Thank you for taking the time to reply. There is some information that is news to me here, but it does not change my overall stance.
Let's say we didn't soft fork. Let's say they are terrible, and we decided to do a clean fork. Would the large stakeholders not be dumping their coin and encouraging the adoption of the newer fork, based on your same analysis? The point I was trying to make is that the soft fork just seems to be unnecessary vs alternative scenarios. Am I mistaken here?
I suppose that's actually the crux of what I wanted to say.
I do want to also address the thoughts concerning the stake since we are talking about it too. My perspective is as one that came late to the party, and already impressed with what was already built. I was okay without this promise, because as you say, if they violated it, things would go south pretty quickly. There was no reason for me to believe they would self-sabatoge the value of what they built. The fact that development was slow did reflect negatively on the price as well. In any case, I don't see the difference between this and existing corporate structure and stock investment, with the same implicit contract concerning that funds be used to further develop the company strategy.
Yes, there's a mistake in your thinking regarding the soft fork. There was a key reason to do the soft fork now instead of just a hard fork later, and that is because the soft fork enabled the chain to keep the fork listed on exchanges. If either side decides to do a hardfork, they have the additional challenge of getting exchanges to upgrade to the hardfork. This is often a somewhat painful process for exchanges to do for Steem. And if it's done in an atmosphere where there's a split in the community, it's going to leave exchanges scratching their heads as to whether to support both chains, support one, or just dump them both. The soft fork prevented this problem, at least for now. So this choice of timing was for practical economic reasons.
Most of the actual work on Steem and even the front-end was done pretty much at launch or shortly thereafter. The pace of development has been glacially slow since then, partly because of poor management and partly because most of the development funds were being hoarded (I presumed for a rainy day, until I got one big dividend payment as a minority shareholder, when the proceeds of most of those Steem sales were just passed on to Steemit shareholders instead of being used for development). This is generally recognized by most people in the Steem community, and the many failed technology promises from Steemit are another of the big drags on the coin's valuation. The most recent tech manager at Steemit has done better than past tech management, but he's also been forced to operate under a very restricted budget (see below for why).
I get what you're saying about the implicit contract, but here's my take on that: Steemit shareholders != Steem investors. This opened up both a potential and ultimately real misalignment of interests.
Now, if Steemit management had been good at managing marketing and software development, it was possible that the interests of these two groups could have been roughly aligned, since both groups benefited from Steem price appreciation.
And initially, I think Steemit did try to spend more on development. But due to failures in execution, they were getting less of a return in the form of Steem price appreciation than they were spending in Steem coins, and it began to look like the best thing to do from their perspective, was to sell off the coins and pocket the results as dividends (and ultimately just sell the remaining stake at a discount to a third party for cash).
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Ah okay, I underestimated the effort on the side of exchange adoption when it comes to forks, as well as assumptions about how they would choose. I may also have wrongly assumed that Steemit Inc would have more influence on the exchanges themselves.
About the implicit contract, I see the distinction between the two groups, but I don't see that this is all that different from the relationship between Steemit management and Steemit shareholders, the relationship between Steemit management and Steem investors. Or say, the relationship within some hierarchy in terms of shareholders of some other large company.
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