Hello Steemit,

Like everyone else, I'm very excited about communities in Steemit, but I have some reservations as well.

One thing I fear is the Theymos problem.

What is the Theymos problem ?

There is an individual known online as Theymos (is his real name known? I have no idea). This same person owns and controls both bitcointalk.org and reddit.com/r/bitcoin. Between these two forums, 90% of the most important communication about the Bitcoin currency occurs (sure there are plenty of other places to talk, but these two are the big ones.)

What? Does the fact that communication about a decentralized currency is heavily centralized in the hands of one man bother you? It should: it's a big problem.

This problem became manifest when the block size controversy erupted. Without diving too heavily into this controversy, I'll just say that there are two sides: one advocates increasing blocks to something larger then 1 MB, the other side is for implementing something called Seg Wit.

This is been a bitter conflict that has torn apart the Bitcoin community and I'm pretty sure that had this been resolved by now, the price of bitcoin could easily be 5000$ or more.

But it's not. Why? Because one fucking guy: Theymos!

So what was Theymos's solution to the block size controversy? Well clearly the answer was to censor the side he doesn't like: bigger blocks. If you attempt to post something in favor of bigger blocks to reddit or bitcoin talk your post will be censored. And I'm not talking about the weak, pseudo censorship that steemit does, where the post is greyed out and you have to click on "show" to see it again, but the real censorship, where your post is gone..deleted...erased from the system poof!

Browse to https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/ go to "Community guidelines" and read this pearl of wisdom:

Promotion of client software which attempts to alter the Bitcoin protocol without overwhelming consensus is not permitted

without overwhelming consensus

So, pray tell, Mr. Theymos, how can one obtain any consensus, overwhelming or otherwise, without being able to talk about it first, hmm?

And of course Seg Wit doesn't have overwhelming consensus either, but it's fine to talk about that. Makes perfect sense? No?

Because of this idiocy, a group of users found it necessary to create /r/btc and there are two conflicting camps, with no end or resolution in sight and Bitcoin appears to be fucked for now. I'm pretty bitter about this, as you can tell.

It was this ridiculous situation that drove me to Steemit in the first place, though I've come to love it for its own merits. I see this new communities concept being floated, and I worry about the Theymos problem.

I'm sure the devs are two or three steps ahead of me and have this covered, but I'd ask them, and all of you to keep in mind this problem, because I'd hate to see it replicated here in the Steemit I love.