Meanwhile, over on Blurt...

Blurt is a Fork of the Hive Blockchain which claims to be for free speech and against Censorship.

Blurt also has no Downvotes, so along with the same immutability as you find on Hive and Steem users have no capacity to reduce rewards if they disagree with them.

Blurt has been around for two years now and it's currently going through a bit of a crisis which has seen several users initiate massive PowerDowns.

The crux of the matter is that the main developer behind Blurt - @megadrive aka @thecryptodrive here on Hive (and a Hive Witness) recently put out a post saying he was going to freeze certain accounts, one of them being @ctime - who you may remember from Hive Downvoting anyone who got upvotes from SteemBasicIncome - I think he DVd accounts receiving upvotes from other curation projects too.

Anyway, from what I can tell @ctime seems to have taken the opportunity at some point over the last couple of years, along with @fervi (very possibly the same person) and bought an absolute fuck tonne of Blurt - getting on for 30 million between the two of them....

NB @megadrive has only 5M, but he also has the power, being the man behind the code, to freeze the governance rights on those two accounts, along with a few others, which is is precisely what he is proposing to do....

@megadrive points out that @ctime effectively has enough Blurt to control the Chain, which he sees as detrimental because of his previous support of harmful dapps and various other historical actions perceived to be harmful.

He also claims that whoever @ctime is has threatened his children and that this kind of sociopathic behaviour isn't good to encourage development or for the community more generally.

So we've got a situation where one person is hard-censoring some of the accounts which he sees as harmful.

Personally I don't know whether I would trust @thecryptodrive's judgement (see the @markymark's comments on his post about his dubious track record viz funding) but I certainly don't trust @ctime's track record here on Hive either, he was hardly a positive force.

This whole process has people a bit upset - especially @world-travel-pro who recently powered down all his Hive and spent I think all of it on Blurt - he's lost $1000s and probably feels like a bit of an idiot having produced his 'it's better on blurt' banner which you may have seen.

The problem of small ponds.....

You can whinge all you like about certain Whales on Hive neutralising certain people's rewards (NOT censoring, there is no censorship, that and reward reduction are completely separate), but for the most part it works - there are plenty of reasonable people on here who get by OK as long as they are not absolute dick heads.

And having personally met at least a third of the T20 witnesses, I KNOW they are reasonable human beings, that's a good basis for trust IMO.

It seems to me that many of the more toxic and desperate people were the ones who sold Hive and gambled on Blurt at least one of them seeing it as an opportunity to become a very big fish in a very small pond...

And now it's come to a head - and we find out that in the medium term it's been held hostage by what is probably one anonymous (and seemingly sociopathic) whale and the reaction from the founder is arguably worse - freeze his accounts...

And yes Hive has its issues, but for the most part it's decentralised enough and reasonable enough that we can all get by without this sort of thing happening!

Part of me feels a little bit sorry for anyone who sold all their Hive for Blurt, but mostly I'm just kicking back and enjoying the show from a distance!