I'll have to remember the Chinese New Year tip- that certainly makes sense. Can Steem witnesses govern content? For instance, could they theoretically remove a block?
Considering Twitter's shadowbanning debacle and what the Cat has been doing to people on here, I'm wondering how reliable and secure the chain is.
Hopefully the community would vote wisely, but what could happen if a witness or group of witnesses decides to go rogue?
Yeah, apparently this has happened every year for the last 4 years so it should be expected really. I know a lot of folks are pretty rattled by it though lol.
And no, as far as I understand they don't have that kind of control over the network. They are simply running a server with the blockchain on it and being rewarded for processing transactions/blocks. And they generally have to come to a consensus on future changes to the blockchain code.
I'm sure somebody with way more experience with the Steem blockchain could chime in here on that though and provide more details of what control they do and don't have.