Another Hostile Takeover
It looks like our favorite person Justin Tron just took over Huobi.
First Elon Musk & Twitter and now this.
Huobi May Soon Lay Off Employees Under Its Rumored CEO Justin Tron’s Leadership: Report
This is particularly bad news considering Huobi Global was basically one of the biggest and best non-KYC exchanges left. This bear market has been particularly brutal to the exchanges. I wonder why. We did not see this kind of struggling back in 2018 with the bigger entities. Regulations and the crypto ban in China have not been kind to centralized agents.
Per a recent tweet shared by Wu Blockchain’s journalist Colin Wu, the former CEO and CFO of Huobi have submitted their resignations to Justin Tron’s team following the alleged acquisition of Huobi by Tron crypto founder Justin Tron.
According to Wu, Justin Tron’s team has taken control of all leading departments of the exchange and may soon initiate mass layoffs in a bid to stabilise the exchange.
To be fair 1600 employees is quite a bit. It's really hard to imagine why you would ever need that many to run a digital exchange that doesn't even exist in any given place. This is all part of a corporate business model. Hard to understand when we've been in crypto so long.
For example, a decentralized exchange just works. No one has to ask permission. Security is almost a non-issue because everyone is required to control their own keys. Nodes are incentivized to operate because they are being paid by the network. The burden is shared between the entire community.
Compare this to a centralized exchange. You control all the keys. You are responsible for everyone's money. When there is a technical issue, you need dozens working in tech support that speak dozens of languages (localization). There is no community around to do any of the work for you. You're expected to handle everything and make it as convenient as possible.
It is in these ways that we see that decentralization is theoretically much more scalable than centralization. But yet, ironically, scaling up seems to be the main issue holding us back.
With speculation running rife, the crypto market is brimming with rumours claiming that Tron has acquired Huobi. The platform had recently announced its decision to delist its stablecoin HUSD, which fueled the crypto rumour mill up a notch. As per Wu blockchain, the decision to delist HUSD has been taken primarily to promote USDD, a stablecoin founded by Tron Network’s Justin Sun.
Crazy stuff
So Justin Tron is going to delist Huobi's stable coin and replace it with his own. Pretty smart strategy considering his position. In the long run it seems almost certain that USDD will crash to zero just like UST did, but then again Justin Tron is full of surprises.
https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1579186183871287296
Considering that Justin Tron has been on ice for so long at regulator camp after trying to undermine China's firewall, it should be pretty damn alarming that he's taking over a non-KYC exchange. The chance that he will secretly report and track everything that goes on with Huobi is almost guaranteed... assuming that he doesn't immediately turn it into a regulated KYC exchange.
Then again, it's hard to imagine that KYC would be the play considering the worldwide crackdown on stablecoins. This is perhaps just another shady play to subvert regulators and leverage Huobi as an outpost for his extremely suspect fractional reserve.
However, Tron is yet to issue any formal statement that confirms the fact that he has successfully acquired the Huobi cryptocurrency exchange.
Yeah I mean considering the author of this post doesn't seem to figure out that his name is Justin Sun till half way through... we may have to check some other sources.
SBF and Justin Sun refused their participation in Huobi Sale
Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and Justin Sun denied second time for their involvement in the Huobi Deal.
This article seems to paint a much more accurate picture. FTX and Sun are denying involvement. Of course this is also three day ago and says nothing about delisting the Huobi stable coin to replace it with Tron's. Either way, it makes a lot more sense to try to do something like this quietly. Too bad Justin isn't a very quiet or subtle character.
The Huobi exchange token has more than doubled in the month of October (Doge went +120% in the last week). Sun is almost guaranteed to be insider trading and pumping his own investments. After cracking macro resistance 11 months after the ATH peak, every day seems more and more like we are transitioning back into a bull market. Obviously this isn't the greatest way to bootstrap one (Musk and Sun) but beggars can't be choosers I guess. We don't get to decide how these things go down. Just need to keep paying attention to the billionaires and the games they play.
Conclusion
Apparently this news went right over my head when Sun bought out Leon Li from his majority shareholding of About Capital, a Hong Kong based investment firm that owns Huobi Global apparently (I had no idea). This happened a few weeks ago around October 10th. Seems that the situation is developing as we speak, with new tidbits of information coming to the surface.
Obviously this is definitively bad news. Justin Sun taking over a non-KYC exchange is... just the worst. RIP Huobi. Very sad. Much wow. I can't believe this kid gets to keep playing his little games considering all the shit he's pulled. Never a dull moment.
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Okay, these things keep repeating itself.
That's how it went with our then steemit when I was a few days newbie and had to watch steemit go zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Would there be a reason why he does all these creepy acquisition all the time?.
is there a project he took over that made any progress?
Is Grenada still on the map? 😄
I am mystified that you seem to not note that it's the same game he plays by the same rules wherever he plays. Wherever stake alone asserts governance, stake will govern. Until cryptos actually deliver to their communities that power, they will continue to be captured. Sun Yuchen captured Steem by buying stake. Hive escaped by abandoning Steem, and just recreating it without Sun's stake being in his hands.
But Hive retains the very mechanism by which Steem was captured. Nothing but stake governs Hive today, and as long as the majority stakeholders seek their own profits above the security of the community that is the source of that profit, they are as vulnerable to being captured as they are able to capture ROI.
While Hive remains the best platform available (because our oligarchs are benevolent overlords), it is not, at least not yet, the platform that will be the best available in the long run, because it is simple to take from the community. As simple as buying enough stake to install a consensus of witnesses, exactly as was done to Steem. That mechanism is effected through witness voting, which specifically enables colluding stakeholders to elect a slate of witnesses through weighting 30 witness votes with 100% of the stake of the voters. This is much different from ordinary voting on Hive, or Steem, and the ability to collude to install a slate of witnesses delivers to an attacker the ability to simply gain enough stake to replace the consensus - or keep it as it is.
Yuchen took Steem from the community, so we made Hive, but doing so we lost a significant percentage of the investment in Steem. When the time comes, Hive is just as easy to take as was Steem, and if again there's a fork, a significant percentage of the investment in Hive will be lost to the forkers. The 30 day wait on the ability of an account to vote on governance is irrelevant, because rather than purchasing stake, the new overlord(s) can just require extant stakeholders to vote that stake as directed and only close such acquisition after 30 days.
Changing witness voting to splitting 100% of VP across 30 witnesses would equalize the effect of stake on governance for all stakeholders, but that is contrary to the interests of the extant oligarchy.
It's curious the mechanism by which Yuchen has gained control of these pseudo-decentralized platforms escapes your notice, or at least your comment, particularly given that Hive remains utterly vulnerable to that exact play, and only exists because Steem fell by it.
Thanks!
I'm not confident your plan to take over Hive will succeed. Good luck though.
I was also thinking so
It has already succeeded. It succeeded upon Hive's creation.
Because there was no mechanism that enabled governance to overcome the raw weight of the Founder's stake, which was no longer being crippled by @ned's forbearance, the Steem oligarchy that had been successfully overthrown by Sun Yuchen were left with forking Sun out, as Hive did.
The governance mechanism on Hive is identical today to that on Steem then. You mock my ability to deploy stake, but it is obvious that the stake necessary to govern Hive is deployed currently, and that entities with nominal means to do to Hive what Sun did to Steem exist. It is a far lower cost to seize control of Hive governance than Twatter's, which reflects the value of our network after shedding that portion of it which remains Steem.
Seems to me Hive should be decentralized such that seizure of governance isn't possible.
It is how witness voting is weighted that makes that seizure, or retention, of governance facile for those with nominal stake and interest. That is how you like it, and that is how it is, so you deride potential alternatives. I would prefer that things were a little less oligarchal, so I propose alternatives that would not significantly worsen anything while improving resistance to financialization.
This is as it should be, lacking only rational, rather than emotional, justification of the status quo, as mockery is far more effective than it should be in persuading the thoughtless, from my perspective. I submit that it is exactly that level of rational debate that establishes the relative value of Twatter and Hive in the view of most people.
Withal, I am left with the impression that you simply have no substantive rational arguments against such mechanisms as I propose.
Once you try it, I'll tell you where you went wrong, after everything was said and done.
Go ahead.
You first.
So, you just misspoke? You really have no understanding of why the direct control of governance by the largest stakeholder(s) is bad?
Neither have you any comment regarding how the weighting of witness votes enables an oligarchy to maintain control by electing an entire slate of witnesses is contrary to decentralization?
I am not sure I believe that, but since you are demonstrating that lack of understanding, I'll grant it is the case.
Or it could be a case of not wanting to show the thief the combination that opens the safe.
I guess we'll never know...
Just have enough money is hardly a sekrit.
I gave you nothing. From that you've come up with all kinds of conclusions, based on nothing. And now you're guessing.
I'm not confident your plan to take over Hive will succeed.
It already has. Your failure to understand does not mean reality is incomprehensible.
"My failure to understand."
What do I not understand?
You seem not to understand that Hive governance is controlled by exactly that means. That's why witness votes are weighted as they are, and we can't throw our support behind one, or a few, witness(es) as a group of plebs. Whether it's 100 phat stacks agreeing to support a slate of consensus witnesses, or one phat cat buying the Founder's stake and doing so alone doesn't change the mechanism.
We can only vote in a consensus of witnesses because of how witness votes are weighted, and the hoi polloi cannot counter the oligarchy by infiltrating dissenters into the consensus.
"You seem not to understand..."
Where did you get that idea?
You are correct but remember most hivians are retards so they can't see how vulnerable they are using a system like this.
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To seize the opportunity to buy a single entity - preferably a failing one, so it comes cheap - is one thing. Hostile takeover of Steem was only possible because SteemIt had disproportionately large stake (and even that was not enough). To replicate the process on Hive the attacker would have to take over stake of several whales, or buy enough Hive on open market to outweigh them. Direct access to printing press would probably not suffice, and if attempted anyway, the price would shoot up so much that even the minnow account would buy you a house. I think we are safe.
False dichotomy. The profits of majority stakeholders are in the community. The coin has no value without its users. That's the whole premise of Proof of Stake governance.
You mean if I have 300 HP and vote for 30 witnesses, each of my votes is worth 10 HP, but if I only vote for 6, my votes are worth 50 HP each? Sorry if I misunderstand, but that's the only thing that came to mind that would make a change (always splitting stake across 30 witnesses would just change the numbers, but nothing else). Assuming that's what you meant, the change would be for the worse. There are many nasty consequences, but the following one is enough to drop such idea. In changing world you need to constantly adapt to survive. In such place the power to veto is the power to destroy. "Change in my way or you won't be changing at all." And above idea would put veto power in the hands of minority stake. Thankfully that will never happen because
and everyone else on the platform.
You illustrate sound understanding of the issues, and I appreciate your statement regarding why you support the status quo. While you point out the power to veto is the power to destroy, you neglect that the power to veto is also the power to prevent destruction. It is exactly that veto that would have prevented Sun Yuchen from seizing Steem. While Hive remains relatively less censored than other social media of consequence, it is less censored because our overlords are less censorious, not because Hive's structure prevents censorship.
So, we disagree on whether reliance on the whim of overlords is acceptable in that regard. I reckon the value of the Hive community is discounted substantially by the excessive weighting of stake in governance, and sadly, expect to be proven right (again) sooner or later, whenever it will be too late to do something about it.
Thanks!
What censorship you are talking about? It is extremely hard to stop someone from transacting on Hive unless you put that in consensus code - Hive structure does prevent censorship.
You could be downvoted to oblivion in which case your message could have hard time reaching new readers, but to my knowledge front-ends respect their users and give them the opportunity to read posts even if the author has low reputation or their post was muted. Therefore downvotes are not form of censorship.
People interact with Hive through front-ends. The common part of them is Hivemind. Hivemind node operators could censor, even change the content of the posts, simply by messing with the database directly. That's why it is good we have many such nodes, and everyone is welcome to set their own. It would be even better if all front-ends allowed users to choose which node to interact with. Even if such events occurred (I don't know of any), I'm not sure it could be qualified as censorship.
Finally front-ends could filter out or change data selectively. But we have many front-ends, so the same story as with Hivemind. F.e. I had one of my posts muted by community moderator. And while I disagree with the decision (obviously 😉 ), I was very angry when I saw that the content of the post is different from what I actually posted. It is a bug though, only when viewed on hive.blog, other front-ends work correctly in that regard. On ecency.com no replies show, even though there are some. Only peakd.com works fully correct. Bugs are not censorship (but they show the potential). I find it ridiculous that my post remains muted even on my own blog - issue in Hivemind. Still not a censorship.
Confusing downvotes with censorship is an old cockroach will always crawl back no matter how many times you flush it.
Your answer nailed it.
This is false. Censorship is not only the complete eradication of information. It isn't even possible to do that. By your repetition of that false representation that censorship is only the complete eradication of information you but virtue signal.
Censorship is suppression of speech. Downvotes are suppression of speech. They do not only reduce the visibility of your posts and comments, they also reduce your reputation, and impact other things as well. I have been on Hive since 2017 and have seen hundreds of users driven from the platform by flagging campaigns, and only the spammers, scammers, and plagiarists unrepentant benefited the community when so censored.
Financial disincentive is a form of censorship. That's why Ye just had his bank accounts at JP Morgan closed. That's why people are kicked off Paypal, and why Youtube demonetizes videos. Throwing people out windoes and double tapping them in the back of the head are also censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
While being flagged on Hive is a lesser form of censorship than being murdered, it is censorship, and it is built into the code because it is necessary to censor spammers, scammers, and plagiarists. Censoring people for dissent is contrary to the mission and purpose Hive was established for, and is one of the primary reasons it has failed to leverage it's use case into token value.
It is impossible to completely eradicate information, and claiming anything less than such complete eradication isn't censorship is clearly false. It's either incomprehension of the clear language used in every authoritative source defining censorship for centuries, an excuse of oligarchs to censor, or of patronizing suckups virtue signaling, and has no basis in fact.
Reputation is far from perfect mechanism, but currently I have not heard about any idea that could replace how it is computed. If there was, since reputation is not consensus, if it was computationally sound, it would be quite easy to test alternatives on real data, even provide dual/multiple reputation systems for users to choose from. There are two things to consider when proposing different system:
Aside from above you could also clone some open-source front-end, or write your own, and make it ignore reputation. It would be up to the people to decide if they prefer that over existing solutions. Yes, I know, people don't always choose what's best for them, but that's reality.
I'm not a fan of stake based comment-vote power. It too much resembles real world where voice of the rich means a lot more. Moreover in real world the rich have to actually spend their money to push their message, while in stake based system you just need to be rich. I think the correct system would have to somehow capture the "content value" the person brought to the Hive community. If we had that, we could even drop the 7 day payout period, so the authors could earn on their content without time limit (even better, in the long run "timeless content" would always earn more than short lived posts). But like with reputation, no one proposed any solution that would work and could not be easily gamed. Until miracle happens we have to stick to what we have, with its benefits and shortcomings.
We actually have it pretty nice in Hive where whales are just 10 thousand times bigger than minnows. In real life differences are much more dire.
Dissidents are always on the margins of society, even if they are right, because people prefer "order" over "justice". Being able to speak freely does not shield you from the social consequences in real life, why would it be any different in Hive? Any dissident should be prepared for that reality.
I disagree, that is, it depends. There are situations when you are entitled to financial reward and others when it is just a nice bonus decided by someone else.
It should not be legal for a bank to close anyone's account outside of court order, because it should not be even known if a person has an account in particular bank (so there is no "it hurts our reputation" argument). Banks have enormous privileges, printing new money being one of them, so requirement of absolute neutrality is not too much to ask for. However the same bank might have a point to refuse to credit said person, because certain actions do have consequences that might lead to increased risk of failure and default. It is prudent for the bank to take that into account. I'm not sure what is legal status of Paypal, maybe it should be neutral (preferably) or maybe not. As for youtube demonetization - the real customers of youtube are not content creators but advertisers. It would be preferable if youtube allowed them to choose between different systems, so they ultimately decide where they want their adverts to show (sort of like subscribing to blacklist works in Hive). Currently as far as I know there is no such system, and youtube unilaterally decides for them where ads can show. Not a perfect system but the pressure to make it better should come from advertisers. "But the content creators bring value to youtube". True, but since creators still use the platform, even when they are demonetized, it proves that the sole ability to reach vast audience is rewarding enough for most.
In Hive "customers" are content creators and users, and they both get to decide what to promote and reward and what to bury (subject to imperfect but without alternative - for now - system of stake based voting). As you've yourself noticed, Hive needs that system to weed out bad actors, but as any tool it too can be abused. We just don't have anything better. So even if you are technically right about definition of "censorship" I still don't think it applies to downvotes, because no content is entitled to any rewards - the default is no payout. If something is upvoted and then downvoted back to zero, it just means different users had different opinions on the same subject (and yes, again, it is regrettable that one whale can erase upvotes from hundreds of other users).
You are correct to assert the problem is complex. It took me 5 years to understand why witness votes are weighted as they are because of the complexity of the machinations underlying Hive governance. A colluding oligarchy with 30 100% weighted witness votes can elect a consensus that only the whole platform could oppose by colluding, and that is absurdly improbable.
Downvotes aren't the same thing as not upvoting. IRL you either buy a product or don't. You aren't able to lower the price of the product the manufacturer gets for it. Downvotes do that. They aren't the opposite of upvotes. They are an upvote against that content being published. As you say, the default is no votes at all. Upvotes encourage and reward creators, and lack of votes discourages and fails to reward them. Downvotes actively suppress them. They destroy the value of their content to the creators, like if a competitor for your job was able to reduce your wages in order to make you quit so the job would become available.
That's why they are necessary on Hive, because that financial disincentive nominally counters spam, scams, and plagiarists. Unfortunately it also successfully does the same thing to people that speak out against prevailing policies. If scientific debate worked that way we wouldn't even have clubs, pointy sticks, or edgy rocks.
Censorship is necessary for Hive to succeed, because Hive cannot succeed unless spam, scams, and plagiarism are prevented from monetizing content. Censorship of content that isn't spam, a scam, or plagiarized can also destroy Hive's success, and that degree of success depends on how censored Hive is. There are other metrics that Hive's success depends on, so censorship resistance alone isn't the only thing that determines whether Hive succeeds, and to what degree.
I would submit based on the token value, user metrics published daily by @arcange, and personal experience that Hive is barely able to not completely fail, and that mostly due to Splinterlands today. Wanting Hive to do better isn't something horrible. We all want Hive to do better, eh? However for an oligarchy that captures ~90% of rewards, better can be the enemy of good enough, and only dissenters that do not threaten to tip that boat are tolerable. I also submit I am pretty stupid, because it took me 5 years to grasp how the governance of Hive is maintained through the weighting of witness votes that enable the oligarchy to be assured of their control, and neither an upstart whale nor an agitated demos of plebs can threaten that control.
It even took two years after Sun Yuchen demonstrated how that control was exerted, by tipping that boat with the Founder's stake, before I figured it out. Clearly I am not a credible threat to the extant oligarchy, and doubt they will care what I say one way or the other. The real blackpill is knowing that you are irrelevant no matter what you know, say, or do, and then you die.
LOL
Regardless that we will be able to wrangle over minutiae forever, I appreciate your considered opinions on censorship and how it affects Hive. We may not agree on everything, or even anything, but at least on Hive we can have that discussion and our accounts aren't banned.
I didn't lose anything in the botched takeover attempt by Justin Sun. I sold my STEEM coins and pocketed the money. At the end of the day, I had more value than before. Thanks for the fish!
You clearly do not understand the value of the network you benefit from to you, and I commend you to gaining that understanding. Nothing is more valuable to you than the goodwill of your community, and without it you would die.
The fork to Hive did great harm to our community. It wasn't enough to destroy Hive immediately, but is ongoing and yet may eventually. I suggest you have a look at the data @arcange daily publishes about the number of users, posts, comments, votes, and etc, to grasp the extent of the reduction in growth Hive has experienced since it's incarnation relative to that it enjoyed when there was only Steem.
Just because you don't understand or acknowledge something doesn't mean it didn't happen. Society is vastly more valuable than tokens. Mike Tyson said that Don King would sell his mother for a dollar.
Would you? Would having that dollar be considered benefiting to you? Merely having more tokens, or having tokens with more value, does not mean that you didn't lose anything in the Forkening, nor does Hive's persistence indicate Sun botched the takeover. Sun botched a lot of things, but he did successfully take over Steem, and that cost you a big chunk of the network that was available to you before he did.
You're full of shit:
This is monthly active users from March 2016 until now.
You are neglecting a huge elephant in the room which is the massive growth in the number of Splinterlands players, which happened after the fork.
Lecturing again.
Fuck you.
He did not manage to take over what was Steem before he came along.
My personal network is here entirely. When I think back to Steem before the fork, I can't say I miss a lot of it. The truly obnoxious whales, the flame wars, all the unabashed milking, the bid bot abuse, all the spam and other abuse as well as Steemit Inc's ineptitude are things I'm glad to see gone.
While Splinterlands is very successful, and I hope will continue to be, the basic premise and use case for Hive remains to decentralize social media by enabling content creators to receive the financial rewards, at least in part, generated from the content they create. Splinterlands is great, but the social media market is far greater, and I note that without Splinterlands Hive has not been able to leverage it's underlying use case because of our failure to decentralize governance and limit censorship to spam, scams, and plagiarism.
As part of the value of social media, in light of the growing censorship of social media platforms, censorship resistance is an integral aspect of Hive. Insofar as censorship has been inflicted on Hive creators other than for spamming, scamming, or plagiarism, it is contrary to that core functionality and use case of Hive. It has driven off many users, including those with large audiences, and this has greatly limited adoption and growth.
I see that censorship has strongly deprecated the Hive community, and that has prevented Hive from attaining the growth and economic benefits that should have resulted from censorship resistance and decentralized governance. It is the failure to decentralize governance that caused the Forkening. All of the value retained by Steem has been lost to Hive through that event, and those same flaws plagued Steem before the Forkening, and continue to afflict Hive and Steem today.
Hive can replace legacy financial institutions, governments, and social media (that have lately been shown to be illegally colluding to censor Americans), yet is prevented from fully attaining it's potential by it's flaws. I would not throw out the baby with the bathwater, but failing to rectify flaws in governance that arise from how witness votes are weighted, and allowing censorship of dissent instead of only for necessary purposes, continue to prevent Hive from becoming as valuable to our community - and the free world - as it should be. As governments, financial institutions, and social media platforms censor people more and more, the market for censorship resistance increases, and Hive is failing to benefit from this existential threat to our detriment.
I strongly agree with your recollection of how Hive has improved by enabling censorship to eliminate bid bots and rank abuse of flagging by certain stakeholders, but I note that some of those bid botters and abusers are consensus witnesses on Hive today. Because I strongly believe in the core use case of Hive as social media that financially rewards creators I advocate against misuse of censorship. Because I strongly believe in voluntarism and decentralization, I advocate against plutocracy. Advocating for fixing these flaws is not whinging about being flagged, promoting Communism, or reducing security from Sybil attacks. Hive is today governed largely by a plutocracy that was overthrown on Steem by Sun Yuchen. Sun was not the problem. He was a symptom of the problem. We have not fixed that problem because for that plutocracy it is the feature their continued governance depends on.
If we can get governance and censorship right, or at least righter, we will all benefit from more freedom, more users, and more wealth. The success of Splinterlands is a good thing, but it is not going to enable Hive to succeed at the more substantive functionality it has. I want Hive to conquer the world, not compete with Pokemon for market share. Society is immeasurably more valuable than money, and that core value is something that needs to be first and foremost if Hive is to succeed. Insofar as it isn't, we continue to fall short of our potential.
Hive has far greater value than it's token, it's code, or it's games. That value is in the community and their voices, and isn't being realized because of our failure to secure governance from mere plutocracy, and to prevent suppression of dissent with tools intended to prevent spam, scams, and plagiarism. We should fix those problems and enable Hive to reach it's potential.
I otherwise agree but I have a comment about this paragraph:
Censorship and flagging are two completely different things. The chain stores everything written on it. Flagging only affects reward distribution and visibility on specific front ends whose owners choose to use rewards to influence visibility in a certain way.
The difference is crucial, IMO. It is completely up to the front ends to decide what content they show. Anyone is free to build their own front end. We have dozens of front ends already. IIRC, Ecency shows more of the heavily flagged content than Peakd or Hive.blog.
Also, if you compare the way how Hive's stake distribution develops, you can see how much better it is compared to almost any crypto project. Steem started out as even more uneven of a stake distribution. The PoB mechanism is constantly spreading stake to new stakeholders none of whom were among the original miners. We also have new whales who've bought their influence.
I mostly agree with your comments here, with the exception that flagging isn't just something that front ends show. Downvotes, which I refer to as flags, are financial impacts. The front ends translate the blockchain data, but the downvotes are blockchain data. I am sure we will agree that financial mechanisms are very often used to censor people, as noted in earlier comments. In addition to direct financial impact, reputation is also impacted, and this is where the front ends most differ in the impact of downvotes.
I appreciate very deeply that we can have this conversation on Hive. Can you imagine having such a discussion on Twatter or Fakebook? Hive is censorship resistant because it uses downvotes to censor spam, scams, and plagiarism while enabling the community to counter flags and out-support content that has been financially attacked by downvotes.
That's why I'm here and not on Twatter or elsewhere. Enabling financial attacks to be used by the community to prevent spam is a good thing. Financial attacks on dissenting opinions by overlords is a very bad thing, and anyone with an opinion that isn't handed to them by overlords should be very averse to it. The Hive community has some ability to support those who are censored, but this often requires supporting speech one doesn't particularly agree with, and that isn't something most of us do often, or well.
People that support censoring those whose speech they disagree with end up being censored. When overlords censor their hapless subjects, it is always to conceal safety data, danger signals, and the like. Censorship of opinion is an existential threat that is always carried out. You can see - or could have watched as it happened - many people who supported censoring 'conspiracy theorists' suddenly changing their minds when harm came to them or their loved ones from the conspiracy in question, and then disappearing from the conversation when they were censored, just as they'd once advocated, by the conspirators.
Losing our tokens from a post isn't the existential harm losing our lives in a pogrom is, so it's easy to dismiss the issue on Hive, because Hive isn't most people's sole source of danger signals. Such dismissal just deprecates Hive, and keeps it from becoming that essential communications platform where people in danger can get information that keeps them alive in a dangerous world.
Hive has potential to be far more than Twatter. I think that potential has been flagged away for years, and I'd really like to see Hive attain it's potential, because I'd really like people to actually govern their communities on actual dirt, voluntarily contributing funds, forthrightly discussing policy, and etc, without the potential for overlords to control them by buying control of the dialogue. Centralized platforms make that control facile. Hive should make it much harder than we have yet. Insofar as profiteering is the problem, I address the problem as I get around to it.
We can do that on Hive, but not so much anywhere else.
The thing is that this is a user-owned platform. If rarely but sometimes do flag content that I find really disagreeable. To the extent I have influence here, this is my platform. No one is entitled to any rewards here whatsoever. It is the token holders who control the rewards and they have the right to use their influence to rewards the sort of content they want. Period. It is always possible to buy Hive Power from the free market.
I think the problem of rewards and reputation is to a large part due to the early stage we're in. As time passes, it becomes easier for communities deviating from mainstream opinion to be set up and thrive also in financial terms through second-layer tokenization. Reputation is also one of the parameters front ends are completely free to ignore and replace with one of their own.
Justin again on Huobi, I don't think is capable to control the firm. Replacing its Stablecoin with his own is first bad steps he attempt. I don't know maybe we're going to see another UST.😂
Stake up bitches so no bullshit drop like a steaming turd here.
It seems everywhere JS goes, he goes with problem and controversy I wonder when his day of reckoning will arrive.
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I’m yet to see a project that did better under Sun. I hope it’s different with Huobi. Just wishful thinking, I know.
F
This doesn't seem like good news for the non KYC exchanges but I think he will just run it into the ground along with most things he has touched. I don't have an account there so it doesn't look like it will bother me much.
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I don't understand these decentralised exchanges that have a head with employees. I am not well versed on this but I thought Hive kind of functions with out some of these structures basically by voting.
Imagine a Hive dex. But I doubt because of lack of smart contract.
this is exactly what we need and we need to build it on layer 2
Fascinating. The consolidation continues. Cryptocurrency exchange demise has certainly accelerated.
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I think it is business as usual for him. While we see community he sees opportunity to take over and grow his biz.
Hopefully we learn from the past and remain vigilant.
I think Hive is trading over there right?
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This guy is a cancer to the crypto space. While I do like to think decentralised exchanges are the way to, Justin Sun acquiring such an established exchange is bad news.
The guy should launch a course on "hostile takeovers" and sell it for $6969. xD
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Whatever he bought, not made a success story. The nearest example is Steem & Steemit
Cheers~
To those paying close attention, it might be instructive to see how Huobi apparently got weakened due to regulation and the bear market. It also had a founder with a majority stake. From then, it seems that the path was open for someone with a big enough bag of cash to buy this majority stake: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/10/13/huobi-token-surges-75-as-justin-sun-calls-for-empowering-the-exchange-token/
Don't know any details beyond this article, but only from that it seems exactly the same as the Steem takeover.
Justin Sun's USDD scam has been just ticking along under the radar.
This will speed things up!
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He can deny involvement all he wants, I am kinda forced to use Huobi fo my daily needs and the changes are already rolled out. USDD is shilled to you on every corner and trading pairs are already live. HUSD is gone completely.
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I love how you call him Mr. Tron.