A lot of comments today over this pull request which appears to be a proposal to remove control of "all Steemit Inc. controlled accounts" from anyone at all, and lock their Steem permanently.
However, this is not at all what is happening.
People who don't look closely see "pull request" and think we're talking about a proposed change to the Steem code, but that isn't what this really is. It's a stupid publicity stunt, a misuse of Github, and pisses me off completely regardless of the value of removing Steemit Inc.'s control of the ninja-mined funds, which I'm taking no position on at the moment.
Frankly, I don't see a reason to; this isn't a legitimate proposal, it's just there to stir up trouble. A new fork was made under the steemdev account, which was newly created apparently for this purpose, and is unrelated to any existing active development. Then this pull request was created, not as a means of merging code into the forked repository, but simply as a feature request. The only code associated with the PR is the basic structure of a hardfork. (Edit: this is incorrect. There is some half-baked code in there which Github was not showing me for some reason. It's still not appropriately complete for a PR.)
The author apparently would really like someone to come along and make this code change for him, and in order to get it more publicity he's made a phony "pull request" to a phony repository to imply that this might be something that will actually happen. That seems to have worked; there are plenty of people who are taking the idea seriously, as if it is something the witnesses could decide or not to do.
However, there's no there there. Dropping this as a pull request with the code in place would have been daring. Dropping it as a pull request with nothing more than a vague request for a feature is nothing more than a stupid publicity stunt. It's no different than someone saying "I think we should fork out Steemit Inc." except that he's using the cachet of Github to make it seem like something more serious and practical is happening.
This is bullshit. The idea of the witnesses removing Steemit Inc.'s ninja-mined stake from Steem may or may not be worth considering, but this phony pull request has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Please do not take it seriously.
Discussion of blockchain priorities can happen all sorts of places, even on Github, where the appropriate place for it is as Issues raised in an active repository. Pull requests are not appropriate places for spitballing new features that have no spec and no code; they're there to propose the adoption of complete code changes. Using them as political footballs just makes the development process more difficult.