Hive Witness Update

Since the Tron purchase of Steemit a little over a month ago, I've written a number of different post drafts that I subsequently scrapped and never posted. It takes me a really long time to get my thoughts together and get them written down in a clear and understandable way, and things happened so fast over the past month that every time I finally got far enough along on a post draft the situation had changed such that a lot of what I had written was no longer relevant or applicable.

I've also been so swamped with work for Splinterlands (you have no idea how much stuff we are working on) and now we have this Corona virus mess to deal with and I just seem to be falling more and more behind on everything.

In spite of all that, a number of historic events have occurred - not only for the Steem blockchain, but for the entire blockchain space and decentralization movement. To say that I'm completely flabbergasted about what has taken place over the past month would be a huge understatement.

Never in a million years would I have guessed that major exchanges could be convinced/tricked into powering up their customers' STEEM to help take over the chain, that the Steem community would then rally to outvote the Steemit, Inc stake, or that the Steem community would be able to successfully get a forked chain up and running with so many tools and services available so quickly and get so many people to support it and move over (although Justin helped a lot with that last part).

Moving On

This will be my last post on the Steem blockchain. Going forward all of my personal activities will be focused on the Hive blockchain. Even though I don't post very often, I have put a lot of time into the Steem blockchain in other ways, from development to raising awareness, and all of that time and effort will be put towards the Hive blockchain going forward.

Like many people here, I have no interest in putting time and effort towards growing a platform that's not owned and run by its community. This is the same reason that I don't put time and effort into platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, and now Steem falls into that same category.

Similarly, I have disabled my Steem witness and am running a Hive witness instead. I hope to be able to contribute to the growth and success of the Hive blockchain going forward and I am excited to have the opportunity to represent the stakeholders as a consensus witness on this new chain.

NOTE: I hope that it's clear that the above only applies to me personally, and not to Splinterlands. Splinterlands' plans since the hard fork have been posted here and are completely separate from what I (or @aggroed) may do personally.

The HIVE Token Airdrop

I would also like to say that I do not agree with the decision to exclude accounts other than those owned by Steemit, Inc. from the HIVE token airdrop. I want to be clear that my support of the Hive blockchain does not imply that I support that decision.

I understand the reasoning behind the decision, so you don't need to explain it to me, but I think that Hive is going to need all of the support that it can get in order for it to succeed and I know that a lot of people will not support it as a result of that decision - far more than just the ones who were directly affected by it.

I know that it may be hard, but I encourage everyone who was affected by or disagrees with that decision to try not to dismiss or discount the value of the entire Hive blockchain because of it. Just like Steem was greater than SteemIt (whose decisions I also regularly disagreed with), Hive is much greater than the group of people who created it.

What "Decentralization" Really Means

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about what "decentralization" really means, and who really has the power on the Hive blockchain. It's not the people who created it, it's not the top witnesses, it's the Hive Power holders. It's you.

I constantly hear people complaining about what the witnesses do, or don't do, or saying that it's "not decentralized" because "the witnesses control everything", but the reality is that the witnesses control very little. If the witnesses do anything that the stakeholders don't support, then the stakeholders can easily reverse it. The witnesses are completely beholden to the stakeholders, which is how it should be.

In the past many have countered the above by saying that there is nothing that the community can do because a very small number of stakeholders (@freedom in particular) have a controlling stake. I think that the events of the past month clearly demonstrate that this is no longer, and was never really the case. After the Steem takeover, thousands of smaller stakeholders came together with voting power worth multiples of @freedom and many other large stakeholders put together.

That's what decentralization really means. That's why the whole blockchain community is watching what happens here. We're showing the power of decentralization in action, and it's really, really hard because it requires a whole lot of people to actually give a shit about what's going on and to take action. Something that is very rare in the world today.

You may think that it's over now that Hive is launched, but in reality it's just getting started. Code can be changed. Past actions can be undone. A specific group of like-minded people may have created the Hive blockchain and gotten it started, but it's up to all of the stakeholders - it's up to all of you - to create its future.

I don't know about you, but I'm really excited to see how it turns out.