Specifically what I wrote in the post you quoted is:


I am referring to Steemit there, not DPoS in isolation. Thus you’re being disingenuous to claim I am lying. I may have thought that “DPoS” (as a term referring to the ledger as a whole) might be down because I presumed that Steemd.com was accessing the ledger directly. I do not think I was referring any where to whether the block producing nodes stopped functioning. Can you find any quote where I claimed that?

Your second link is where I pointed out to @smooth that any attempt to frame the issue around whether the block producing nodes were still active, was more or less a diversionary tactic trying to discredit the point that Steem/Steemit was down.

I stand by this account of what transpired:


Refute that.

I am not lying. I never wrote “dpos was down”. That is an attempt to put words in my mouth taken out-of-context. I clearly explained that the Steem/Steemit was down from my perpective (and presumably 1000s of others given I verified those were down via numerous proxies all over the globe) and that Steemd.com gave an error which lead me to believe that the blockchain might not be communicating to Steemd. If you’re going to quote someone, then quote what they wrote. Do not insert some words they never wrote verbatim taken out-of-context, purely as an attempt to draw attention away from all the correct claims being made on various issues. And the point below potentially links the periphery being down to the design of DPoS and collectivized transaction fees.

Indeed Steem (as perceived by 1000s of users) was down. That is fact.

It is an entire system. Those of you who are trying to obfuscate what was discussed, are just conveniently trying to weasel your way out of culpability for the system being down.

I am sorry for you John if you bought this token and now feel you have to defend it, if that is the case. Certainly you are not being objective about the full scope of the discussion about Steem/Steemit being down. It was down! None of you have denied that the sites I checked were down and that busy.org was unable to load content from (caches of) the “blockchain”.

What do we mean by “blockchain”? Okay so we put hashes of content on the data stored by block producers and then we grab cached content that matches that content from other nodes/servers. So if it is possible to DDoS attack those nodes which serve up data that users expect to come from the “blockchain” then is the blockchain down yes or no?

It is a matter of perspective. That is what @smooth and I discussed. You read only what you want to read into the discussion which is from my perspective an incorrect summary of the discussion and what transpired.

If Steemit has 1 billion users and it goes down and you tell them, “oh but it is really isn’t down”, they are going to say you are either a liar or have lost your mind.

The fact that they have not been able to yet scale the entire system out such that it can’t be DDoS’ed attacked is I think perhaps relevant to the discussion about whether EOS can scale. As Vitalik pointed out, the collectivized transaction fee scheme has  not been tested at smart contract scale yet. Moreover I should have pointed out in my discussions with @smooth that perhaps the reason the cache servers were insufficient to defend against the DDoS attack might have something to do with the fact that presumably no transaction fees are being paid directly to them (they presumably depend on residual income that somehow trickles down from the collectivized circle-jerk). The collectivization of fees works perhaps to fund the inner whale circle-jerk for the 100 witnesses, but it apparently does not scale out decentralized in the ecosystem, which was the point I been trying to articulate to @smooth over the past weeks in several facets that DPoS can’t scale the ecosystem from an economic analysis. And apparently also the point Vitalik was making. When I refer to circle-jerk, I mean in many facets including that the last time I checked there was still no formal specification of DPoS nor sufficiently organized documentation so that any one could even know where the fuck to look in terms of knowing whether the circle-jerk DPoS “ledger” thingy was still functioning whilst the GUI user-level access points of the ledger data were down due to DDoS attack.

DDoS attacks will happen and they can be a learning experience that can possibly be adequately defended against by making some changes. I am not expecting them to never have an incident as they grow and learn. Steemit was also DDoS attacked in 2016 much more frequently. Yet I also stand by my skepticism about whether a centralized ledger of 100 (potentially sock puppet) witnesses can be a robust system against more powerful attackers. Also if the whales start attacking each other is another possibility I worry about. Yet I also was willing to tolerate it as a scaling mechanism to test out new ideas, but my main objection thus far is that the systems seem to be whale money grabs. Even the voting on Steem/Steemit seems to be “if you scratch my back and help us money grab, then we will give you a cut of the action”. My interest in supporting a decentralized ledger is I want my ROI to not depend on kissing any one else’s ass or corruption. I want to be able to go build things based on the merits of the followers I can create, the value to others out there of the products/apps I create, etc.. I am not going to support any system where the ROI is subjective on whether I support things I do not think are correct.

I am pointing out about Dan potentially enticing securities regulators to look more closely at our ecosystem. And I am not happy about some whales raping the ecosystem and squandering it on illegal shit. Broadcasting to numerous threads that others create to talk about EOS, Steem, and DPoS enabled systems, is I think consumerate to the level of the $300 million money grab and incorrect hype and snake oil salesmen obfuscations underway. Centralizing a huge pot of money is going to raise angst in our ecosystem because it leads to massive failure, e.g. Mt. Gox, the DAO, etc.. EOS illegal securities might be the next black swan that takes our ecosystem into another crypto winter (not sure about that though). And $300 million is not actually that huge any more as the market caps have increased significantly over the past year.

Luckily so far I am not censored at Steem/Steemit when I argue with whales. But I have had my entire awards (from 100s of voters) nullified by a couple of arrogant whales who abuse the downvote feature. It is not the loss of money but it is that I want a meritocracy. I want to have a decentralized ledger that I can invest my effort in and not feel like it is being wasted (potentially in a future fireball of securities regulation or DoS attacks) or gamed.

Mostly I just intended to write down some of my thoughts about balancing the disclosure about EOS so that readers can judge for themselves both sides.

Never have I stated that I thought EOS would be a bad speculation. I am not commenting about that other than to note most of these FOMO things tend to have their pumps eventually.