Steem Community to Complete Hostile Hard Fork to Flee Justin Sun

Steem, the blockchain platform for bloggers, is moving to Hive.io, with the hostile hard fork scheduled for Friday.

“My own opinion, Justin Sun thought this was a voting war,” Blocktrades founder Dan Notestein said. Blocktrades is a major validator on the Steem blockchain and Notestein is among the developers controlling the hard fork’s software.

Tron foundation bought Steemit, Steem’s primary social media DApp, on February 14. The buyout sparked a desperate fight between Sun and the Steem community over which side leads the chain. At issue is a heap of Steemit Inc.-controlled Steem tokens called the “ninja-mined stake” used by Sun to determine the blockchain’s destiny.

For this initial hard fork, one primary thing will be changed: the tokens from the original development fund controlled by Steemit will not be carried over to the new chain. Everyone else’s will be ported over.

Notestein said:

“He didn’t understand that the underlying value of those tokens is the community. In the end, if not enough people support those tokens, they become worthless.”

In short, rather than proceed with fighting for Steem, established community influencers hope to shepherd their community to greener pastures.

Decentralize this

Steem is best known as crypto alternative to Medium. Bloggers write posts and get a small fraction of the block rewards based on the popularity of their posts.

Notestein operates a top witness (like a Bitcoin miner) on Steem. He also operates a service similar to ShapeShift that makes it easy to switch between coins.

Two days ago he wrote a post on Steem which reflected ongoing within a Slack group detailing the rough plan to hard fork the blockchain so the Tron Foundation gets shut of it completely. The new blockchain is called “Hive.”

The nature of Steem platform makes such hard fork quite easy.

Basically, the fork’s developers will make a copy of the blockchain, which has the unique feature of carrying in it copies of all the blog posts which people have written to date.

This means that Steem hard fork preserves all the blogging data. Other DApps supporting the blogging function can just redirect to the copy of that data on the new blockchain. Notestein noted that many of the DApps beyond Steemit will do so.

Steemian, a Steemit alternative, said it would fully switch, though users transition will take several weeks. The game Splinterlands, which is the most popular Steem DApp, according to Dapp.com, stated it would switch once the chain was stable and the team had adjusted all the technology on its end. The owner of SteemD, a block explorer, said it would present some kind of format which allows users to choose between the two. The switch will require rebranding of many DApps.

The fork discloses the decentralized nature of blockchains. Both chains will hold all the content loaded before the hard fork. Which blockchain future content will be loaded to will depend on user interface. Probably, if a user is used to blogging on Steemit, their post-hard-fork posts will still be loaded on the chain with Justin Sun’s tokens.

The Tron Foundation did not provide any comments on the matter so far.

Major changes

When it comes to Steem token supplies, the developers will copy all the wallets at some block then send the same token amount to all the wallets on the new chain.

Those who have tokens on Steem will also have them on the new chain, except for the Steemit wallets controlled by Sun’s Tron Foundation.

Notestein commented:

“Our immediate plan is to keep it simple. We are doing this very quickly.”

However, there will be one change so that exchanges will be much less likely to vote their tokens on behalf of someone attempting to conduct a governance coup, as Binance and Huobi did on Tron’s behalf recently (each has later regretted for doing so).

“One of the initial changes will be an improvement in the DPoS [distributed proof-of-stake] system to prevent attacks of this sort,” Notestein explained. Basically, if a user on the new blockchain stakes their tokens, they won’t be allowed to take part in governance votes for 30 days.

Steem is unique in terms of how governance demands users to really lock-in their assets. When a person decides to vote their tokens, they are locked up for a long time (“powering up”). The tokens “power down” in Steem parlance for 13 weeks (the tokens release gradually over that time).

Currently valued at $46 million on CoinMarketCap, Notestein expects Steem tokens to drop after the hard fork.

He explains that users are holding now because they want to get tokens on the new blockchain, and after the hard fork is completed Steem will be widely dumped. Notestein is himself a Steem whale, and he also plans to dump accordingly.

Speaking about creating value for the new token, Notestein is sure that one exchange will list it. He also wants to build an exchange on which the Steem community can use the new token. They already have the technology ready, he said.

Ready to go

Notestein believes that much of the blogging community will move, as his post accumulated over 1,700 votes and more than 700 comments.

Notestein stated:

“The way Justin Sun has come in, he’s just rubbed everybody wrong. The thing about Steem is it basically introduces people to a lot of the ideas of crypto even if they just come here to blog.”

Case in point: As talks started, Sun took to Steemit to call witnesses to side with him. But he let his frustration show. In a March 5 post since largely deleted (but whose original resides on the blockchain) Sun asked: “Do you like Justin Sun or you just want to fuck him?” It went on from there in a similar spirit.

“Steem is a much more social blockchain. It’s kind of a different feel,” Notestein said. “That really was our number one goal: to maintain that community from really an existential threat from Tron.”