I know I've claimed many times I would never ever become a witness, but I have decided to start a node as @dtube.witness. This node will simply keep on following the majority version of the top 20 leaders of this blockchain, without actively taking part in its governance.
The first purpose of this node, is to keep a local database of all DTube contents. The second one, is to try to contribute to the reliability of the STEEM network now that a big part of it has segregated away.
Server specs:
RAM: 128 GB
HD: 1TB SSD
CPU: 8 cores Intel(R) Xeon(R)
Location: Google Cloud europe-west2 (London)
If @dtube.witness gets elected into top 20, I will open a second node to act as a seed/backup node. If you respect DTube's neutrality in the conflict, and understand our move to keep STEEM safe, please vote for @dtube.witness.
My opinion on the drama
STEEM has split. A large part of the community has left for Hive, after believing the lies that STEEM got centralized and censored by JS. Let's clear up these points:
1- STEEM has never been centralized. Even when 20 sock puppets entered the top 20, STEEM remained decentralized. Steem has a backup witness solution, meaning that even if those 20 sock puppets nodes suddently crashed, the network would have kept on running, and was therefore still decentralized.
2- STEEM has never been censored by anyone. All STEEM UIs (steemit.com, d.tube, busy.org, etc) have always been censoring some contents. While this censor has always been used for good reasons in the past (mostly DMCA complaints for DTube), censorship on the domain level has always been possible. As long as people use a UI from a web-browser, relying on DNS system, this will always be true, and this is what 99% of the users do currently. But STEEM is still uncensorable, anyone can run a blockchain node and access the contents.
N.B: When a UI is open source, such as SteemIt.com, or d.tube, you can always take the source code and fork this website on another domain, REMOVING the censorship. This is NOT TRUE for close-source projects such as SteemPeak or Threespeak for example.
So why all this drama happened? Because there was a power change. @ned promised he wouldn't play the game (for power), and never vote for witness, which he didn't. Effectively when JS proved he had ownership of all these tokens, the ex-witnesses panicked, and as they were still running block production, stealthily updated the blockchain, locked SteemIt inc funds, in order to stay in place and not lose their jobs.
Finally, after realizing they were losing the decentralized elections for witnesses (Stinc funds unfrozen with help of binance+huobi+poloniex), and that they had no way to keep their positions in the top 20 in the long term, they decided to:
- FORK the chain
- SPLIT the community
- WIPE all the past branding efforts
- LIE to the community (see 1- and 2- above)
- WITCH-HUNT the people who wanted to stay neutral (like @dtube), forcing them to take a position
- DELETE the coins of 300+ accounts who supported JS when forking to HIVE, about 30% of the total supply.
- SHUTDOWN a lot of critical tools of the STEEM network to try to hurt it, despite their promises over the years, despite getting paid for it via the SPS, namely in particular:
- @anyx's full node infrastructure
- @themarkymark's black list API
- @yabapmatt: steem keychain
They told you STEEM was like Bitcoin, that funds were safe, yet they deleted 30% of the supply on their fork.
They told you they would use their personal skills for the benefit of the community, yet they created bid-bots and made money off you.
They ran this blockchain for nearly 4 years, incentivized you to power-up, while they dumped regularly and contributed to the marketcap crash over time.
They told you they loved STEEM, yet they are trying to burn it to the ground right now.
For me, those people, and the many other ex-witnesses who are ruling HIVE, are completely dishonest, and I am glad they are no longer using STEEM.