81% of the block production for ETH is controlled by 5 mining pools...that is not the picture of a blockchain that is "totally decentralized".
https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks
As far as the possibility of Steemit Inc to dictate which top witnesses get elected that is a possibility but so far the stake in the @steemit account (which has about 75% of their total stake) has not been used for that purpose.
For Steemit to dump their stake on the market they would first need to power down. That will take 3 months to accomplish...no one would be taken by surprise.
That's a strawman argument. Pools don't control the mining rigs. If pools try doing something bad, the miners can simply switch to another pool or make their own pool.
And pools definitely can't just split the chain or make hardforks out of the blue like in steem where 20 people have that power.
Both dan and ned have powered down a lot of SP. And they can power down in 7 days a huge amount of SP which if dumped will crush price to 50 cents or less.
Block production is not a straw man argument. % of block production controlled by # of entities is the most important measure of centralisation by far as it determines the power to make changes to the blockchain.
This isn't true in Steem either. Nodes will reject blockchain forks that roll back anything further than a few blocks. It takes consensus among both economically significant nodes and block producers to fork, just as it does in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Objectively it takes a smaller number of entities to fork or 51% attack the Ethereum network than Steem.
People will always use the node that is used by steem inc because they are the ones running steemit. The primary gateway.
There is almost no other alternative.
congurlation. thank you dear @steemit. I'll be glad if you see my blog, may bee usfull for people. mery chrismass
I don't see the fact that 5 pools control which version of the software is used as a strawman argument. It is what it is. In the case of steem 1% of the accounts control the witness list...that is also a fact.
As it stands right now I don't see ethereum as being 1000% more decentralized than steem. Sure hypothetically the mining rig operators could switch pools but they don't the same way that other big stakeholders in steem don't vote for witnesses to fork the chain.
As far as Dan or Ned crashing the price I just don't see it happening (It would be more in their interest to sell gradually over time). While we are at it I would not include Dan and Ned in the same conversation (it's no secret that they don't see eye to eye since Dan split from Steemit Inc.)
Sorry, not 1%. It is 0.001%.
Etherium is not even started as mineable crypto, it began with crowdsale like ICOs and therefore, ETH corp have tons of cash from the initial sale which is no different from Steemit Inc having large holding.
Every coin has large holders through initial mining or crowdsale. Not to mention of Satoshi or Satoshi Lite, Charlie Lee of LTC. When people can mine with low difficulty, having 100K BTC or 1M LTC at initial stage does not matter. Moreover, more than the current amount of STEEM will be distributed in next 20 years to the users/miners which is very different distribution and fairer than BTC, LTC and ETH.
Most of the reward pool is actually going back to the early miners or investors because of their high stack and circle jerk + vote selling.
So, miners are going to get very tiny amount of that and most of it will go to 0.001%.
Did you know that 6.7% of reward pool is going to the pockets of one person? Do you know who that person is?
Do you understand that your assertion looks like a complete piece of joke?
@haejin, it is due to one whale @ranchorelaxo voted him with 1.34M SP VP several times. This is not a joke, it is evolving consensus or random act. It is an experiment where it was assumed that good whales will counter evil whales. It is hard to satisfy all the biases of human behavior ( circle jerk + vote selling). But it is better experiment than wasting energy equivalent of a country (e.g. BTC, ETH) through PoW mining. The VP in DPoS is incentivized for curation, however, the rules for VP can always be changed in future HF when consensus will arrive for better.
Satoshi also holds a ton of BTC, and could cash them out at anytime too..
Did Satoshi just take a dump today?
Corrections are natural and healthy :)
The comparison here is actually between steem and ethereum. And I have said it before and I will say it again, bitcoin is a shitcoin now. The fees are insane.
Haha! Proof that you don't know what the hell you are talking about. EVERYTHING is riding the Bitcoin wave.
Don't get me wrong. I am bullish on Ethereum. You don't gotta come in here talking BS about Steem though.
bitcoin is a shitcoin hahah :) satoshi will never do that .
The main point is that the fear about founders (or any large investor) cashing out their stake is of course always a concern, but it really only matters if they actually dump their stake. Dan and Ned have had plenty of opportunity to dump, but history has shown that they seem to be more interested in taking out small amounts over time in a way that doesn’t crash the price.
What Tim Cliff said above. Satoshi holds the majority of all coins/wealth of Bitcoin. He never burnt them off.
Lol. Noobs ....
He doesn't even hold 10% of bitcoin. You are lying.
if its not gaming you can't call somebody a noob >.>
What is a noob?
Lol, no wonder they call you "little" boy :P
Yes, actually he does hold a shiton on Bitcoin , yes, or no little boy ?
Go back to kintergarden and learn some English.
the pools still have options. They can do it quickly, or do it in the background.
They could power down and crush the price, but why would they do so without any reason. Why would some one build a business just to destroy it one day. I have seen many websites and businesses go down, but never seen anyone destroy their own business intentionally.
I think that only dan has powered down a lot, ned doesn't seem to have, unless you're talking about a different account he might have?
To add to your point, its advisable to invest in smaller coins with a moderate amount. Steemit coin is only going to grow. As at today one steemit coin on coin market cap is $3.09, now Imagine investing 100 - 500 usd and leaving it for 6 months (that's money we use for things we don't need anyways) . After 6 months or 1 year that steemit coin would have grown to 20 usd worst case scenario. That's some good money. That's being smart.
still the pool have a lot of people behind them so they can join another pool, not like Bitcoin. Is it more decentralized than dPOS based Steem? I don't know but steem would have a hard time recovering from a shutdown of the top witnesses. And voter apathy is worst than what people think.
Overall I don't think any cryptocurrency is as secure as they usually claim. I think the attacks are way cheaper than what they think and if it gets to a confrontation with governments or banks or any real power, we would loose.
Actually that is a non-issue. If a top witness goes down there is a big list of backup witnesses that can fill the void in a short period of time.
A real concern would be if the witnesses have there nodes setup on the same vps providers. In that case the blockchain can be crippled if let's say a government targets the data centers where the servers are housed.
Because the majority of the hashing power of the mining pools for Bitcoin & Ethereum comes from china both coins are not laying on a bed of roses. It would just take a political decision from the Chinese government to shutdown the mining farms (or worse bribe them or coerce them to act for their own selfish interest)
I understand your point. This is why I am a bit reluctant to use privex. I don't know how many witnesses use them.
What I meant was more like say the 40 was down. Are the rest that ready to take over and support this charge? I am not so sure. Also witnessing means having one node doing the job so more chance to be taken down. Actually, as a witness not in the top, it makes sense to attack and try to deactivate the other witnesses.