A security is a contract that provides you with some kind of circumscribed access to the pool of assets of a group, usually a corporation. In this case, it grants voting power for both assigning rewards and choosing witnesses. This conforms perfectly with a standard Stock contract. A security is publicly tradeable, via a licenced broker. In this case, we can say that means through the mechanism of the blockchain.
The issue is not about mining the SP, it's mining the SP, while such a capability was beyond the reach of the public. If a corporation makes an IPO, but they sell the first 80% of the initial offering only to friends, before anyone else can actually buy them, this is a violation of the whole principle of a PUBLIC offering. These securities thus cannot be publicly traded, or the company issuing them has violated the law. That means Steemit.
Code is not documentation, and those who mined it, and then did not reset the chain when Steemit.com launched, are in violation of the 1933 US act regulating securities issuance to the public. It does not apply to private issuance, but that does not apply to what Steemit and the preminer group did.
It is immaterial that we do not want the government involved in this, the law is still a valid law and still stands no matter where in the universe such an activity takes place. It is an absurd perversion of the word 'public offering' when nobody except for a little gaggle of ghouls with inside knowledge could take up this offer. They should have reset the chain, when it was offered to the public. But they had this mistaken idea, that they could use their premine to fund development. This is patently fraudulent. Why did they not just do like Dash, and allocate a share toward development.
I am not going to concern myself with how to allocate the stake to miners at this point. That can be left up to the new witness group and whoever wants to be the new babysitter of the forked Steem codebase. The main thing is the chain needs to be pruned, reset, while retaining everyone's accounts and current balances, minus that premine, and then, a group can organise a new company or developer group to take care of fixing all the headaches contained within the code, and make proposals for improvements, like the ones I have suggested.
I want to do this, at least, all the preliminary legwork, so that people have this option. I am pretty sure that there will be great interest in confiscating the chain from Steemit, who have proven they are completely irresponsible and despicable people. Same goes for most of the witnesses that they have blackmail relationships with relating to the premine stake controlling who is in and who is out.
It's a sorry state of affairs that is seems to have come to this. I have raised concerns over the steemit premine several times. My biggest concern has always been that. On the new chain, I think it is imperative to do an analysis on how much premined accounts have taken out so that those that got into this with the best intentions, who have not cashed out or are founders (especially ned and dan) are compensated. I don't know yet whether I would support a fork or not, it rather depends on how it is dealt with, how fair I perceive the distribution to be, how well looked after the founders are etc. I am certainly not against examining the possibility, especially if at the same time we can address legal issues, flaws resulting from distribution and technical aspects all at the same time.
The utility of steem and the community should be the greatest concern for us all.
>got into this with best intentions > DanHHAHHA, Ever wonder how almost everyone talking positively about Dan have a vested interest in one or more of his projects, or just a complete newbie who thinks Dan , the anarcho capitalist, aiming to secure life and liberty for all, will "revolutionize" the finance and tech sector. Just lol
Oh, and EOS is a complete joke as well
on his "rebuttal" against Vitalik's criticisms of EOS :
Not even exaggerating when I call him a shameless conman, people outside of steemit are literally laughing at the platform (and eos) and its founders.
Its a nice and innovative concept, but run by some really shitty people
EOS sounds like just another shady scam by a bunch of shady nerds, just like steemit (let a few insiders in first, let insiders build power/influence/vests, then let the general public in so those same few insiders can use and abuse the noobies for their own profit/gain while convincing said noobies they are part of something special that may make them rich some day)....
No thanks. I think I'd rather risk any potential investments I may make with the upcoming independent steem fork (free from Stinc) - Calibrae