I want to add what I think is a very important piece of the puzzle. It seems to me that any entity can acquire a large stake at any point in time. In other words, what we have now is not a one-time problem. And most solutions being talked about treat this as a one-time problem.
The difference is that if any entity acquires a large stake, they've purchased it and invested their own money, and would have a different sense of urgency to see a return on that investment. In the situation we have now, that's not the case. A premine is a lot different than a whale purchasing a large amount of tokens.
I think any solutions discussed have to be about making changes to the protocol. What change can we make to the Steem protocol to enable the community to do blockchain development (i.e. not relying on Steemit, Inc. or any other single large stakeholder)?
This is the discussion that sparked the entire set of drama. We were having conversations about changes to the protocol to support community development before this entire situation blew up. We still are having those conversations, they're actually happening in the new slack we created right now.
Sadly, if we were to actually develop and make these changes and submit a pull request to the Steem codebase - they'd likely be rejected by Steemit Inc. That's the reality we're facing and why we even started talking about a fork.
Thanks for your responses, much appreciated.
Hmmm, this would seem to contradict one of the foundational principles of blockchain technology - that the stakeholders have in their interest to do what (they think) is best for the platform. If the community can improve upon the platform, then this would benefit all stakeholders. Steemit, Inc.'s tokens would rise in value. If they prevent the platform from being improved upon by the community, then: 1) the token price wouldn't be going up due to community efforts, so there is lost potential value there; 2) a lot of the community members may get super frustrated and leave, which means the network shrinking and the token's price diminishing.
Why would a large stakeholder on a DPOS chain not do everything they can to improve the platform and help others improve it? They stand to gain the most benefits.
As a sidenote, why would they devote resources to a dev portal if they didn't want others to contribute to development?
Taking a different angle now - if Steemit, Inc. wanted to exit (cash out), they would power down and sell their stake. I imagine the price would crash a little or a lot based on how quickly they sell and on the community's response (it could trigger a massive wave of selling). So I'm not sure what they'll get if they sell. They'll probably get a lot more in return if they sell gradually and do their best to help the community continue the platform's development. This might even increase the price as it could create a lot of excitement about decentralization.
In either case, somehow I can't see a large stakeholder as a malicious actor, even if they wanted a quick exit.
How do you see it?
Agreed, if you pay for something you tend to value it more than getting it for "free."