Call to action: Remove your STEEM from centralized exchanges.

If you've followed my philosophical rantings here for almost 4 years (especially as of late), you'll know I'm very interested in increasing human well-being and creating a world we all want to live in. I think violence distorts human decision making and voluntary interactions via share agreement are a much better model for structuring society. As I explore these concepts (and especially lately after reading people like Thomas Campbell), I come to similar conclusions that we might be in a consciousness training simulator as individuated units of consciousness collectively part of the absolute unbounded oneness. Different religions and spiritual brands have different words for saying essentially the same thing.

We're here to learn and grow up. We're here to evolve our consciousness.

It's easy to get freaked out over what Tron and centralized exchanges have done to take centralized control over the Steem blockchain. It's easy to point fingers at others. It's much, much harder to look at ourselves and find the fault within. The Steem community (and most cryptocurrency communities, to be fair) gave their tokens to exchanges so they could maintain liquidity and participate in speculation. They chose this over controlling their own store of value. I've been running the Exchange Transfer report for years to highlight this activity and make it clear.

Centralized, custodial exchanges have too much power in this space.

I've been saying this since 2013 when friends of mine didn't listen to my warnings and lost BTC on MtGox. Have we learned our lesson yet? Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems only work when there are enough sufficiently decentralized actors participating in the governance process. Distributed consensus is obtained when sybil attacks are made economically too expensive and enough people believe the story of the value creation being proposed to protect it by their direct involvement.

This means we have to take personally responsibility if we want to see these systems function correctly.

It also means, if you leave your votable tokens on a centralized exchange, you are giving up personal responsibility and you are directly weakening the security of the network.

Example:

@binance-hot has over 31M staked tokens.

Vote Weight
31,732,006 SP

These will require 13 weeks of power down to become liquid. These are what you believe to be "your" tokens if you have STEEM on Binance (or any centralized exchange, I'm just using this as an example). In reality, they are not your tokens because you do not control the private keys. Binance can (and will) vote with them.

They only have a million liquid STEEM:

31,731,800.885 SP   
1,194,314.050 STEEM
3.728 SBD

What will happen if everyone tries to withdraw STEEM funds?

Let's find out.

If you have STEEM on a centralized exchange, withdraw it to your own Steem account. Vote for witnesses that want to protect the chain and keep it decentralized with future improvements to prevent this from happening again. Let's start a movement to take personal responsibility and direct ownership of our store of value. This is what blockchains and cryptocurrency are all about. No central points of failure. No third party counter risk. No rulers telling us how to peacefully co-exist.

I'm on a path to evolve my consciousness and take more personal responsibility. I'm becoming more convinced this is the very reason we exist. I hope you will join me by taking your own path to personal development, self-knowledge, and self-ownership.

If there are fractal patterns in this universe, if the sacred geometry symbolism does actually have significant meaning to our existence, then what we do internally in our hearts and minds can change the external world we see around us. The only thing we can control is how we deal with our own shadows, fears, and avoidance.

It's game time, and we're being asked to level up.

The Steem/Tron/Steemit situation is evolving quickly so if you want to follow along with my thoughts, you can do so on Twitter. I may post summary updates here as time allows.