I've had my many, many issues with bernie and how he treats people with verbal assaults like "Fuck off child." I've been flagged by him for months because he sees me as a pretentious douchbag even though (his own words) he has read almost none of my actual posts which I've been creating here for two and a half years.
THAT SAID, I will at least give him credit for this: He has had Ned and Steemit, Inc pegged from the very beginning as being an existential risk to this blockchain which could not be avoided. We are starting to see the reality of this in a much broader view which few people can deny.
I truly despise the method he uses to communicate and obtain his "entertainment," but I at least respect the times he's not wrong.
I've gotten so frustrated over the years trying to point at facts to demonstrate where his flags or "fuck offs" were incorrect only to be responded to with "Oh how cute, you actually thought I cared about what you think?" type messages when (as you did below) the facts show his knee-jerk reactions such as calling you a leech were not the whole story.
All I can say is, I'm doing my best to let Bernie be Bernie. No one will change him. It's just words and flags after all, not real actual physical violence. I've learned to better understand my own emotional responses through his actions.
Such hyperbole does not become you or your position as witness, in my opinion, Luke.
As a witness, I understand threats to DPOS. A centralized, soon to be hidden, stake which is large enough for a single person to replace all witnesses and push out whatever code they want is an existential risk to this chain and always has been. That is not hyperbole. Ask anyone who truly understands DPOS, and I’d be very surprised to find any disagreement.
Do you know as a fact that the monthly six figure amounts tranfered to exchanges constantly over time have been 'sold off' to pay for servers? How do you know that those amounts have not been transfered back to the chain to build whale accounts like @freedom? Or more subtly by creating numerous Orca accounts?
How about you move for an HF that allows witnesses to reject a vote, like a mute, and see how many high principled wirnesses, as yourself, rejects their @freedom vote. Anyone that doubts the influence @freedom has on your witness position need only look at the following graphic. Their one vote comprises almost half of your witness support!
http://steemreports.com/witness-voters/
Could @freedom be Dan and you his agent? You are the one who brought up SP conspiracies. Have you dedicated yourself so much, as an EOS witness, that you are trying to sell the same over goverance crap to us?
Look at all the top 20 witnesses and look how many are there because of @freedom or because of some other witness voting circle jerk.
If your zeal had been used (when the pull request was first made) to post that you and other top 20 witnesses would not run an HF stealing STINC of their stake then perhaps STINC would not have overreacted by moving resources to exchanges. Instead there was radio silence from most witnesses or FUD posts like this one from those that had something to say.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks
I've been running the Exchange Transfer report for 126 weeks (I'm a couple days behind this week as I've been traveling) so I know better than most about what money is heading this way and that. Of course I don't know for sure but I do see movements to and from exchanges, even for orca sizes (my reports show the top 50 in both directions). Steemit, Inc themselves have said they do programatic selling, so I don't think this being made up.
I don't know who @freedom is and all my attempts to find out haven't made progress.
Reject a witness vote? That would be quite interesting. I agree, the Freedom account does represent a risk to the system, but those funds could be spread out into multiple accounts as well if they really wanted to hide their stake. The difference here, I think, is that Steemit, Inc via Dan Larimer way back in the BitcoinTalk days at launch made claims about how the funds would be used. Many in the community are frustrated with the downward selling pressure that brought that 80% stake down to 20% stake (and the price of STEEM with it). Also, Freedom doesn't have a previous track record of pushing in their own witnesses in order to deploy code (as Steemit, Inc did with HF9).
No, I'm not "Dan's agent." You sound silly saying that. I've never met Dan. To say what I've been working on since April with eosDAC "governance crap" is insulting, especially when I wrote this post helping the EOS community get out from under the ECAF constitution drama we've been dealing with.
What you call a "witness voting circle jerk" others call voting for people you know well who have put in more work that most people realize to secure this chain. I don't often look at who votes for me, and I don't make my decisions based on that at all. I can't speak for others in that regard.
I didn't even know about "the pull request" until I clicked a link to join a witness slack about a week ago. It was never a very serious threat, IMO, as it was just some dude who forked the code and created a PR. As I've said before, none of the consensus witnesses were ever fully serious about doing it, though it was being talked about. Ned over-reacted and/or used it as an excuse to power down more. At that point, I got voted into a committee of nine witnesses who then elected three people to talk directly with Ned to try and improve the broken community relationship. As part of that group, I agreed to keep things discussed there private (not at all my preference as I greatly value transparency). That's why I didn't post about what was being discussed.
And which FUD post are you referring to? The committee may not have accomplished much as we didn't prevent the power down or the exchange transfers, but there are more community discussions about the governance problems in Steem than ever before and that is a good thing.