STEEM thread. I was hoping not to be involved, but alas, doesn’t seem to be possible. I did approve the vote from Binance, thinking (wrongly) it was a regular upgrade/fork. For that, I apologize. Guess it is only fair that I get involved until the issue is resolved.

I am not an expert on STEEM, as you may (wrongly) assume. We deal with hundreds of projects/blockchains, each have their own consensus/vote/delegate/witness/staking/... mechanisms. Can’t know them all. So, please excuse some noob questions/comments.

Q1: Justin Sun claims that some witness froze his 65m coins, not just blocked from governance, but not even allowed to transfers. This has happened on Feb 22. Is it true? https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1236348154460516352?s=20

Q2: Justin thinks the company has the right to use those coins, but some in the community seems to think there was a promise that those coins would never be used. What’s the history/story here? I have not seen any evidence of promise not to use those coins.

Q3: There seem to be an attempt to completely destroy those 65m coins. Just a pull request, not voted yet. https://github.com/steemdev/steem/pull/1

Is this a good/right thing to do?

The above 3 questions actually don't have much to do with me. I do think these types of blocks will severely damage the value of the blockchain. My opinion should not matter much in this case. But if this is a new listing application, we would reject for those reasons.

Q4: What does concern me is, there seem to be an attempt to freeze Binance (and other exchange) user funds as well, or at a minimum block them from voting.
https://github.com/SteemDevs/steem/blob/0.22.6/libraries/protocol/hardfork.d/0_22.hf

Is this true?

This has a material impact on our users. It’s not clear that all of our users want to give up their ability to vote, just because they also want to trade. We may implement a vote feature on Binance to allow people to vote in the future. This way, we protect users ability to vote

Interestingly, if we implement this vote feature, Binance users collectively will have, by far, the deciding vote. People who care may need to deposit to Binance to vote.

We don’t want to do this because: 1 we don’t want to get involved in voting, 2 it is more work, still busy with staking. But if other witnesses are inclined to remove our users’ ability to vote in the future, we may be forced to implement it now.

I am aware of discussions happening between Justin/TRON and certain key witnesses. I hope you work it out ASAP. Blockchains should NOT have freeze features.

I believe this issue, if not resolved quickly or properly, will significantly damage the credibility of STEEM, as well as its price. The price of STEEM is only holding up now because both sides are trying to buy more coins to vote.

United we stand, divided we fall.