My Opinion On The Soft Fork

I won't explain what the soft fork did. If you need to be brought up to speed or want more details, you can find them here:

https://steemit.com/steem/@softfork222/soft-fork-222

In my opinion, Justin Sun was asking for something like this by publicly announcing a token swap where every STEEM holder would be allowed a opportunity to swap their STEEM for a corresponding Tron-based token and that he had exchanges on board and ready. What this would imply would be the the necessity to migrate all Steem apps and the the functionalities of the Steem blockchain to the Tron blockchain.

When asked about it later, he backpedaled and said no token swap was in the cards, for now.

Of course no such token swap and migration to Tron could possibly happen any time soon. Why not? Steem is a complex piece of software. The only way to replicate it on Tron would be to write smart contracts on Tron that do what Steem does. It would take a fair bit of time to port Steem to Tron. The code written in C++ would have to be completely rewritten in Solidity, the smart contract language used on Tron. Who would agree to swapping their tokens if no fully functional and well-tested Steem replica even existed on Tron? Precisely nobody.

Is there anyone working on porting Steem to Tron? As far as I know, no. When Justin Sun made the announcement, the engineering teams at Steemit and people at the Tron foundation hadn't even met. What was the purpose of such an announcement? To stir up a hornet's nest and create headlines, I guess. That's what Mr. Sun excels at.

Do I think the soft fork that froze accounts known to have belonged to Steemit, Inc was a good idea? If a major stakeholder capable of dominating the witness pool threatens to destroy the chain, then freezing that stakeholder's accounts is warranted. But only if the threat is imminent. At this time, no such imminent threat existed. I would've tried establishing better communication with Justin Sun first. But what is done is done.

We're now in a bit of a pickle. The freezing of the accounts is supposed to be a temporary measure. When will the accounts be unfrozen? After that, will Justin Sun take preemptive measures of his own? Will be start voting for witnesses? Is the idea to keep the accounts frozen until the stake distribution on Steem is such that Justin Sun is no longer capable of taking over the chain? That would take a long time because the only way the stake distribution can change is through STEEM inflation distributing enough of the token to others.

And yes, there's the precedent of witnesses colluding to limit how an individual stakeholder can use their stake but I'm not so worried about that because Steemit, Inc's dominant stake will clearly pose an existential threat to the chain for some time to come. Many witnesses were very hesitant to accept the soft fork and some were not on board at all as a matter of principle. I don't believe any individual's accounts are likely to be frozen for any reason other than this.

Interesting times.