The Steemit stake

in hive-174578 •  5 years ago  (edited)

Okay I know you're all probably really tired and sick of reading/listening/watching content related to everything that's going on here but I wanted to write about an overview from my perspective. Events that have unfolded have made things a lot clearer and even though I'm just speaking for myself here, not for any other witnesses I'd like to also speak as someone who dabbled in shitcoins before Steem and how that changes the way I view the Steemit inc ninja mined stake now.

A long time ago I got fascinated by bitcoin and around the time the altcoin era was starting after Litecoin was launched I decided to purchase a couple GPU miners to join the goldrush that was occurring at the time. Now before you call me lucky to have been there early on I want to let you know that I personally wasn't, I was in too deep and often too early with my calls of what I should hold and not. This whole Steem early mining reminded me of the time I mined X coin from the very start with a few CPU's I had around the house and was one of the first to mine it with a GPU miner when that was released and compiled for Windows. The reason I'm comparing it to X coin, later called Darkcoin and even more later known as Dash is because it also had a very "unfair" start. Of course in my shoes it wasn't unfair because I was one of the few who mined it but the way it was announced, all the name changes and more importantly the changes to inflation made it one of the most profitable coins for the early birds in later days. A majority of the supply was mined very early, the announcement existed, yes, but there were already so many different coins to choose from and one could say those who launched Dash were mining it heavily themselves and cornering the majority of the supply (sound familiar already?) and then they changed the amount of coins that would be mined on a daily basis and on top of that even another new difficulty which depending on how much hashrate was mining it it would give even less or something ridiculous (correct me if I'm wrong, it's been such a long time ago).

Before you ask how much I got and how much profit I made, let's just say it was a 5 digit amount but I sold it as soon as it hit the first exchange for peanuts due to the distribution which I saw as a huge issue. Of course during the late 2017 bull run now of that would've mattered as pretty much everything went haywire but let's hope the next one will be a bit more smart. So the reason I told you about all this and that I mentioned there were already a lot of coins in existence is because competition was there, new currencies needed something extra to stand out from others, a unique proposition, usecase, fair distribution. The latter got more and more important and many would not even touch anything with a pre-mine no matter how big or the idea, some that were started by reputable bigger names would often be restarted as a "classic" minus the pre-mines or supply going towards the teams and some of those did okay. Of course Steem never had that, but let's get back to the Steem launch. As @justineh mentioned in her very compact post with a lot of details it was launched by a random username many didn't know who it belonged to. The announcement didn't even say much about what it could become but of course those chasing the next new coin to mine and hope it'll turn into something profitable (something I used to do as well and was fairly successful with dash, dogecoin, ethereum, etc (et cetera - not ethereum classic :P) happened to mine Steem as well and seeing some comments and posts calling that for a "ninjamine" as well is really ridiculous in my opinion cause clearly they were not as prepared to mine it as Steemit was who knew about the launch and even restarted the chain when their servers bugged from mining it first time around.

The point being, they've stated many times that this stake they mined was supposed to help grow the network, help distribution and decentralization of Steem without there being another really big miner with malicious intent. That's it at that point, if you once say that this stake that was unfairly mined is meant for a certain thing there is no going back anymore and they didn't until this sale to @justinsunsteemit. The reason this is important is because owning 55%+ (as mentioned in the video below) of the stake and even more (around 80% the very first days according to some bitshares post) is ridiculous for a coin that came out as late as it did compared to the horde of other coins in existence at the time. On top of all of this they also changed the inflation which meant it would be much harder to gain more Steem after they already mined and got the most out of inflation (similar to Dash). Doesn't matter if it had a unique usecase, better tech, etc, no one would touch it or take it serious if they knew that Steemit the company that owned all of that stake was going to consider it as their personal belonging and at some point sell it or plan on dumping all of it all along. Sure, they started Steem this way to avoid an ICO and the legal complications that could've meant (although looking at EOS the fees were laughable so maybe an ICO would've been a much better choice after all, but then again you can look at Kik and the legal battles they're constantly in with their Kin token which was launched much more recently) but starting it that way and always having the intention of holding it for themselves or selling it and not staying true to their words that they are going to use it to build the network, do marketing (did they ever put a single Steem into marketing?) not only would it have meant Steem would have been a bigger joke to everyone and it would have never stayed in the top100, it also means it would have all along been a proprietary blockchain to Steemit which has it's own legal ramifications.

Here's one of the videos of Ned mentioning what the stake is going to be used for:

Okay so to get back a bit to the present. Yes it sucks that this curse has now befallen Justin Sun, even though it is hard to feel sorry for him after his actions and the reputation he's had all along in the crypto space. This is something that should have been dealt with a long time ago but just opting out of that decision as the owner and delegating the task to another buyer does not mean the stake changed. Last time there was a threat to hardfork the coins due to incompetence of this centralized company they ran for the exchanges quick and the only thing that changed the witnesses minds, even though many didn't buy it, was that Steemit was going to donate a large sum of it to the DAO which had yet to exist. So they paid for its creation and kept some people busy with a Steem foundation for a while, Ned stepped down as CEO and Eli made it look like they're finally getting their shit together only for us now to find out it was all a fad while he was waiting to sell not just the company but all of the stake to someone else as well after only donating 200k Steem to the DAO. Imagine that, out of 65+ million SP still belonging to Steemit all they donated was 0.3% even though it had been 4 years of promises that all of that premined stake was going to be used for the growth of the network and the DAO being one of the best ways to publicly use those funds that way.

To say the least you really start to wonder how he has used those funds all these years, you can point at incompetence and costs but if he couldn't keep this one promise he's been running with for so long I don't doubt that there's a lot of other things he's kept from others. I'm not accusing him of anything illegal here, I'm just saying it seemed like he always had Steemit's best intentions in mind instead of Steem as a whole. If the stake that was mined was always meant to be Steemit's personal belonging he knew no one would have bought into that. He can say that "oh well it's just crypto speculators, not a binding agreement into what they bought and for what reasons" but similar to that then he should also abide by crypto rules and decentralization that make it possible for those not affiliated with Steemit to hold that stake accountable because that's why they are here and that's the reason why many stayed. Because of how that stake was going to be used.

I can't think of any great analogies for this, but let's not even mention investing for now, say as a user, or dapp owner; would you have stayed here if you knew the company that still holds a large percentage of the total supply down from 80% in the beginning was going to either constantly place sell pressure on the market without giving anything in return back to the growth of the blockchain? It has been 4 years already of them pretending to be on our side, using some of its stake as delegation to our dapps to keep us happy while all along only having themselves in mind and just waiting for the right moment to get out of this promise by handing the problem to another buyer while the purchase happened without anyone knowing. I mean at this point it's even difficult to imagine Justin didn't know about this even though Roy mentioned a few times they weren't aware of the stake's baggage, if they truly didn't know then yes it sucks for them and they should take the matter into their own hand and take it up with the seller of that stake, not with the community and blockchain itself.

It's really hard now not to see this stake as always having been something that's kept Steem back. It's funny because I use to joke that Steemians are their own worst enemy (when it comes to them not sharing their content outside of Steem and competing over the rewards pool and ROI instead of the coin appreciating in value) when in reality it was Steemit he company meant to assist it that probably was its own worst enemy. We all here today are aware of Steem's advantages over usual social media, the tech, usecase and everything is there, sure mass adoption for any social platform is not easy but it does seem like we've had something constantly stifling it's chances. I may be overreaching here but I can't help but imagine what Steem would have been had Steemit either been less greedy with the ninjamine or had it instead been another entity who was always open and public about what it did with the funds - such as the DAO. Well, time may be coming where that scenario could be a reality, let's see which chain ID we'll get to go forward with in this universe without Steemit.


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That donation as a percentage is rather pathetic isn’t it. Why not 25 or 50%? With that funding you have to hope that some good could have been done, multiplying the value of the remaining percentage.

And instead we are here, likely forking off and seemingly going back to the start.

Oh well, Steemi on.

greed... greed... always greed, and the blind incompetence. i.e. the human nature.

Human with a reptilian part in the cerebellum ;)

It's less than the interest earned by steemit and mister delegation accounts.

yup, poor!

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Puts some perspective on it.

Even with this drama, we're better than any other social media platform. At least you can witness the history of something labelled as "fake news", and see whether or not that person said that thing in the past.

Hehe, yeah, @justinsunsteemit learned that the hard way. ;D

and yes, you just can't help imagine the Steem it could be today if Steemit was ran by someone else and had kept its promise. :)

whats up with the STU price? still says 19 cents

The sockpuppet's price feed is broken.

I thought they were going to look into it with some guidance from the community

I'm prepared to start from 0 sp with fairer start on a new chain and slowly stell Steem, or 0 value on a forked chain just to see Justin amd Ned fight from the sidelines.
I never bought steem till after Dan left and knew the risks, but I'm sivk of this. My pessimism, skepticism and annoyance have gotten the best of me.

I'm gonna get back to writing about ponds amd various photo stories again.

I may have purchased all your dark coins for peanuts, because when it hit the exchanges I was buying like crazy, but that premine was too scary to hold them long term. So, I too only made a 5 figure profit on that one, but I'm not complaining :P

I made a four figure profit off of a five figure amount. :(

The more I learn about this the more I come to the conclusion that it isn’t the ninjamined stake itself that is the problem, it’s how it was and wasn’t used. If they weren’t going to use it to grow the community, it should have been burned ASAP or distributed to the entire community

People outside steem that were calling steem a major scam were not wrong after all. I would not buy into steem if I were to be a major investor without knowing what will be the fate of the huge steemit stake. Ned really need to face the music no matter where this ends

Yep, in a recent audioclip of him on Discord he said they mined the stake for their own speculation that it would be worth a lot some day - after all the promises just to cover that fact - he basically admitted it was all a long con.

That's an insightful post, Acid. Quick question, at this point, do you still own DASH or did you sell everything?

sold everything :p

I wonder where we'd be if this was sorted a year or two ago.

My guess is between 2-4$

Somewhere around there....

Aye, it’s a pity to hear this, @acidyo... I hope we learn from our mistakes, moving forward 🙏🏼

I wonder where we'd
Be if this was sorted a
Year or two ago.

                 - tarazkp


I'm a bot. I detect haiku.

I say get rid of the root cause of the problem. The premined stake.

I was using Steem for probably about a year before I fully understood the ninja mining situation (2016-2017), mostly since I was busy doing so many other things, the ninja mining wasn't a big topic and I hadn't been into the mining scene much. It did, however, become quickly obvious to me that Steemit was not acting as a responsible tech company would do in their situation. Without having direct insight into the working of the company it wasn't possible for me to know exactly what the problems were and so I was willing for a while to put them down to the complexity of the challenge or the inexperience of Ned and others. Over time, it became more apparent, though, that Ned was not reliable and way too avoidant to be trusted. I decided to put 'some' of my professional time into helping steem and developing things for it, but nowhere near as much as I would have done if they had appeared fully trustworthy.

It blows my mind somewhat to think that Ned would plan to mislead 50,000+ people in order to get a few million dollars for himself - however, having previously put time into studying various ponzi schemes (where the people ended up in jail mostly) - I have actually seen this before. I am not saying Steem is a ponzi scheme, am just saying that there are precedents for such deception and denial.

Anyway, my main aim in this reply was just to point out that as a system architect/engineer and business analyst, I realised very quickly (even without knowing the fully details of the ninja mine) that Steem could not be fully decentralised without it being reset with a new baseline that is more fair. I would still like to see that done but don't want anyone who has invested in Steem to lose their money. A middle ground that takes existing tokens into consideration in an intelligent/fair way would be ideal.

I wish I could have gotten some of the early fruits of crypto. Now it is too mainstream and very very hard to make a good profit without heavy investments.

I think we are all guilty of trusting Ned to do the right thing especially in the blockchain world where the whole point is to have a trustless society.
In ways I am glad that this is finally coming to a head and that rules get written so we can move on to a brighter future without this specter hanging over us.

I'd completely agree with you, except for the part about rules being written.

Who's gonna write them? The people battling Sun for control of the blockchain now? I recommend you read my exchanges with @justineh (https://steempeak.com/steem/@justineh/my-personal-thoughts-steem-tron-saga#@justineh/q6xww7) and @lukestokes (https://steempeak.com/steem/@lukestokes/fact-steemit-sybil-attacked-the-steem-blockchain#@lukestokes/re-valued-customer-q6vufb) regarding this weighting of the witness votes of User A with 1M Steem, and User B with 100 Steem:

" The difference between their hodlings is 999,900 Steem. The difference in the weight of their influence on governance however is 29,997,000 Steem."

Despite that this weighting scheme breaks DPoS by causing Tron's estimated ~100M Steem stake to bear 3B Steem influence on governance, and making it very easy for him to seize complete control of the Steem blockchain (which is why the witnesses ran 22.2 to prevent Tron voting on governance), the extant large stakeholders and consensus witnesses do not want to address this centralizing mechanism.

Don't believe what I say they say. Read what they say and decide for yourself why they say it.

I now understand that the present struggle for control of Steem is between an oligarchy that was permitted by @ned to profit from extraordinary magnification of stake weight on governance, and Justin Sun who wants that power for himself and has undertaken to seize it as @ned never did.

The only solution I see to this dilemma is to fork them all as hard as we can. I don't like any of them, and I just want to fork them. All of them.

Thanks!

Edit: Ya'll can search my comment section as well as I can, but I did it for you to save time and spread this information as widely as possible.

Thank you for your reply. The biggest flaw I can see in Steem and DPOS is the way proof of stake is given. This will always allow the ones with money to seize power. Unfortunately these are the rules written at the beginning of the blockchain and I don't think at this point we can change those rules.
As a social media Blockchain I don't think being able to buy friends and influence is very social. We will be crashing in the same car again and again.
I can see a Hardfork as the only way out and with that a new proof of stake that takes into account social standing. How that would be programmed and by who I don't know.
Having everyone start on a blank slate and prove themselves to those around them may be the only way.
All this is not to say I don't still believe in what Steem has to offer. I have seen great changes happening these last few years and the present situation shows me that there are enough good people around to help push it in the right direction.

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I think in this situation, that Justin Sun aka Tron should sell their Steem Stake thru a public auction. After Justin Sun bought the Ninja mine Stake and didn't even understood the Steem mechanics, community or agreements I think he should just admit it was a bad decision and try to sell the ninja stake in the best possible way.
He could advertise it that Steem becomes more decentralized by selling the Stake to private investors who believe in the new course of Steem.
I hope that we see something like this otherwise we have to deal with reckless dumping or another big investor with bad intentions.

I would backup that vid you never know 😉

What a post that took me 15 minutes to read 🤣 I'm not as certain about the part:

I mean at this point it's even difficult to imagine Justin didn't know about this

Ned's got a lot of flaws, but he's a good scammer when he has to be, using the fact that he was putting out 800,000 STEEM per month on the exchange, I don't think it was extremely hard to get Justin to swallow anything that was in a weak position and make him believe that those STEEM could be used any way he wanted. He was already baited and in demand for a great deal. At least that's what I think.

It's sure that if these funds had at least been split in two, one part for development via Steemit and the other on an independent and real marketing company (SteemPromote) in charge of advertising budgets things would have been different, now what's done is done and there's no point in looking back but moving forward because as they say in the country where I was born "with some ifs we could put Paris in a bottle".

"I don't think it was extremely hard to get Justin to swallow anything that was in a weak position and make him believe that those STEEM could be used any way he wanted."

"Accredited investor
An accredited or sophisticated investor is an investor with a special status under financial regulation laws. The definition of an accredited investor, and the consequences of being classified as such, vary between countries. Generally, accredited investors include high-net-worth individuals, banks, financial institutions and other large corporations, who have access to complex and higher-risk investments such as venture capital, hedge funds and angel investments. Laws may require that some types of financial offerings may only be made to accredited investors."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor

When you're buying private corporations, it's safe to assume you're an accredited investor. Anything Justin Sun didn't know about Steemit, including any obligations it had undertaken regarding it's Steem hodlings, is entirely Justin Sun's responsibility.

Accredited investor
An accredited or sophisticated investor is an investor with a special status under financial regulation laws. The definition of an accredited investor (if any), and the consequences of being classified as such, vary between countries. Generally, accredited investors include high-net-worth individuals, banks, financial institutions and other large corporations, who have access to complex and higher-risk investments such as venture capital, hedge funds and angel investments.
Laws may require that some types of financial offerings may only be made to accredited investors.

Being responsible legally for something doesn't interfere with the fact that you may have been fooled. When you acquire a company of any kind you always have surprises that you didn't expect and will have to change (more or less) the direction of your business from what you had originally planned. It's part of business life ;)

The point of accrediting investors is that they have proved to exceed marginal competence at due diligence.

"with some ifs we could put Paris in a bottle" - a nice said! what country is that? just curious.

France ;)

Thought you'd probably appreciate the current post payout from my latest post in OCD 😈

image.png

People who say they are right are more likely to get worse. Especially you. You have to be more inclusive to make this story. Your words look worse than Justin Sun. He can do more on steam than you do. Do not insult or harm others.

Excuse me but what are you talking about?

당신도 나을게 없다는 이야기 입니다.

Any specific reason you are downvoting my 3-4 day old posts?

I hope you will sincerely apologize for what you have done.

Please enlighten me on what I have done.

Tough pill to swallow for relatively new guys like me. I didn't know about the secret stakes when I joined in late 2017 and it hardly came up in conversations.
What do you propose is the way forward? Considering the situation and behaviour of the culprits in particular.

It's more important now where we are heading. At least, at the end, we are going to a definitive end , no more assumed assurance from Ned or Justin.