I've said it before, and it appears to be confirmed with each passing day. SteemTron is a centrally-controlled database which will become irrelevant over time for those who actually care about blockchain technology, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, resilience, anti-fragility, and the core principles of distributed and decentralized community-engaged governance that give cryptocurrency value.
I'll try to explain as best I can in small, tweet-sized bites why I believe Steem is now Hive and what is currently called Steem should be considered SteemTron.
in 2016, Steemit, inc launched a PoW blockchain and ninja-mines 80% of the tokens telling the community they will be used for the community and not for Steemit, inc's own profit. There is no contract between them and the community, but see interviews, 2017 roadmap, etc
The community is constantly frustrated with Steemit over the use of this stake with some even threatening to null out the keys for it last year. I and other witnesses stated plainly we will not do that. Example: https://steempeak.com/stopthepowerdown/@lukestokes/is-steem-centrally-controlled
On February 14th, Justin Sun and Tron buy Steemit, inc, Steemit.com, and 20% of all STEEM tokens which Steemit still had left over from the original 80% ninja-mine. Without their consent, Tron tells Steem community they are moving everything to Tron.
Community understandably responds with, "WTF? The hell you are! We invested in STEEM, not TRON." AMA with Ned/Justin is a joke, questions unanswered. All attempts at clarification are met with empty statements which later prove completely false.
STEEM holders, witnesses, and app developers see Tron's statements (example, Poloniex saying you can swap "Old STEEM" for "New STEEM" on Tron) as an immediate threat to their on-chain Steem value and demand something be done.
Tron Foundation votes on the Tron chain with foundation tokens not meant for governance. Sets a precedent for what STEEM investors think he will do on Steem. Still no useful communication between witnesses and Tron (email back channels open with me and others remain unused).
Witnesses make the difficult decision to deploy soft fork 22.2. It's described as a temporary measure: https://peakd.com/steem/@softfork222/soft-fork-222 Individual witnesses publish their views. One consensus witness disagrees with freezing liquid tokens and is voted out.
Soft fork 22.2 freezes the ninja mined stake, prevents it from being powered down or participating in governance. It's an easily reversible code change and not a theft or ransom. All token balances are intact.
As a side note, I disagreed with freezing tokens and only wanted to prevent voting temporarily until we could learn the intentions of the new owner. I was overruled by consensus. Discussions about property ensue: https://peakd.com/softfork222/@lukestokes/what-is-property-is-it-defined-by-consensus
Justin Sun responds to 22.2 positively the same day it is deployed: https://steemit.com/steemit/@justinsunsteemit/open-letter-to-steem-community There is no mention of "hackers" or "theft" at this point. A Town Hall is scheduled for two weeks in the future.
Without community notice, Justin Sun tricks exchanges into powering up user stake and deploying v0.22.5 to single-handedly control the chain. Pretending to be multiple witnesses, it's essentially a Sybil attack: https://peakd.com/steem/@lukestokes/fact-steemit-sybil-attacked-the-steem-blockchain He calls community witnesses hackers.
With Steemit's intentions now clear, the community wishing to create a new chain which honors the original intention of the Steemit ninja-mined stake grows. The idea behind Hive is born.
Myself and others make a last ditch effort to help Justin realize he's about to lose all the value he invested in because the value of any cryptocurrency is in the community supporting it: https://peakd.com/steem/@lukestokes/the-value-is-always-with-the-community
Within less than a day of launching Hive, the list of accounts that will not be included in the airdrop is released. CoinDesk interview of Blocktrades says it will be ninjamined stake. Hive announcement says it will include those who support centralization.
When I see the list includes hundreds of accounts who proxied or voted to support sock puppets, I strongly disagree and push back hard. I consider not running a Hive witness over this issue as I think it will become a big PR problem for Hive.
Eventually, I decide to accept it because I'm told the proposal system will be fairly used to let the Hive token holder community decide which excluded accounts should be allowed to get an airdrop. https://peakd.com/hive/@lukestokes/witness-update-running-v0-23-0-to-support-hive
Hard Fork 23 is deployed which creates a new chain known as Hive. Other than the accounts involved in centralizing the chain (and some errors) all token balances on Steem are airdropped on Hive. All content is preserved. Steem is unaffected.
Steemit starts censoring accounts (including one of mine, lukestokes.mhth) on the Steemit.com interface.
Some errors are discovered in the Hive airdrop exclusion list. Some accounts were excluded in a way that didn't fit the criteria. Community members make it clear this will be fixed for those accounts with a future update. Others can use the proposal system in the future.
Originally, myself and some other witnesses agree to run nodes on both chains to support Steem until people can power down. I discuss this with token holders on both chains and decide to shut down my node as I will not support censorship. https://peakd.com/steemisdead/@lukestokes/i-ve-decided-to-shut-down-my-steem-witness
As the community hostility towards the centralization of Steem continues, Steemit begins censoring accounts on the Hivemind API level. Now posts censored on Steemit are now also censored on Steempeak, Busy, etc as there are no other community APIs running.
Meanwhile, Hive thrives with growing community support every day. Apps that used to run on Steem continue moving to Hive and even though the volume is still low, exchanges begin listing Hive and the token price is holding, in some cases doing better than STEEM.
Soft fork 22.8888 is deployed which locks 8 accounts including an exchange from transferring tokens, powering down, voting, etc. This is, once again, a centrally controlled action with no community input. Via the dev365 proxy, witnesses who don't agree are removed.
Of the 21 “witnesses” supporting 22.8888, only 1 published about the code deployment (unlike 22.2 where all witnesses posted their views). 5 of these sock puppet witnesses have never posted on chain at all.
SteemTron is no longer a blockchain. It is not Byzantine Fault Tolerant, it has no resilience, is not anti-fragile, is not immutable, and is not decentralized or distributed. Hard Fork 23 will be remembered as the moment Steem renamed to Hive.
Anyone can run code and call it a blockchain. It's open source and permissionless. What creates a real public blockchain is distributed consensus. Hive has that consensus. SteemTron does not. What matters, as always, is human conscious attention.
Hive is 4 years old.
Exactly. You get it.
To view this as a tweet thread, go here:
I think previous Steem blockchain should be called Justine's chain so anyone clearly understand that all there depends on mood and likes/dislikes of the only person. If he in bad mood he can steel your assets and nobody will help.
😂👏
*Justin's fancy crappy database
Super fancy.
I like SteemTron, but you're right, this all seems to be driven by Justin and not the larger Tron community. They don't seem to be calling him out on it though.
I think you mean Justin and not Justine (@justineh)
Yes, I'm sorry for the mistake
That's ok!
Wonderful summary, and with references! Love it.
@tipu curate
Over there, the "100 Days of Steem" official posts started with empty platitudes, then claimed surprise at sock puppet code deop, and now claims a "bump in the road" as an excuse for dropping the ball already on day 3. I still hope the mess can be salvaged, but I appreciate HIVE existing as a substantial alternative to hope despite the flaws in its launch. As the old saying goes, wish in one hand, s[p]it in the other, and see which fills faster...
I'm afraid that their "bump in the road" will turn into a boulder as more and more accounts come to Hive.
The wheels have come off, despite their assurances to the contrary.
That's what it looks like to me too. I've been writing for a news service so I don't have a lot of time to pay attention. I have to rely on guys like you to keep abreast with what's going on... so thanks!
They are driving stick horse...
Great article!
Time to powerdown steem and power up hive!!
Fantastic summary. That's the whole story that matters.
Beautifully described the whole transition. Cheers
Really good write up Luke. This is where I will begin pointing anyone who wants to learn the current history of changes
Yes,indeed. This is how it evolved. And just today STEEM vital organ stop functioning when intern's administer a wrong dose of medicine.
Yeah! Go get-em tiger!
Justin is an idiotic scammer
Great summary. One correction in point 1 "There is no formal signed contract".
There may indeed have been contracts formed incorporating promises re use of the ninja-mined stake.
There are no contracts between the community at large and Steemit, inc. Do you know of any? You say there may have been, but if so, where are they? How would the community have counter signed them? Who would have signed to represent the whole community?
To me, a "social contract" is not a real contract. A real contract is signed by actual people.
I'm not talking about a social contract. Legally binding contracts incorporating representations about the use of the ninja mined stake were likely formed between Steemit Inc and each person who signed up for Steem on their website as well as the other early ninja-miners.
Is there a possibility that a blacklist error occurred at the fork?
I have several people in the community who were blacklisted by HIVE and not blacklisted by Steem. The amazing thing is that many of them had months to go unreported
When you say blacklisted by hive do you mean the people who were not included in the airdrop as an error? My understanding is that's a small percentage of the three hundred or so that were excluded due to their voting and proxying activity. When you say "months to go unreported" I'm confused. Are maybe describing a different blacklist? If so, Hive doesn't blacklist anything. I think there are some services that maintain spam lists. Is that what you mean?
These people were included in the airdrop. i mean they spamiator blacklisted when the fork and steem are not. it's just curiosity I think that they haven't even found out because they haven't published for months
A great post very concise! I am blown away with what is happening, still at disbelief but I had a post taken down and it appears this censorship is all too real and likely marks the death of the steem blockchain.
Thanks for the summary Luke.
One thing that frustrates me the most about this whole episode is a dapp owner and Steem witness whom I once believed was doing the best for Steem and supported as a witness, is now saying the ex top Steem witnesses are childish and full of shit because they attack the Steem network. Their view is that the Hive blacklist effectively robbed people of their investment (you can't rob someone of something they don't own). Yet they fail to mention that those who supported 22.888 yesterday are the real robbers, robbing those accounts of the stake they really own.
I fully agree with 99% of these, but there's an attack vector still here to be addressed. We have effectively mirroed every post/comment that the Steem chain had until the fork date, that includes the content on the users excluded from the airdrop... Despite I agree with the exclusión criteria and I am very happy with the fact that we have the appealing process, the content of the excluded accounts mustn't be carried over. This is property of the user who post it, and even though each excluded user still has access their Hive accounts, they don't have enough enough HP to delete this content if they don't want to be on Hive.
This can be seen as intelectual property theft and we should solve this issue ASAP.
Very interesting perspective. Do you know of anyone who would like to modify their content on Hive but don't have enough resource credits to do? If so, please have them contact me. I'm happy to delegate to them so they can clear out their blogs and comments.
The content on the chain is completely open and public. I wouldn't at all consider it the intellectual property of the author since any website can access it and use it however they want (including using it to gain money through ads, etc). Posting on chain is at your own risk, knowing it's all completely public and immutable.
According to the Steemit terms of service, "You retain ownership of and responsibility for Content you create or own ("Your Content")."
Steem is not Steemit.
Still, you can't copy and display other people's content. Forking is essentially doing that. This is an interesting problem for blockchain forks related to content.
But you can. The content displayed on each interface is a copy from the blockchain, converted to html and sent to the browser. Not only that, when it comes to the blockchain itself, anyone can copy the data there and do whatever they want with it. Might they later get hit with a copyright violation or plagiarism? Maybe, but how is that different than a website displaying the chain data? There's also the Ship of Theseus identity philosophy to consider. Which is the “real” blockchain? Is it Hive or SteenTron? I’d argue right now it’s Hive and the SteemTron copy centrally controlled is not legitimate as it doesn’t have the characteristics that contributed to the original content store as that content was posted.
Hi Luke, not sure we've really crossed paths before now but your informative post appeared on my feed and read the comments section and found this comment you made
Now that's definitely an interesting perspective and not something I'd considered before. My understanding when I first joined steem was that having content published on a Blockchain would be able to act as a copyright timestamp and in a way, protect content creator's work but is this not the case?
I embed Spotify links to my music which I publish here via steempress so this revelation is sounding massive alarm bells now
Sure, you can certainly use it as a reliable time-stamping mechanism, even as a form of notary (example). I think that’s separate from thinking you can somehow control how the blockchain content is used. It’s completely public. How would you prevent someone from accessing it?
I honestly cannot remember between the hundreds of comments I have been reading during this last four weeks which was the one pointing out this issue...
About the nature of the content, my assertion is based on something I read about CC0 when I was learning the guidelines of the SteemSTEM community (not so sure how they rebranded the site when they packed and moved from Steem), they made us read a lot of material about copyrighted content ( if my memory serves my well) and there was a section that explained that every post an individual makes is copyrighted unless explicitly stated otherwise... As for the public nature of the Steem blockchain, sure we all know that the content is free for everyone to access it, but it is not legal to make unauthorized copies of these contents. At the end of the day the Steem ledger is not the Hive ledger and the authors posted their contents on Steem.
Actually, I raised this issue today on the Hive discord Chanel, they said that because of the nature of the distributed ledger there was not helping it, we need to copy the text data on each block and that include the authors posts (I know very well how the blockchain works so I understand that, but how this applies to the images we are also mirroring to other storage infrastructure for Hive? There were authors who's post were about photography, and that is the central part of the value of their posts).
I proposed a solution, actually inspired on Justin's censorship... We should grant the ability to each user to make unavailable their contents on the API layer as Justin is doing with the censored post... But the reply was more like I have not been making much sense, that the content each front end displays is responsibility of each front end manager and that each API provider manages it's node as he/she wishes.
I'm not willing to push this further because I have not researched in depth the legal framework of this issue, I just suggested to do this with the idea to wash out some of the dirt the launch of our platform has... Justin's giving us the best of the opportunities to show how we can do the things right while hi's trashing years of dedicated work of hundreds of steemians... But, from what I grasped at the discord, the consensus on this point is that this is not worthy the effort. My opinion is that anything that can be done to distance ourselves from the ill practices of Steemit new and old administration will be great marketing for us. What's your opinion on this?
I agree with you on every single point, and I might use this post as the basis for telling the story of Hive.
Thank you. That was my intention: create a clear view of how we got here.
This is exactly what happened, thanks for the concise and well-documented summary, I retweeted on Twitter
Thanks. That was my hope to create something useful to tell the story as it happened.
thanks for this post, really helped me understand what is going on.
This is a realistic summary. You have always been a voice for reason. You treat others kindly and respectfully. I really believe that if more acted like you without the childish and vulgar attacks and memes it could have been a separation and not a war. Both cause pain but the latter kills innocent victims.
I feel sorry for projects like Appics and some individuals who have been caught in the crossfire.
Things just keep escalating as many keep throwing fuel on the fire. Now I fear that JS will just continue to seek revenge. This is hurting many that are trying to power down and exit Steem. I hope that I can exit Steem safely. I invested 10’s of thousands of dollars there.
Thanks for what you have done @lukestokes your points 9 and 15 show your fairness and reasonableness. I actually hate the politics and infighting. I’m here to have fun, help others succeed and create a little side income.
Thank you. It’s a tough situation all around and I think it could have been handled better by Steemit and Justin Sun. I’ve tried to point out the things the Hive community could have done better, but at the same time, I’m not convinced I was right. The community supporting 0.22.8888 might need to be excluded from Hive if they’re intentions really are to attack, centralize, and censor accounts on chain. Maybe I was wrong. Either way, it’s been a tough situation and I hope all sides gain some humility and learn from these mistakes to further improve and secure DPoS.
@lukestokes, thanks for the summary. Do you know how to move Steem Dollars to Bittrex so I can sell them? When I try to sell, I'm taken to the global Bittrex site, which is unavailable to Americans. When I delete "global" from the address bar, I can access my personal Bittrex account, but have no way of moving the coins from Steemit to Bittrex.
How are you able to sell your Steem tokens?
Sign up for bittrex US.
Great timeline @lukestokes. How convenient that the Tron purchase and ensuing chaos happened at a time when traditional social media censorship is at an all-time high and the world is at a turning point in history.
We know that decentralization is the answer to the chaos. I'm glad the community realizes this and has forked.
I hope those who still haven't realized this catch on soon. It seems to me there are people that still think centralization, control, and censorship are appropriate.
next time...zero out bad actors BEFORE they can do anything; who @justinccp is, was very clear at the time, sans any need for hindsight
...and be very, VERY careful about bring in the folks that supported @justinccp
In fact, just dont. only bring in the folks that got blacklisted on error.
the others? make them sell out on Steemit, and BUY into HIVE
maybe they'll learn their lesson that way, but I doubt it: I have yet to see a single one of them admit to a mistake.
Do you really want them making that same kind of mistake here?
That's certainly one perspective that many people share. As I said, my perspective was overruled by consensus. I mentioned in some comments here that I may have been wrong and the right choice was to exclude them.
However, the flip side is once we make the decision that some people are okay and others should be excluded, how do we prevent that from becoming a slippery slope? Who sets the criteria and how is it ratified by the community?
you are right in that you have to go by your conscience in making these choices; however, I think we all need to be more harsh in making those decisions with known bad actors
Very clear and understandable summary, Luke. I admire the fact that you have often served as "the voice of reason and moderation" in what seems to often have been emotionally charged times.
I often remind myself that back in the very early days, Dan referred to Steem/Steemit (back when those lines seemed very blurred) as "an experiment." I just hope we have collectively learned from that experiment as we now set forth with this new experiment known as Hive.
Agreed.
This post is a document that historians will look back on. Perfect accuracy.
Dude, don't do that... That is some BCH brand stealing BS right there. Steem is "Steem" and you guys made something else. If that is not true, then you guys stole from the people that got blacklisted. So don't call Hive Steem.
I know you, Luke, were opposed to the blacklist, which I respect. I feel you and Aggroed were some of the more noble individuals in the fork. But it is not okay to say that Hive is the whole damn Steem community, because it is not. Powerdown/up data shows that Steem is not experiencing a mass exodus with Hive receving mass adoption. That is just not happening.
Steem still exists, it has lots of users that want to stay there and they have a right to not have people telling lies about their blockchain and their asset. Hive is a competitor and I wish you all well in your endeavors, so let it be an honorable competition.
What competition? Are you still calling Steem a real public blockchain? That is the lie, right there, IMO. Describe to me how Steem is still a public blockchain and use some evidence, please. I have a computer science degree from UPENN, and I've been in the blockchain space for over seven years. Steem lacks the characteristics of a public blockchain. Hive retained those characteristics.
You say “you guys” as if it was small band of people. This was the major applications, investors, witnesses (who actually know how to maintain the chain, price feeds, etc), and community members who have been with Steem since the beginning or very near it.
In time, I do believe Steem will experience an exodus from those who actually care about the blockchain fundamentals that made Steem worth participating in. If you and others who want to stay on Steem don’t care about those fundamentals anymore, than fine, rename your centralized system to something else. Don’t pretend it still has the key components Hive never lost: the blockchain community.
All DPoS systems are pretty much centralized. I always had that problem with Steem, and Hive has not solved that. You said it yourself when I checked out your youtube video. DPoS is a problem. It scales the best, but when push comes to shove we're sacrificing decentralization for 3 seconds.
There is a holder that has incredible influence over Steem. Still, before Justin came around how much more influence did Freedom or Smooth or Dan have compared to the average user? These three people have more control over Hive than thousands of people combined. That's not decentralized.
Steem has an asset connected to its brand. When BCH forked off from Bitcoin they sought to take the brand and call themselves the "real Bitcoin" and that's what you are doing now. It wasn't right for them to do that and it isn't right for you to do that. Like I said, if Hive is "Steem" then the witnesses running the blockchain that removed coins stole from those accounts. I know you didn't support that, but you're running it, right?
I understood why BCH forked off and I get why you guys wanted to fork off. I have no problem with the fork having happened and I sincerely hope for the best for Hive. But there is an honorable way to do it and a dishonorable one.
This fork involved alienating large segments of the Steem community, primarily the South Korean community. Is Hive the Steem "community"? Well, the US is about 15% of the community, while the South Korean community makes up about the same amount.
Westerners are more focused on the concept of decentralization for some reason, I assume its the Enlightment history in our culture that they do not have in their culture. Still, they don't seem to have a big concern over the decentralization argument. What will matter to them is a new fork trying to hijack the brand. That's how Bitcoiners felt about BCH, and its a legitimate position.
A new blockchain needs to work on its own brand and grow its own community without going around saying we're the "real one" now. Like any social platform users are free to come and go, but Steem remains Steem. If Hive is the "real Steem" them y'all owe a bunch of people their "STEEM" you took. But I think you don't owe them that "STEEM" because Hive is not Steem.
All consensus systems have centralization challenges, including PoW and PoS.
For some reason? Like, maybe that’s the ENTIRE POINT OF BLOCKCHAIN CONSENSUS security models? It’s tiring dealing with so much ignorance about this technology and what makes it work. I’ve been trying to educate people for over seven years on it. If you don’t understand Byzantine Fault Tolerance, you don’t understand blockchain.
I’m not going to cloud the debate about Hive here due to analogy, but there are some very influential and OG bitcoiners who will privately say BCH is more accurately the original peer to peer digital cash intention of bitcoin and thus deserves the original name. Again, I’m not going to waste energy debating that because it’s clear they lost that battle and unless bitcoin really screws up in the future and does something which clearly centralizes it further (which some believe they will do depending on how the lightning network evolves), then that will not change.
You speak as if it the airdrop criteria was arbitrary. As you said, I didn’t agree with it, it I do understand it. Those who are actively attacking a chain and centralizing it are a threat to the value of that chain. Those who don’t understand blockchain will not understand this. Thaat doesn’t make it any less true.
If you think you understand public blockchains, pleases explain to me how Steem is still a blockchain? Demonstrate the blockchain characteristics it still has according to its DPoS consensus algorithm? I’ve been a technologist since 1996 and I don’t see it.
What I do see is cognitive bias from those who can’t let go and face reality.
The Hive Community is strong. We will not be centralized or bullied into believing deceptions or lies.
Here's how I see it now:
Steem == Whaleshares == Weku == Bearshares
It's only a matter of time before Steem is worth about 0.02 Bitshares tokens apiece like the others. Or in this instance, 0.02 TRX apiece. All the same rubbish.
Hive is now the only legitimate project with any future.
It will be interesting to see how long Justin can fund keeping the price of Steem above 10 cents.
헛소리 하시네.
hive는 한국인을 제외했다.
인종차별이며 초중앙집권이라는 증거다.
그래서 hive는 블록체인이 아니다.
Google translate:
No, Hive did not “exclude” Korean. This is not about race at all. I already stated I didn’t agree with excluding those who supported centralizing the chain, but that what it was about. If some in the Korean community want centralization, they can have it on Steem.
It was not evidence of centralized power. There was a significant number of token holders, application builders, and witnesses in the discussions that created Hive. I know. I was there. Were you? Saying factually incorrect things again and again doesn’t make them true.
What is a blockchain to you? Seriously. Please answer that question so we can all better understand your position. Your answer will plainly demonstrate why your statement about Hive is false.
totally agree with you on this. the fact that someone who has been posting about flowers and insects and beaches is now a top 20 witness on steem says it all.
JS planned this soo well before we all went into social distancing that we can't even get the printers to print out cool new t-shirts.
really great summary of what has been going on!
Thanks for this. It's nice to have a short (relatively) write up of the events.
Every DPOS blockchain will become irrelevant. (it's about to be replaced)
Replaced with what?
As someone who entered Hive after leaving Steem 3 years ago...
I see the action missed.
In fact, this is that post everyone will refer to.
Love the tweet-sized bulleted bites.
Not that anything means anything, but is there an explanation for the recent crash of HIVE price along with the stability of Steem price?
More HIVE tokens were sold in a given moment than HIVE tokens were bought.
...
I wasn't trying to be sassy, but in case that was unclear, I'll be more verbose:
Considering that one point of pride mentioned in several posts I've seen was that HIVE had a higher price than Steem in the couple of days following the chain split, and that that position is now reversed, are there any likely inciting incidents for the dramatic shift that other, more connected Hivens may have become aware of and posted about that I haven't noticed? Have there been public opinions by prominent users or behavior changes by whales?
Since my last post, I've been told that... Justin Sun's witnesses have frozen the Steem in some whale accounts. Perhaps their exodus from Steem into Hive was driving the value of Hive up and Steem down for a while? Is that possible, or was I misinformed and/or am I mistaken as to the economic causes and effects of coin pricing?
In the 7+ years I've been in the cryptocurrency space, I've rarely if ever seen rational reasons for why prices do anything. Occasionally hacks lead to price swings, but mostly it's just post hoc rationalizations. In this case, I don't know what happened, but I imagine some who don't like Hive wanted to make a point by obtaining Hive and dumping on the market and keeping the sell pressure there to keep the price low.
Not speculating on who that someone might be, eh? ;P
Can you show the Steem chart also? I'm curious how much of this is bots. I (and others as well) turned off automated voting during this craziness.
Good point, Luke. @freebornangel brought up the same thought about bots on a thread we had on STEEM. Not sure if @arcange is still doing STEEM stats or not. My guess is that things are down with STEEM too. @freebornangel also mentioned that their autovoting has ground to a halt which could also be a strong indicator.
The first sentence of the post linked is:
"This statement has been co-authored by the Steem community, which includes witnesses, developers & stakeholders."
This is completely misleading, I haven't been asked anything...even though I am a developer as well as a stakeholder...
I think they meant "the top 20" since most of them are "witnesses, developers & stakeholders."
Let's stop blinding people, we all know that the people who did that, they did it for their own sake and not for the community otherwise they would have actually asked the community and I'm pretty sure that several people, like the witness that got voted out, would have had a totally different opinion...
But I guess that's the problem of DPoS in its current implementation. Let's not forget that what's happening right now on Steem could easily happen on Hive as well...
This other sentence by itself proves how centralized Steem/Hive are "This update is reversible, and is simply to be used to ensure that the security and decentralization of the Steem blockchain remains intact." (it wouldn't be that "easy" to deploy an update otherwise)
In the end, I personally don't think this post is showing the complete truth.
I returned to Steemit last week after 6 months of absence and I discovered all the mess that happened. I wish I read a post like this earlier, I tried to understand what happened by reading post/comments on different sites (Steemit included) and watching videos of people complaining on YouTube.
This is a great post and I think that it will be really appreciated by both new Hive users and old Steemit users who will return to the site after a break and realize what happened (as I did).
I'm very glad to hear it helped you find your way home on the blockchain. :)
Thanks for the delineations
Great summary! Thanks!