Dear Diary,

Yesterday is the first day I've ever spoken with the community (on the PAL Pirate discord). I was in there for the full 7 hours as we all talked in circles (as always). I ruffled a lot of feathers with my Scorched Earth plan. My perspective doesn't have a lot (if any) support. Radical politics like what I propose will never gain enough community consensus to have any real value unless the small group that agrees with me are the people bringing the lion's share of value to the network in the first place. This is currently not the case.

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I wish I was bringing in millions to the network and was a respected witness, but I'm not so my radical political opinions can't be taken seriously by the community.

It's funny because I mostly identify with the anarchists, libertarians, and conspiracy theorists here. However, these are the same people who believe in 100% free market and 100% censorship resistance. These are the same people who are telling me my ideas are not a viable option. I would say desperate times call for desperate measures, and they say back to me:

"This is a slippery slope that will unravel the network;
if you start censoring one account, where does it end?"

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A big part of the community still doesn't even want to send the Steemit Inc's stake to @null. This means that my plan to take that even further to freeze the three exchange accounts and the Korean accounts is completely off the table.

Perhaps consensus will change when the time is right to sister fork. As it stands now, we do not have the dev power to outmaneuver JSun. The best course of action at the moment seems to be doing nothing. If we do nothing and JSun continues to be his own worst enemy, we will win by default.

DON'T HIT ME!

We have essentially been dealt 17 in blackjack. It would be absolutely foolish to double down at this point. We have to hope the dealer busts.

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The PAL discussion was led by @r0nd0n. I'm not exaggerating when I say he made the same statement over a dozen times. To paraphrase it went something like this:

If you put your enemies in charge of the system and it breaks, it's the system that's flawed.

To which I would counter: name a single system ever where this is true.
Even crypto is a governance system that is supposed to be controlled by no one.
The entire point is to automate governance with code trustlessly and implement ideals.

He is under the impression that the ninja-mine is a red herring when it comes to this discussion. Warren Buffet or any other billionaire could buy 70 million coins and launch the same attack. My response to this was to quote something I heard from Andreas Antonopoulos.

If the central banks try to buy out Bitcoin, all the people with Bitcoin are now filthy rich and can fork to a new network with 1000 times more funding. This is why you can't compare buying the ninja-mine through back-channels with legitimately purchasing massive stake off exchanges.

The chance of a billionaire investing that much in a network and then attacking the network is much less likely because they would have to pay way more money than JSun to do it. JSun has relatively very little skin in the game compared to his actual holdings, so he doesn't care about attacking us and messing with our governance because he doesn't have a lot to lose, or so he thinks (the reputation loss is the biggest loss).

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The time it takes to buy 70M coins (without the ninja mine) is quite long. You have to pump the market slowly so it doesn't bubble and become volatile.

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In response to this @r0ndon claims someone like Warren Buffet could acquire 70 million coins through back-channels just like JSun did even if we burn the ninja-mine. I don't believe he's flushed out this thought experiment very well.

Thought experiment.

Warren Buffet wants to buy as much Steem as possible through back-channels. He approaches a few whales and offers to buy them out at (or above) market prices in secret. How long before the secret gets out? 1 whale? 2? 3? By the time Buffet acquires less than 10M Steem (maybe even 0 Steem), the entire network knows what's going on and they start aggressively holding (or either outright buying more) stake.

Without the huge centralized acquisition of the ninja-mine, it becomes impossible to buy that much stake without spiking market prices to an insane level. At this point it doesn't matter if Buffet attacks the network with his stake (which he wouldn't) because all the devs here are rich enough to pay for whatever code they want to see developed on any of the networks out there (or even a sister fork).

The ninja-mine is not a red herring, as the dynamic of this centralized attack vector is ENTIRELY different in the future if it gets forked off the chain. Finding whales in secret who want to dump at market price and not alert the community to what's happening is not some trivial matter (unless you're talking to a Ned with 70 million coins on the table, which does not exist in this scenario).

However, I'm not blind to the point being made. @r0nd0n believes nerfing the 1:30 witness votes is an obvious way to mitigate the threat of this attack vector, and I 100% agree. The way in which we do that is up for debate.

Personally I think 1:1 vests:witness ratio is the obvious solution. You could vote for as many witness as you wanted but you have to chose for how much. You could upvote one witness for 50%, another for 10%, and 40 more for 1%. However, because we are in crisis, I understand that a quicker solution that requires less testing may be in order. Lowering the max number of votes from 30 to 3 would make it so even a threatening stake couldn't block a hardfork. At the same time only being able to vote for 3 witnesses seems a bit extreme, but here we are. If it was only a temporary measure until we develop 1:1, 3 votes would be fine in the interim. Personally I think even 5 to 7 votes would be acceptable at this point in time. Unfortunately, these discussions are all pointless if we don't retake the super majority to push a hardfork.

https://steempeak.com/hive-133987/@arcange/how-would-steem-power-be-redistributed-without-soft-fork-0-22-2-frozen-accounts

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Look at how decentralized Steem becomes when you delete the ninja-mine! The Orcas have more stake than the whales! That's fucking crazy. In my mind, JSun's actions have given free pass to eliminate this burden for the good of the entire network. I only wish more stakeholders held this viewpoint.

To make the claim that a billionaire could run around gobbling up millions of coins outside the market without raising the price is simply not accurate. There is no way to approach 10+ whales in this manner in secret. There's no way to convince whales to sell at a price that they know has a very strong chance of going up in the near future. For the most part, whales aren't looking to cash out and abandon the network like Ned is. They want to play the market; buy low, sell high. Profit.. just like everyone else.

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Switching gears

I do not know what's going on here. I don't see the value of powering down directly to another account. Why not let the powerdown appear as liquid coins in your account and then transfer them after?

If I had to guess, this function is being tested so that the @binance-hot wallet can send coins directly to @poloniex and they'll pull an "oops I did that on accident" again. @poloniex is the only exchange actively attacking us, so Binance must pull another "oops" if they want to continue to attack the network, which they do.

This is exactly on target, @jacobpeacock. Binance is lying and still actively attacking our blockchain. They maintain a stance of 'neutrality' when their stake was absolutely instrumental in the hostile takeover. They will not vote for our witnesses because they are 'neutral'. They are absolutely full of shit.

https://www.binance.com/en/blog/421499824684900453/A-Letter-to-the-STEEM-Community

Binance stays neutral and has no interest in on-chain governance beyond the Binance ecosystem. We hold a supportive position of normal upgrade/hard fork and will continue to do so in the future.

Bullshit. Binance is not neutral. They've created this mess, and by not supporting this community to fix it they are actively attacking us. They are claiming ignorance, and they are lying. They knew full well they could back out and go "Oops! We're neutral!" once they unlocked JSun's accounts.

Hopefully, the STEEM community and TRON will reach a consensus in an efficient manner. If they fail to reach an agreement and it poses potential risks/damages to STEEM users on Binance, we reserve the right to take corresponding actions at the consent of our users.

At the consent of your users? How are you going to get consent? Fuck off CZ, you are so full of shit. Once again Binance is building a narrative to attack us with their stake, INSIDE OF THEIR OWN APOLOGY LETTER TO US. You can't make this shit up.

Binance participates in community voting in the interest of our users.

LOL... seriously? I think it would be in the best interest of your users if you corrected this cockup ASAP rather than bullshitting around and trying to play the neutrality card in the war you started. I wonder how many millions of SP would flow to our side if Binance holders could vote right now. I guess they still have 3 more months to program this feature in (yeah right).

Back to powering down to another account.

I still don't understand the value of this. Trying to wrap my brain around it. Perhaps if a hardfork get's pushed to the network that allows instant/quick powerdowns then you can powerdown directly to the exchanges without the transfer operation. We already know that witnesses can block the transfer operation with a softfork, but they would not be able to block the powerdown, because it's already happened.

This is likely what's going on. JSun's hardfork will get pushed to the network that allows Steemit Inc stake to be powered down in 7 days or whatever. While that 7 days is counting down, team Tron doesn't want us to rally again (scoop Korean vote) and take back the super majority. They know we don't have a hardfork to push, so if they block the softfork by powering down directly to the exchanges the softfork can't stop the operation.

In fact, they could do a normal powerdown over 13 weeks directly to the exchanges and a softfork can't block that either (while a powerdown to liquid coins >> liquid coins to exchanges could be blocked via SF). During this powerdown, we would easily regain the super majority, but still not have a HF to push. Ruh Roh. Steem needs devs, QQ.

Why would Ned test this function on an account that's being watched? What's that? Because he's a fucking moron? It's amateur hour once again, folks. Thanks for tipping your hand, dummy!

Once again, the ultimate goal here is to transfer the ninja-mine to the exchanges so it can be mixed, tumbled, and not frozen. I wonder if they'll pull it off.

Did you guys catch this yesterday?

There was a huge 'arbitrage' opportunity yesterday where we could have bought Steem for 20% under market price on Binance. Binance is currently insolvent and withdrawals disabled. What I assumed happened here is that Binance holders who wanted to support the network sold at a loss to buy coins on Bittrex so they could withdraw and power up.

Someone has already taken advantage of this opportunity and closed the gap from 3.5 cents to 1 cent, but the discount is still there, if not lessened.

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On this same note the @binance-hot account has received 400k more coins over the last few days, yet withdrawals are still locked, throwing yet more evidence on the pile that we are being actively attacked by them.

If they have 1.2M liquid coins, why wouldn't they allow their customers to withdraw them? We know why. This is such a bad look for Binance, I can't believe they think they are going to get away with all this bull shit scot-free (they probably would in traditional finance, but this is transparent blockchain). Steem is not worth it, yet here we are. They continue to double down. Let's hope the dealer busts.

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It's important to note here that we should let people know that sending their coins to Binance at this time is a great way to lose free money, as the value of coins on insolvent Binance is less than the rest of the market. Also, it helps them continue their stealth attack on us.

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@theycallmedan never made his announcement.

I thought he was talking about Houbi claiming they were hacked by JSun (prob with Ned's help) but that tweet actually came before this cliffhanger. I wait patiently as this story continues to unfold. It's not like there's a lack of action going on already :D