What Does Decentralization Mean To Me?
Hello everyone in the steem world. I know that some of you know me and have seen me talking on the pal discord. If you have you will know that I have been defending @justinsunsteemit a little. I wanted to make this post after seeing @theycallmedan put out this post asking for us to talk about decentralization. I am not going to be taking one side here and just telling you my thoughts on what he is getting at asking this question.
What Does Decentralization Mean To Me?
* I am going to try and answer each question that was put in the post. I am also going to add a bit more on the issues that are going on here. I will start with it. What do you think are the fundamental building blocks of blockchain? One of the things that I think is very important about blockchain is that is is an open ledger that one person or small group can change. This is what can make it so safe from ever being taken away from you. No government can get it from you without your keys. In a real push yes they might get it. But this gives many people of the world a way to protect themselves from hyperinflation. This takes a lot of power away from men that would take over a ruin a country. Living in the USA I have not had to face things like that yet I know it happens to people. Rich or just doing well one day and the next the money you own has no or little value. Blockchain can also be used to track goods and improve supply lines. But I don't feel that is what they were made for.
Next, he wants to know about this What does decentralization mean to you, is it important, why? Decentralization is the idea that no one person can control an assist or ledger. That the code that drives the crypto can't just be changed and bam everything is different. This is important because without it people could take away all the best parts of the blockchain. For that reason it is important. If the servers controlling the code are not decentralized your chain just isn't safe. It is almost as simple as the saying "never put all your eggs in one basket". There are other ways to protect the code but without many people running a node and working together with the system it just doesn't work.
Now that I showed you what I think about those questions I am not going to go a bit father and apply them to steem. Proof of brain is a great idea. It has given us a place to come and post and have a chance to turn our hard work into money. Or just to have fun and earn a bit of side money doing that. Steem can be fast and free. It can open up so many different apps and frontends. It can do so many amazing things. But it fails in so many basic ones. I am not an expert about every part of how the system works but I will try and tell you why Decentralized governance hasn't been working. Who are the witness? What do they do? A very casual user has no idea. Even someone like me who is here every day didn't spend a lot of time looking into it. Sure I knew that they rain a node that processed the transactions. I am aware that some of them run a dapp or a few web pages that promote steem or a front end you can use to post on the steem chain. I have learned more about all of them. The issue is I had to hunt that info out. I have to be in tons of discords. It is hard. So when I was told that Justin was trying to take over steem I went to their aid right away. But now I have backed off.
Once I found out that 22.2 did indeed freeze all the steem Justin had bought I removed all the votes I had given them. They didn't miss my vote but if you read my first post I could not support people taking away access to someone's funds. I was also upset that so many seemed to act like they had done nothing wrong. That there was no reason for Justin to have put 20 witnesses in place to change us to 22.5. That he was going to soft fork us or hard fork us into this or that. It was a mess. It was also a mess because there wasn't one clear message from them. It seemed like there were 3 or 4 groups of thought. Some never wanted to do, some thought it was a mistake now, others thought it was justified and a few thought they should have just nulled his sake. Even today for someone that has spent a lot of time chatting about it I am not sure of what they are willing to do to get anything done or what they will do if they get power back. This is the major issue with decentralized governance it is slow, there is lots of fighting, on and someone with a lot of stake can tip the scales with 30 votes. That is right we have a top 20 and you get 30 votes. I can kind of see the theory of it. Yet how anyone didn't see how easy it would be to take this over is beyond me. I am going to move one because this getting a bit long.
The story as I understand it today is this. Justin buys steem inc and there stake as a legal claim to it in the real world. Story leaks that he has done this so a fast AMA happens. Justin says no token swap and then announces a token swap and maybe went back and forth a few times. Top 20 got nervous froze his stake. I am not sure on how many of the top 20 approved of 22.2. Just calls them hackers as he thinks his funds are getting taken. Makes a plan with exchanges to take over the top 20 to free up his funds. Old top 20 freak out, call to arms and get anywhere from 10 to 11 spots back in the top 20. Right now they hold 8. Now a hostile take over fight goes on and Justin gets blasted on Twitter. It does appear Justin tricked a few exchanges but I take that with a grain of salt. How do you trick someone into voting for witness? Justin seems to want them to promise to not freeze anyone funds again before he will remove his witness, The old top 20 seems to not want to do anything until the so-called "sock puppets witness" are gone. I might be behind any new updates. If so let me know.
So what will happen next? I can't be sure but in that story, I don't see anyone that is without blame. I hope for a deal with Justin because I think he can make steemit.com what it should be. I also think now the community has proved we don't want a token swap. That isn't talked about much. If you want to know what Justin can bring go check out Facebook, or twitter. Look how clean the work and how fast they are. Look how they let you chat and customize so much more. I have been on steem for 1.5 years now. It has been around for longer. Yet I have not seen steemit.com get better in any major way. Steempeak.com is doing better and I know there are a few more that are doing better. But none of them has the funding that Tron can bring to development. None of them has the PR team. None of those sites have to lead to a big jump in users and we need more users. We also need users that are willing to invest and stake. I would like to ask the top 20 to resist the fork. I know the idea that it works for other projects. But steem is not just a coin it is a community. If you break the community you are going to end up with 2 chains with even fewer users. So get Justin to make steemit.com work as it should. Get it to be a top tier social media site. With mobile apps that work great. Get rid of the learning curve of posting here. Prove to people they can use this site for any reason and get rewards for it. Don't force him out over a Ninja stake that might have last got you person that could push steem to a new level unless one of you is ready to fill that position. Because that stake is Justin's or it's null on the new chain. and Null doesn't help with anything.
