The following letter has been drawn up by Andrew (@apshamilton) at @jpbliberty on behalf of a number of the Steem investors who are directly named in the code of Hard Fork 23. It has been sent by JPBLiberty acting on behalf of their clients to a number of witnesses still operating with Steem.
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Letter to Witnesses
Dear Sir/Madam
URGENT: Theft of $5M in Crypto Assets - Steem Hard Fork 0.23
I am writing to you to on behalf of a number of cryptocurrency investors whose assets are about to be expropriated by the proposed hard fork (0.23) of the Steem blockchain scheduled in less than 24 hours.
The nature of this hard fork, which has just become public in the last few hours, is to involuntarily transfer the Steem cryptocurrency holdings of 66 Steem account holders (23.6M Steem ~= US$5M) to a new Steem account called @community321.
Details of the code of this planned theft are at: https://github.com/steemhardfork/steemhf/commit/66321e06f862a28b53e5268f0d67db0fd65b3bcf#diff-5f5356c18939f3b2ce7f3e74ab944614R14
As a Steem witnesses you will be asked to modify the version of the Steem blockchain code you are running on your servers to version 0.23 in order to implement this theft.
YOU MUST NOT IMPLEMENT THIS CODE CHANGE (HARD FORK 0.23).
If you do so, you will committing criminal offences including grand larceny and securities fraud as well as expose yourself to civil liability for damages.
It is completely unprecedented for the persons controlling a cryptocurrency blockchain to change the computer code of the blockchain to involuntarily transfer cryptocurrency assets from one person to another, (except in the case of proven fraud, which is not the situation here).
Whatever your concerns about the Hive hard fork and the behaviour of the listed accounts, you cannot steal other people’s assets in retribution without facing serious legal consequences.
It is the difference between walking into a bank and giving out $100 bills to 80% of the people there (what Hive did) and walking into a bank and taking $100 from 20% of the people there (what hf 0.23 does). It may be mathematically and computationally similar, but one is perfectly legal and the other is completely illegal.
JPB Liberty is a litigation funding company which prepares and arranges funding of legal claims related to the cryptocurrency industry. JPB Liberty is investigating a class action lawsuit against all persons knowingly involved in Steem hard fork 0.23.
JPB Liberty is also well advanced in preparing a class action lawsuit against Facebook, Google and Twitter for banning the advertisements of the cryptocurrency industry in early 2018. You may have a claim in this lawsuit. More details at www.jpbliberty.com.
It is far better to be the beneficiary of a large class action lawsuit than to be the target of one.
yours faithfully
Andrew Hamilton
CEO, Australian Legal Practitioner
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Do you work with @apshamilton? Posting with a setting that allows you to receive such a high level of rewards for posting his work doesn't feel kosher unless you'll be splitting them with him. I understand the promo of a necessary cause, but nothing is original here.
Yes, he works with me at JPB Liberty. See the Team section of JPB Liberty website. https://www.jpbliberty.com/
He will transfer some of the rewards to JPB Liberty.
It was late at night and I was tired: I should have put @jpbliberty at 50% for the rewards but I didn't. I will be forwarding @JPBLiberty the proceeds in a week when the payout happens. You can look for the transfer in a week if you want.
@apshamilton and I work very closely together and you'll see I'm actually part of JPB Liberty.
@brianoflondon is part of the JPB Liberty team.
He is the part that can stay up past midnight. :-)
He splitting 50/50 with the curators.
Yep, been on Steem and Hive since Aug 2017. Familiar with the mechanics.
This.
I'm not sure there is actually a difference. The planned Steem hardfork does not guarantee the legacy Steem chain will go away. What happens if users and exchanges continue on the legacy Steem? The HF23 Steem would then create a new token just live Hive did?
I think with the way dPoS works it's almost impossible to continue on a legacy chain like that, which is why Steem endured 20+ hard forks without an actual chain split. Once you have that 17+ top witness consensus, now controlled by Justin Sun, any outliers running outdated versions will simply have blocks rejected from the chain. I believe Hive is less a fork in the truest sense, and more a new chain with the legacy open source Steem data imported.
Interesting. So what happens to users who continue with running 0.22 Steem nodes? Do block production cease so the chain is essentially frozen?
This post was helpful but didn't fully answer my question.
Take this with a grain of salt because I'm no expert, just read a lot on here over the years!
Here's my understanding. Witnesses running older versions may in fact coexist with current ones in a number of ways as many transactions might cause no conflict and the basic code is compatible in almost every way.
Take for example the recent 22.888 fork which froze the ability of many accounts to transact. Witnesses running 22.888 had software that explicitly denied transactions from a list of accounts. Witnesses running 22.5 did not deny those transactions. A supermajority (17+) of top witnesses run 22.888 making it the "law of the land" but there are some backup witnesses who regularly get scheduled to produce some blocks and are still running 22.5.
Just like when you make a bitcoin transaction and it requires so many "confirmations" to occur on the network, it does take several blocks for a transaction on the Steem blockchain to become confirmed and "irreversible." So... if a witness running 22.5 picks up a block containing a transaction from an account frozen under the 22.888 rules, it will allow the transaction, but on the next block 3 seconds later, a 22.888 witness sees the transactions and does not confirm it. This doesn't cause a chain freeze, the blockchain simply drops the transaction as invalid because it didn't meet consensus. There was an interesting post that I can't find again that calculated that it may in fact be possible for a "frozen" account to sneak transactions through by continuously broadcasting them to the chain and waiting for that rare combination where several 22.5 running witnesses would pick it up in a row and therefore irreversibly confirm it! People on Steem have had a lot of problems over the past couple months with votes and comments "disappearing" or being flaky I believe precisely because of the mishmash of witness versions being run, and some actions being dropped out before they are fully confirmed.
I believe major hard forks and revisions have a way of excluding those that don't upgrade once they become accepted by that 17+ supermajority. Looking at the Steem witness list right now, I see that several "OG" Steem Witnesses did enable their nodes leading up to the 23.0 Hard fork, and are running 22.1. They did produce some blocks 15 hours ago, just before the passage of the 23.0 fork, but haven't produced any since then. I believe the dPoS system that "schedules" the witnesses for block production is smart enough to exclude those who have not upgraded to the latest consensus hard fork.
Chain freezes and halts occur when something goes really wrong. Basically the chain has to be presented with a "no-win" situation, usually caused by an outlier glitch in the code, where a block must be produced but it recognizes that it would somehow irrevocably break consensus in some fashion. Then it halts the chain as a manner of protection.
Nah it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with them forking out Justin, milking, downvoting and trolling Steem and feeling entitlement to take it down, when they already forked their interest out.
Both sides are ridiculous and ruining the reputation of DPOS
Spammy behavior can easily be solved by censoring the account at the API level as they already did. The milking can be addressed by downvoting (an inbuilt mechanism). What they're doing is just theft, the witnesses soft fork froze the Steemit inc's balance, not good... Users were excluded from receiving a (at the time of creation) worthless coin who partially mirroed the majority of Steem accounts balance... Again not good! I disagreed with the means employed here but so far no red lines were crossed imo.
But, they are effectively seizing others people assets!
That's theft, hell they could even have done things right if they really wanted to shit on them that badly! They should just create a new chain and fork them out! But hey, there you can spot their lazyness, having to go through the process of reaching the exchanges to explain this mess will make them lose more face... So they doubled down ...
And you're wrong on that their soiling DPoS, their soiling all crypto with this childish behavior
Spot on: Two wrongs don't make a right. Neither does Three!
Yeah, there is much in what you say that I agree with.
Go away steemcunt.
Yeah its not smart. The smartest thing Justin could do is set powerdown time period to a year, then do a fork of Steem that excludes people on his list and redirect steemit.com to his fork.
Steem would slowly die and he wouldn't have the Hive loyalists spamming and dumping on the project.
You’re ruining the reputation of critical thinking and logical argumentation.
Oh...and fact gathering.
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous to think that people should just not touch other people's stake. what a crazy idea.
I think the reputation of DPOS, both good and bad, is earned.
This whole situation is interesting. And it does kind of prove, or at least indicate, that the idea that "This will probably not happen again" is ill founded. It also goes to show that people tend to be the same and that power seems to easily corrupt supposedly benevolent rulers.
There's good reputation for DPOS?!?!?!
Well, this situation has kind of shown some good. A single actor was able to take temporary control of the chain, but was eventually neutralized by the community at large.
A fork was created and the community was given an option.
I think those are both some good things about DPOS. I don't know if they outweigh the bad, but they're good.
Ultimately, when you look at how things turned out, all is right with the world. Nobody had Steem taken (other than maybe perhaps opportunity loss).
But that has nothing to do with DPoS...
You're talking about how blockchains can fork, that's not DPoS. Delegating Proof of Stake is only the act of voting on someone ON-CHAIN to decide consensus for you. That failed hard. If you're trying to say that Hive as a fork was a success, then you're talking about an off-chain solution being a success.
All I have seen from this mess is that DPoS is a complete failure and any blockchain using it is not sufficiently decentralized to be secure. Not to mention, with the resent lawsuit against EOS alleging that EOS is not sufficiently decentralized enough, it appears the government might soon rule that DPoS is not decentralized.
None are so blind as those who will not see.
Go fuck yourself, cunt.
I imagine living life while being as brain dead as you are must be pretty mundane.
Act-V...
I would definitely want to see the Steem witnesses not approving this, but I doubt it will happen. Such a sad and stupid think happening. It seem kind of surreal.
Check this out! All funds gone!
https://peakd.com/steem/@ookamisuuhaisha/all-steem-assets-held-by-community321-has-been-just
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