Some quick thoughts. We should not have 30 witness votes. If there is a top 20, then one should not be able to vote more than 10. 20 in my mind is not very decentralized and having 30 votes makes it easy for money to buy all. This has been raised before, but no one seemed to care. Are we all too trusting?

I mean, yes. And there have been people who have been saying that your are too trusting for quite a while, but let's take another step.

What would reducing the number of votes per account available actually do? After all, the people with the most stake in the system (in a literal, numeric sense) also simultaneously have access to the most ability to create free accounts and, likewise, find that creating accounts is truly microscopic in cost compared to the value of their stake in total. As such, mathematically, reducing the number of votes available per account impacts the people whom you are the most concerned about the least.

Who does and impact more? People who can afford less.

If the underlying idea was to increase the empowerment of small players in the market, reducing the number of witness votes available to them is a surefire way to do that.

(This is where having some sort of experience in designing games comes in really handy. Designing credit sinks is literally the skill necessary to try and do what you want to do here. Unfortunately, it's also impossible to do in this context for reasons I'm likely to get into here in a minute.)

Steem witnesses made the first move here. A move which in general I supported. However, one witness seems to be like an abusive husband. Pointing out the bad, the worst-case scenarios, making people scared and then at the same time, being the one to have all the solutions and the one to rescue the platform. I felt all along the language used by this witness was above what most here would really understand, and way beyond what was really needed. Commanding authority and yet setting himself up on both sides of the fence. I bet he is getting rather excited about how this all plays out. Do I blame this one witness? No, but for sure he played a big part in how this all went. I guess I'm a bit emotional. In fact, I know I am because last night I started a power down and probably venting towards this one because of that.

There are two things worth pointing out here.

Firstly, and probably the most important, can we stop using language like "Steem witnesses," "one witness," and all of the externalizing language that has been thrown around in the context of the discussion. It's not just you – it's a lot of people. Name names. If you want to refer to someone in specific, refer to a specific person. If you want to refer to something that someone did, link to an example of that behavior. Not only because it's more honest and straightforward but because if you really want to persuade anybody who isn't already on board or a deep insider, you have to actually talk about real people doing real things.

Secondly – emotion is the enemy of insight. Everybody knows that. The problem is that a vast bulk of the discussion around the Steem blockchain is constantly and eternally couched in emotional language, to the point where there is no separation between choice of behaviors and emotional responses. "Real financial advisors" (if such things can be said to exist) constantly caution against making decisions with your gut or with your emotions because neither one of them is particularly adept at turning a profit. "Real political advisors" (if, likewise, such things can be said to exist) caution against the same thing for political agents. Both groups ruthlessly exploit the fact that most people simply can't be bothered to make the effort to not be emotional and thus are easily led.

So a counter move was made by Justin and as we have seen, money talks. I do not agree with his actions but I understand why he took them. The Tron team are writing new code as we speak. They did a post on what to expect, including a 3-day power down. That's how Tron works. Lock in for 3 days if you want to vote on a block producer (or whatever they are called over there). With a 7-day payout window, RC and how steem works, 3-day power down is ridiculous. I would have a concern that like his last post when the soft fork was launched, this is to buy time. For all we know this new code could include a real and forced token swap.

I find it amusing that there doesn't seem to have been anyone who was providing advice to the original witness group, whomever they may be, to point out that the entire system being based on proof of stake was absolutely designed for whoever held of the most resource tokens by 51% to do whatever they wanted to with the witness slate. Without hesitation, question, or even a lot of effort. I remember two years ago when both you and I were doing considerable amounts of digging around in the database, showing where the money hung out, what the reward pool distribution look like, I and where the contribution to its direction actually existed. I pointed out on more than one occasion that the distribution of SP on the Steem blockchain was obscenely exponential, with vast amounts controlled by a few accounts that can be directly traced back to Steemit Inc. I also pointed out that SP in motion was the only designator and controller of what votes mattered.

I also remember being largely ignored.

Nice to see that everyone eventually caught up to me – but they learned that the wrong lesson.

Also ironically, I remember not too long ago weighing in on the tempest in a teapot of power down duration, and pointing out that I thought that three days was a perfectly reasonable amount, if not a bit too long. Not for the reason that JS is going to go with it but because mocking people's money up in a nontransferable way for long periods of time with no guaranteed outcome or profit is no way to get investors to come to the platform. Well, a large investor came to the platform, just like everyone was screaming for, noticed what I said was the state of affairs in terms of voting flexibility, made use of that knowledge, and now has every ability to make whatever changes he wants to because he has the largest pile of active SP.

Remember, "proof of stake" and "code is law."

Now, if Justin Sun wants to take advice from me about how to improve the blockchain as a whole in terms of actually being useful, it'd be nice if he actually gave me a call or drop me a line. I have a few ideas. Not the least being to make the payout window a sliding eternal window, but that's a discussion for another day.

This new code could include anything, and there probably would have been a lot more transparency if (as we might describe in inverted emotional terms) a secret cabal of witnesses who could no longer count on the automated support of a vast pool of sluggish/slow moving SP hadn't have taken it on themselves to literally invalidate to of the core axiomatic ideas of the Steem blockchain, "proof of stake gives you voting rights" and "you can do whatever you want with your stake" and forced their idea on the rest of us. Then having proved that anybody could be disenfranchised at any moment as long as enough witnesses decided you should be, they had the absolute unmitigated gall to look surprised when JS activated that vast, sluggish pool along with massive stakeholders who were directly threatened by the idea that a relatively small group of witnesses could hold them hostage and benevolent disengagement was no longer an option for them.

So now, yes. Having escalated into direct confiscating authoritarian force, those same people are catching it right in the face because they established it was possible. And the rest of us are along for the ride.

Oh the humanity.

Witnesses play a vital role and you need to make sure you are using your witness votes. This is what you need to do now. Vote for your witnesses.

Witnesses play a vital role – and odds are that everyone that you know and everyone that they know, pooling their resources into a single voting pool, would still be significantly less stake than a single active exchange that people are leaving their tokens on for whatever reason. And there will always be more exchange holders than there are active and interested users, because they have far more motivation to hold and acquire and far more unity of vision. They will always outvote you.

They have the proof of stake.

There is no gameable incentive for the relatively small amount of influence being leveraged against Huobi to get them to capitulate by giving up the vast amount of voting power they command in this way. Especially in light of the fact that the people most loudly calling for them to give up their voting rights are exactly the ones who supported entirely non-consensually removing voting authority from a set of accounts that only said they might do things and not did do things. If Huobi goes along with it, that should raise a lot more red flags for people interested in activity going on beyond the surface because it means that someone promise them a lot more potential profit than they would have potentially acquired by maintaining the threat (not even the actual execution) that all of that SP in their pocket provided.

If you really wanted to make a difference to the community of Steem governance, far more important than your relatively small number of witness votes backed by your relatively small amount of SP would be an overall movement to pull liquid Steem and liquid SBD out of the exchanges and back into your wallet. A sensible, smart person already knew that any token not in your "possession" is in the possession of someone else and that possession imparts a certain power. It is an explicit delegation and if you care how much power the exchanges possess in terms of voting authority and activity in governance, that is your first line of defense.

But I don't see people calling for that. It would be something that you could actually do and would actually be sensible. We can't have that. It's too prudent. It also might actually have some aggregate effect, as opposed to shifting a few witness votes.

Honestly, this whole tempest in a teapot strikes me as ludicrous in the extreme. As much as I have absolutely no trust in Justin Sun as a governance authority, I at least except that he is playing within the rules as defined by the system. He purchased what he controls fair and square, and if he wants to force a token swap between STEEM and TRON – it's not like STEEM is going to take a really huge hit in its overall valuation; it's been in the toilet for a while. If he wants to facilitate exchange-lists token selling between the STEEM blockchain and the TRON blockchain, I don't see how that hurts us since it provides more opportunity to actually use the TEAM token to buy things you might want. None of this crazy meltdown strikes me as a reasonable response to anything that's happened. Don't get me started bitching about the number of application developers who think that the best way to protest things happening on the blockchain that they don't like in terms of governance is to silence their users by turning off the service, making sure that voices which agree with them have even less access. That is the pinnacle of idiocy and it's something that I've seen lauded in more than one place.

To reference a meme from elsewhere:

Nice job breaking it, hero!