You were already refuted. You’ve lost all credibility in my evaluation of your ability to comprehend. Don’t let the door hit you in ass on the way out. I do not need dumb people with us. Go for the dumb projects.

You can not seem to comprehend the subject matter. The point is that is the distinction between made by @smooth is an entirely meaningless diversionary tactic. All I can do is suggest you re-read my prior explanation after you’ve let your pride and emotions settle down and you are ready to read objectively. But perhaps you may simply lack the understanding of the subject matter to understand the argument entirely.

If you would like to talk on Skype about this, I would be more than happy to take the extra time to explain to you your error, given you had supported me in the past. Just Pm me a contact number or Skype account and I can call you now. Frankly it is disappointing, because I thought you were more astute and smart guy.

I understand you feel you are trying to call a spade a spade, but you are simply incorrect here.

I am always willing to admit when I make a mistake. I readily accepted that not all the block producing nodes were down and afair I never claimed they were. I do not remember claiming that the block producing nodes had been directly DDoS’ed. Even I reminded @smooth that I had not forgotten he had told me in the past that the block producing delegates have secret IP addresses (so why would I think they had been directly DDoS’ed). Your thought process does not make any sense. Again I challenge you to find a quote where I said they were. My point was the system as a ledger and a holistic economic system was down. And I was correct. The terminology around what means what specifically for Steem/DPoS/Graphene/Steemit is not well defined. There was not even a damn specification for this stuff. I was clearly referring to the fact that the sites I accessed were down and that the data from the ledger was not loading (which one would presume to be decentralized). There was never a specification on which terms we are supposed to use to refer to the data of the blockchain as separate from the block producing nodes. I wrote “Steemit DPoS was offline” as a way of expressing not just block producing nodes. I did not write “dpos was down”. It is quite clear who was lying.

Btw, we should add the point that I should have made to @smooth that secrecy (about IP addresses) is not security. Damn he knows that! He can’t possibly be a server guru if he does not know that. The asymmetry that the block producing nodes have is afforded to them because they trust their immediate connections to the outside word who feed them data. If that trust is violated, then they can be DDoS’ed. The vulnerability that could fail someday is still having these permissioned nodes in a privileged state. I am confident @smooth would not disagree with that. And I am confident that the collectivized transaction fees will also play into a vulnerability for the entire system in numerous facets.

You decide to read it the way you want to so that can find fault, but you are just injecting your own subjectivity into the analysis.


Afair I did not write “Steem is down” instead I wrote “Steemit DPoS is”. And even if I had written that, it is not quite clear in terms of definitions of names (e.g. Steem) where the demarcation is between data that has to be fetched from the ledger and block producing node activity. My prior reply to you explained that if the former is not funded, then the ”Steem” ledger is not really functional. So the design of DPoS with its for example permissioned and collectivized transaction fee mechanism is pertinent to whether the ledger was down from the perspective of needing to obtain the data from the ledger. Cripes man. Where is your comprehension level?

You are too focused on ambiguous vocabulary (as explained in the context why it is ambiguous) and not on comprehending the holistic nature of the issue and subject matter.

In short, @smooth was incorrect[imo pointing out a fact which I have explained is not germane to my intended point about the centralized clusterfuck of DPoS as pertains to genuine economic scaling], but I did not want to drive a stake through him nor beat a dead horse when in fact he was not trying to push his point beyond merely pointing out the fact that he did. You are the one who is forcing me to attack @smooth in order to defend myself. So who has the big ego here?

If it makes you feel validated somehow, just continue on with your interpretation. No big deal. Go your way and I will go mine.

Yet my holistic point is very very relevant and yet it gets lost in the nonsense about definitions of terms.


There was no error in my analysis. Never did I claim I had inspected the block producing nodes and concluded they were down. WTF  

Never did I claim that because Steemd.com was down it meant certainly that block production had ceased. I dare you to find anything I wrote that was even remotely insinuating that. I did claim that it meant some aspects of the (access to the) ledger seemed to be offline.

What are you smoking.

P.S. Honestly I am still not even knowledgeable (due to lack of a specification and not wanting to waste my scarce time to go digging in their source code) about whether the data written to the blockchain is retained by the P2P network full nodes (or whether just a hash is retained) and whether these nodes can supply the data or just the hash. And whether the sites that access this data have their own private caches or whether they use some feedthrough web servers which get the data from the full nodes (possibly caching it for efficiency). And how these web servers are funded so there is a sufficient network of them to be resilient against DDoS attacks. And that all ties back into my point that if the sites are down, then in effect the ledger is also down, unless we assume that these sites will have their own funding and fund private web servers not shared with the overall ledger, but in that case where is the funding coming from given there are no transaction fees? Is Steemit displaying advertising or some other form of revenue to pay for private web servers? Well I know Steemit, Inc. sneakymined a shit load of coins (50%?) so but then how is this distinct from the DPoS ledger given it is the same whales who control both and who take their funding from the various collectivized schemes for whale money grabbing. @smooth has a tendency of making pigeon-holed argumentation which just does not make much since from a helicopter perspective where you look at the entire thing holistically.

Oh and another point I did not make but would have if I was trying to really argue it as if someone was going to think @smooth slapped me down (geez you guys are always so damn focused on that aren’t you like chest thumping baboons), is that DDoSing the web servers is the low hanging fruit, thus in effect it is an attack on the ledger. Strengthen the web servers then the incentive to attack the core block producing nodes increases.