RE: Hive and Steemit - The Ultimate Tale Of History

almost 2 years ago (Edited)

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Hello new friend,

Great post. It's hard to abridge such en event in one blog post but you did a good job. However, I think you were a little confused about this:

Now I didn't know that this was even possible but apparently the powerful witnesses managed to soft fork and freeze Justin Sun's stake on Steemit.

For blockchain forks the TL;DR is that it is just tweaking the code. A soft fork can be backward compatible with the blockchain but a hardfork isn't backward compatible and essentially has all the old history but uses new coding that runs independantly of the "old" blockchain. Another example is how Ethereum Classic hardforked over the DAO hack of 2016. Ethereum did a softfork and added some code to retroactively undue the exploit but some Ethereum users believed that "code is law" and viewed it as censorship so they hardforked Ethereum so their copy has the block with the exploit intact.

Steemit froze the stakes of certain users that I will allege that Justin Sun identified as "troublemakers". I caveat that it's my personal belief that Justin Sun solely identified the "troublemakers" because of apparent shenanigans of users being pushed off the top 20 witnesses and replaced by new witnesses and how a few major exchanges like Poloniex at the time used customers' STEEM to vote for some questionable new witnesses but later withdrew the supporting votes. There was a lot of drama.

I think what confused you is that for the Hive hardfork the stake for @justinsunsteemit and some of the concerning accounts his takeover put him in control of copied over to Hive were frozen. Every account on Steemit at the moment of the hardfork to Hive got a 1:1 parity of their STEEM for HIVE tokens.

The ethics of whether freezing Justin Sun's Hive stakes "makes us as bad as him" can be debated. Generally it was considered a bad idea to let Justin Sun benefit in any significant way from the fork he forced to happen.

P.S. a little self-promotion but relevant to the Hive community topic. Check out my post today about the glow in the dark Hive logo I 3D printed.

https://www.hive.photo/@holovision/glow-in-the-dark-hive-logo-3d-printed