When Justin took over our witnesses I felt a sudden sadness in me. I thought to myself: is that it? Did all these years of hope really just end like that? I was kind of surprised I had that reaction honestly, I have been in a very relaxed relation with steem but suddenly when I saw it being taken away from me I felt a genuin sadness and disappointment.
Because of that I would like to express my gratitude to the witnesses for the endless hours of negotiations they are doing on behalf of the community.
I would like to express the immense feeling of empowerment I have gotten from seeing all of you steemians regardless being a minnow, dolphin or orca taking action to make us all stronger. I hope I managed to do my small part by resteeming countless of witness vote posts(sorry to spam all of your feed) but also powering up to over 50k of SP once again.
This major crisis did truly answer my question I have been wondering for a long time;
Is the steem blockchain really decentralized?
I am not only talking about the technical term here, but also as an community and spirit.
After tron and the exchanges chose to vote in the puppet Witnesses it would seem like our system is flawed, that steem was indeed not as decentralized as we would like to think.
However the massive uproar of us made massive echo through the crypto space with such power of the people, that we made some of the biggest centralized exchanges bail with fear of loosing more of their reputation.
Now we have them eager to get their steem back. Or as I would say a nice firm grip by their stinky balls.
most of you know me from my cycling adventures. That's because I started my cycling adventures around Europe at the same time I started my steem adventure.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
We steemians love to fight amongst each other, like a small family in a too small house we wage wars between each other and our difference of opinions. Sometimes it also feels childish.
Most of the time we are not able to agree, we all have different visions of what's a better steem. But isn't that the beauty? We keep pulling each other's ropes and slowly but surely we shape the perfect blockchain as it is. I would never want 20 witnesses who would all agree and I hope you never will.
After past events the most clarifying truth is clear to me, we all wish the steem blockchain to live on and as soon as we are under attack, we do indeed stand together, regardless of our minor differences.
We still lack half our witnesses in top 20 it is hard to say that the blockchain is centralized on a technical level, But it is most certainly on a spiritual level
I told my friend that Justin acquiring steemit will either be the worst or the best thing that has happened to steem
And I am starting to think Justin buying steemit.com is the best thing that ever happened to us, just not the way we would expect.
Here is why:
Justin does indeed bring a lot of attention with him, both good and bad. We needed that badly.
The fact he pulled this major takeover might initially hurt our reputation but it seems like we are also getting a lot of recognition for our rally we have made to fight back. I would almost say we have gotten a certain amount of respect.
Now the world are watching and if we come through with our witnesses intact and (hopefully) peace with Justin, great things could come our way.
I don't like holding grudges and I still do hope we can find common grounds with Justin(the new steemit team) to find progress on our blockchain. We are going to live in the same house with them for quite a while, hopefully.
I hope Justin will learn a lesson here: Respect the community, acknowledge and communicate with us and he will have access to a very powerful community, just like we will have access to him and his resources.
Going against us and he will only hurt himself.
Good faith versus our pride
We are in a powerful position now, the exchanges are surely pushing Justin to get their steem back and Justin are begging us.
From a moral standpoint giving in for the exchanges and let them withdraw their funds is absolutely nonsense. Why would we, they went completely against our values.
From a strategic standpoint The exchanges have not started powering down yet and it could indicate a threat they will do the same again, prepare the code, make another takeover and fork their funds out. This will surely hurt their reputation even more but more so ours. I think they are holding back on it to avoid anotherbacklash once again and give even bigger uproar. But if they get desperate who knows?
It might be a super unpopular opinion but maybe it is not far fetched to let them have their funds back and building the bridge again with Justin? It all depends on what values we put in it. Again our differences of opinion is what is needed here. Please don't judge me for entertaining that thought.
Overall it's a very complex situation with a lot of nuances. Let us believe our witnesses will make the right calls on behalf of us.
Whatever happens I am proud of being part of such a great community.
Our future might be unclear but I have a feeling this attack awakened the beast of a community that we are, probably even more than ourselves would have known. Stay strong guys!
I'm a proud steemian, are you?
SteemON!
-holm
Aww, that was a nice read :) Especially from someone who I thought was not interested in Steem that much anymore. I have said that many times in many posts and comments but this epic uprising of our community has made me prouder than I had ever been, even if we were to lose I thought but now I am more and more confident that we will come out of it as the ultimate winners. Moreover, as I mentioned in my yesterday post, the crypto world is watching and supporting us ;) Did you know that CuKoin, after watching our brave fight, want to list us? ;)
Hah I'm always in the back line watching! Yeah I heard that and that's exactly my point! We are recieving a lot of acknowledgment from the outside world!
Exactly ;) Well, their tweet literally made my day...
If the exchanges were to act in good faith and if they truly had been blindsided, they would've started powering down in a heartbeat.
This thing has potential to seriously diminish trust in Binance, Poloniex and Huobi. It could end up costing them billions of dollars down the line.
The exchanges have their customers assets frozen for 30 days. If I was a customer I would move my STEEM into a SteemIt account.
That would force the exchanges to buy steem and will raise the price of steem. WINNING.
And indeed for the first time in years STEEM is rising when Bitcoin is falling.
A customer of Binance, for example, cannot move their STEEM into a Steem account at the moment because Binance (and Poloniex and Huobi) have powered up their customers' STEEM. Steem Power is non-transferable. What the exchanges have to do is power down to give back their customers' access to their liquid STEEM. That will happen in 13 installments once a week. A half of consensus witness positions on Steem are currently controlled by community witnesses who aren't going to agree to a hard fork that would allow the power down period to be reduced to instant, which would allow for the exchanges to give their liquid funds back. The exchanges haven't even started to power down, yet, because they're hoping for Justin Sun to be able to pander to the Koreans' demands so that they would vote for his sock puppets and make the hard fork happen in spite of the opposition of the community.
Our job is to make Binance, Huobi and Poloniex pay the full price for their using custodial funds to participate in the governance of a DPoS chain. They might use their voting power a second time out of desperation but that would cause so much bad press that they could end up losing billions, which is what has to happen because large exchanges stand in the way of the vision of decentralization.
I know how Steem and VEST work. No need to explain.
I'm sure the exchanges didn't power up all of their STEEM and left a few liquid steem in reserve.
If now customers demand to transfer their STEEM into SteemIt accounts and those reserves dwindle exchanges will have to buy new steem to meet customer demands.
They can't tell there customers to wait a week. The exchanges have to provide the coin within minutes when the customer demands them.
I don't think its a coincidence that STEEM is rising since Monday:
It's absolutely true that any remaining liquids should be transferred of all the exchanges.
More than the remaining. So that the exchanges run out and have to buy from other exchanges who didn't participate.
Thanks for using eSteem!
Your post has been voted as a part of eSteem encouragement program. Keep up the good work!
Dear reader, Install Android, iOS Mobile app or Windows, Mac, Linux Surfer app, if you haven't already!
Learn more: https://esteem.app
Join our discord: https://discord.me/esteem
Hi @holm!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.183 which ranks you at #2028 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 10 places in the last three days (old rank 2018).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 86 contributions, your post is ranked at #8.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
Congratulations @holm! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPDo not miss the last post from @steemitboard:
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!