Agreed 100% I am quite sure it is a ponzi scheme. The longer the big names in the top 19 witnesses hold out on refusing to address this issue, the more guilty they look. I laid out the scheme pretty clearly as to how there has never been any real power for anyone except the in-crowd over sufficient control to determine hard fork vetos, or not. Between @dan, @smooth, @abit, and a couple of others, there is sufficiennt voting power to pin at least 14 witnesses to the top 19, which basically means they control what little vestige of democracy there is.
Never mind the fact that steemit arbitrarily defines such changes as giving minnows a 25% vote capability (which is possible even with bandwidth limits), or even considering banning direct self voting, as 'feature requests' that repeating such offence (even if on different topics) will get you banned from the github, and that you must 'post it here in the forum' where, wouldn't you know it, anyone with any amount of voting power that could propel it to the trending page, where supposedly stinc might start to consider it, except they merely have to pointedly ignore such posts and nobody ever sees it and by magic, their power continues unabated.
It's the most gratuitously fake corporate democracy ever. The shares were issued to the inner circle at the beginning, and they have used their excessive share as a group to lock everyone else out. I am pretty sure that if this was a regulated asset (steem power), that the way these people acquired such a humongous share would be 'insider trading' because insiders, members or employees or other close associates, are not allowed to buy the shares until sufficient advertising has been made to offer shares to the public.
Make no mistake, steem power is a share. It even says so in the whitepaper, indirectly, right near the top, when it talks about reddit talking about giving users shares and this giving thtem power in the system.
Now that the SEC has ruled on the subject, I think that they should be informed that 250 million dollars worth of market cap included a closed early share issuance in digital form, that constitutes insider trading, and is being used to shut out competition within thte corporate democratic system and milk the small shareholders of their assets.
I have not either mentioned that the actual infrastructure has a built-in ticking timebomb in that eventually, the servers will not be able to complete a replay and the site will cease to work...
But people think I am exaggerating in all these things. How could I possibly be so sure about this? Go look up the limitations of graph database systems, for a start, and search for 'large binary blobs' in connection with this. Binary, or UTF-8, it really makes no difference. Large Blobs. Eventually it causes this type of database to become non-functional because of the explosion of indexes and index sizes. I wouldn't even be surprised if Graphene has a hard coded limit of 256Gb shared memory (if we are lucky, if it's 128Gb, it will exceed its own memory addressing capacity withtin 6 months).
I love reading your analysis, even though I'm unsure what to think.
I don't know enough about these systems to have an informed opinion on this, but do you think that this is Dan's warm-up act then, and before it technically exhausts itself, he will bring it down, and transition to EOS? Does EOS also have these technical problems, or have they been addressed in some way?
I do find it hard to imagine that the blockchain couldn't be somehow truncated (so a complete replay isn't necessary), and earlier stuff archived in some way, whilst the new continues. I know very little about blockchains though, and maybe I fundamentally don't understand the situation.
I do wonder why you worked at being a witness if you knew of the inevitable demise of the infrastructure, or did you learn that later?
Since Graphene is open source, would it not be fairly easy to determine to what shared memory limit is, if that's important?
Not happy to read that. If it is a Ponzi Scheme I should withdraw all my assets immediately and stop posting here. Not sure if I want to do that though. :(
I don't know what to say. It just pops the biggest bubble of hope in my life and I feel like I am drowning. Steemit was my last resort.