the end.
!ENGAGE 30
Btw these are things your community should be aware of (see comments): https://steempeak.com/steem/@steem-dragon/steemdragon
Checked the link: I think it is a trolling account - like justinsteemy. Haven't heard of them before and it seems that chinese users of SCT are not familiar with them either.
Don't you think it is interesting that within 2 minutes it was voted by Dev365? Could it be that it was created by TRON Foundation?
Stay critical, the new "overlord" does have a reputation. Sometimes there is just too much smoke (sometimes he also admitted things he was busted for). You/PT will be bribed and played. Good luck.
PS: I didn't approve of 22.2 and I dislike how 22.5 happened. But things happened and here we all are. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@glory7 you have received
30 ENGAGEfrom @fknmayhem!View and trade the tokens on Steem Engine.
Both will take a hit short term and perhaps steem will recover. I am sure there will be plenty of cross posters to add some content volume, but who will stay and vote on them is a question also
The negotiations never really needed to be aided. Once the centralization of the chain became an option, it should have been rejected utterly and completely.
My guess is the same that there will be lots of cross(double?) posters. We will see whether that would continue in the long run, though.
It will depend on value. There will always likely be some that will look to milk from as many sources as possible, but I have found that the ones who are looking to build homes, generally focus more on one platform - and they tend to be the ones who are also producing quality. Though, if there is an easy gateway to crosspost, perhaps more will use it.