Quora Hive Awareness Initiative, Question Answered: "Why did some of the Steem witnesses decide to block the Steemit Inc stake from being used to vote for witnesses?"

It was actually nearly all of the consensus (the top 20) witnesses on Steem that did this. They also blocked Steemit, Inc’s stake from powering down (by refusing to process transactions to that effect) to prevent it from being tumbled on an exchange so that it could’t be used in a Sybil attack against Steem governance. (What’s a Sybil attack? It’s an attack by a single entity against a consensus mechanism by pretending to be many.)

The majority of consensus witnesses on Steem did this because the very first thing Justin Sun did after the purchase of Steemit, Inc was announced was to announce to the entire world that Steemit, Inc and all the applications on it would be migrated to the Tron blockchain and that there’d be a token swap where all STEEM would be swapped for a Tron-based token.

Here’s an article on Coindesk that covers the announcement on February 14 2020:

Steemit Sets Up Shop on Tron Network - CoinDesk

Making that happen would’ve been the death of Steem as a blockchain and an independent entity. Goodbye decentralization. Welcome total control by Justin Sun who controls the Tron foundation, which in turn has controlling stake on the Tron blockchain.

The community was extremely upset by this announcement. Matters were worse by an AMA by Justin Sun and Ned Scott. It did not clear up much, perhaps because the Tron foundation did not have any concrete plans as to what to do with Steemit and Steem at that point. What’s relevant here is that the AMA and none of the later statements did anything to persuade the Steem community that their chain would not be under threat. In later statements, Justin Sun said Steem would not be migrated to Tron - for now.

I’m not a consensus witness and I wasn’t there when the witnesses discussed their next move. They said the soft fork that prevented Steemit, Inc’s stake from voting on witnesses or powering down was done to get Justin Sun to the table to get some real answers from him.

That didn’t happen. What happened instead was the infamous operation in which Justin Sun lied to Binance and Huobi (he didn’t have to lie to Poloniex because he owns it) that Steem was under the control of malicious hackers, which he also announced to the world, and that customer funds were at risk unless the exchanges powered them up and elected Sun’s puppet witnesses as top witnesses.

An epic battle ensued where the community got organized and concentrated all its voting power on 20 community witnesses and was successful at wresting control back from Steemit, Inc. Votes from the Korean community and a number of others brought the situation to an impasse. The rest is history. I would say what ultimately happened was a total win for everyone concerned. The whole process showed the true power of decentralization and open source.

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