The hive.blog wallet has some technical issues but you can use peakd.com

@bbc.reporter

Yeah, it is hard to tell what is really going on there. Both shady and slippery characters for sure, so public statements are not worth much (anything) and we don't have much else to go on, at this point, unless a whistle blower comes forward or something, but that seems rare in crypto. In reality we may never know.

@bbc.reporter

Good questions.


There was a similar issue a year or so ago when Steemit announced major layoffs, the CEO of Steemit was acting in a very evasive and sketchy way, and public statements about the use of the stake did not match what people were seeing on the blockchain. In effect, one can say that there was already concern about an exit scam being in the process of occurring. A fork to protect the ninja-mined stake aka dev fund was discussed among witnesses and stakeholders (the PR in #3 above was part of this), and there were even some direct talks between witnesses, stakeholders, and Steemit. Ultimately, a fork did not go ahead at that time, and Steemit made some other commitments and process changes which, tentatively at least, satisfied the community.

So, yes, this matter was in play before the sale even, and the lack of true on-chain governance and control over the ninja-mined stake, how it was used, and the community considering forks to address that issue is something that has lingered for a long time, and not something new to Justin.

After the sale, there was no immediate anticipation of an exit scam per se, but there were numerous statements from Justin about replacing the Steem blockchain (described as proprietary, which is not true) and migrating all users to Tron. There was a page put up on Poloniex (which Justin owns, or is part of a group that owns) telling Steem users how to exchange their Steem for Tron-based tokens.

During this period of about a week, many attempts were made by witnesses and major stakeholders both publicly and privately to communicate with Justin and other Tron leadership to discuss these plans and the lack of support for them in the Steem community. All of those attempts were either ignored or explicitly rejected.

Also during this period, an "AMA" video session was conducted during which, out of several dozen community questions submitted (and acknowledged by Steemit management), only one or two were answered before ending the session with a statement to the effect of "now that we have answered all of the questions (!), let's wrap things up".

As part of the same session, it was stated that the migration and token swap plan was put on hold. However, communications and PR from Justin and Tron continued to promote the upcoming migration and token swap, and the Poloniex page remained up. Further attempts to engage and ask that these efforts be put on hold were ignored or rejected.

So the witnesses and major stakeholders decided to move ahead with the temporary soft fork and freeze the stake in place until what was seen as serious threat to the blockchain could be more effectively addressed. These threats could theoretically include an exit scam as well as using the stake (which although committed to be non-voting, in practice represents about 70% of votes) to take control of the blockchain and even shut it down, forcing a migration.

To revisit one more point from my previous reply, and referenced in your reply above ("not just blocked from governance"), it is not technically possible to block stake from governance without also blocking it from moving. Once the stake is moved, it can be placed into sock puppet accounts and used to take over full control from there, at which point it is no longer possible to stop it from voting for governance. So to prevent it from being used for governance also requires stopping it from moving. This need not be permanent (and, as implemented, was not) but only long enough for governance issues to be resolved.

Finally, to clarify another point, this was not witnesses acting alone, as witnesses don't have any real power on their own (voting changes are instant, so any or all witnesses can be voted out and replaced). It was witnesses working with the support of major stakeholders. Following the activation of the soft fork, stakeholders not part of that discussion could still vote out the witnesses supporting the fork and vote in witnesses opposed to it (there were both in the top 50 ranks), but, in fact, the full complement of stakeholders increased support for the pro-fork witnesses and decreased support for the anti-fork witnesses, and this continued to be the case for several days. So it can be said that stakeholders overwhelmingly supported the step, making it a true exercise of governance and not a "witness plot".

So to answer your question, I would not say that an exit scam was anticipated, though it was certainly possible. However, there were ample reasons to assess that the stake could be used to threaten the blockchain. To guard against that requires stopping it from voting as well as stopping it from moving. Preventing an exit scam was an additional benefit, but not really the primary intent.

#1-2. There are many posts and comments on Steem about this (including some from me, see below), I don't really want to rehash it all. Except as you say many claim it is a sort of dev fund (which I personally agree with for many reasons and IMO there is more than ample evidence to support this). Witnesses and supporting stakeholders implemented a soft fork to temporarily prevent transfers from the account so it couldn't be drained in what would be, if you view it as a dev fund, an exit scam. Also, the only way to prevent voting is also to prevent transfers otherwise the coins can be moved to another account and voted there. The exact same issues have arisen prior to Justin's buyout of Steemit Inc (see below), so this is nothing new and not personal to Justin.

#3 is wrong. First that PR on a non-official repo is over a year old (addressing much the same issues as #1-2, at a time when the community had lost faith in Steemit Inc and its former managements handling of development, which is further evidence that the issues pre-dated Justin's acquisition of Steemit and he should have been aware of it). Second, as a 100% factual matter (which can be verified by anyone who understands the code), it does not completely destroy any coins and in fact would be a similar temporary soft  fork if it had ever been implemented (which it was not). Flat out, whoever claimed it would 'completely destroy' coins either does not understand code (nor consult people who do) or is deliberately lying about it.

#4 is wrong. That commit would have blocked exchange accounts from voting (which all major exchanges have publically stated they would not do anyway, until they "accidentally" or otherwise ended up locking up and voting with customer funds to help Justin override on-chain governance and take over the network), and would not affect transfers. It has not been implemented. Any coder can make any commit they want and one should not read more into it until and unless it is deployed on the network, which this one has not. FWIW even if implemented this would not be secure for the same reasons as described in #1-2 above (coins can be moved to a new account and used to vote there) and for that reason I would consider it ineffective and not support it regardless of the merits.

I've replied to many Steem posts and comments addressing these matters. You can find some of that here: https://steempeak.com/@smooth/comments

From previous reply

Agree. It is a form of attack where 'stake' does not equal economic ownership therefore all the usual arguments about the costs of acquiring stake and the costs of (at least potentially) reducing the value of your holdings by attacking the network do not apply. There are many variants of this including the BST attack that Monero's ArticMine has described numerous times before.

For your own good, stay the hell away from any new Risto scam at least until and unless he pays his debts from the last scam.

Dandelion doesn't address linking your IP to Monero use. What it does do is make it much harder for other nodes to link your IP to your specific transactions. (To be clear it already wasn't trivial or even easy, but with Dandelion it is much harder still, and since it is built in and everyone is using it, this makes the task of mapping Monero transactions overall much harder and helps everyone.)

If you want to hide your Monero usage altogether you need to use VPN/Tor/I2P.

I stepped down shortly before the drama as I anticipated it (though not the specific details of what has played out of course) and was already feeling like my time investment there was getting to be more than I wanted, with upcoming drama likely to increase it.

Exchanges are clearly the real powers behind any proof of stake type coins. In practice, regardless of how theory is supposed to work, customers deposit huge numbers of coins on exchange which the exchanges can then use (legitimately, illegitimately, or in gray area situations) to dominate the chain consensus, despite having no real skin in the game at all. With other coins it is a bit more debatable. Obviously exchanges still have a lot of influence over what coins get traded and this influences their value, but it is less clear when influence is more diffuse among holders, developers, miners, and exchanges.

Sorry for OT for the AEON thread, if you want to continue the discussion please take it to a Steem or Steemit thread.

Apparently returned and back for another round of (very likely) scamming.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5227927.0

I would strongly urge everyone to not go near this or at least do so with EXTREME caution.

Pay your debts

Literally they can not, but in effect a miner (cartel) which is able to selectively block or insist on higher fees on coins that are not its own can increase its share of the total supply, which is equivalent to increasing inflation (on everyone else).

Without censorship resistance you lose what is useful about a programmed supply rule (that your holdings are only diluted at the specified rate), even if the literal supply rule is still there.

@bbc.reporter

I agree with you that IF there is a mining cartel, then all sorts of bad things happen, not only manipulating supply but also censorship, confiscation, and even inflation.

Most of the security of PoW depends on there not being a cartel.

Whether ASICs inevitably lead to a cartel is debatable.

Whether external factors (e.g. access to energy) lead to a cartel regardless of ASICs is also debatable.

Finally whether ASIC resistance is futile is also debatable.

People who are claim to be sure about these things are either lying, ignorant, or so much smarter than me that I can't differentiate between their superintelligence and ignorance.

Long term success of cryptocurrencies is unknowable and will probably require no small amount of luck. Which by the way, I would say there has been already to get as far as we have.

Correct and there are more updates in progress as well.

The coin is actively maintained.

Nothing announced before xmas...

Be careful downloading binaries and don't trust links posted to any forum.

There were never any payments made to Poloniex or any other exchange after the resources were handed over to me by the original dev, and aren't any payments being made now. I can't speak for what happened before that.

Recommended maintenance release

Aletheia (point release 1)

This maintenance release contains dozens of reliability and performance improvements from the AEON community as well as upstream, including

New notify daemon and wallet options for event-driven handling of blocks, txs, reorgs, and block rate changes (enhancement)
Fixed incorrect reporting of inputs amounts the CLI wallet when creating a new transaction
Numerous fixes needed for building with GCC version 9.1
Fixed broken DB migration when upgrading in-place without a resync
Fixed numerous potential information leakages when using wallet with an untrusted/public node

https://github.com/aeonix/aeon/releases/tag/v0.13.1.0-aeon
https://github.com/aeonix/aeon-gui/releases/tag/v0.13.1.0-aeon

The counterfactual is pretty hard to assess but the concentration of mining under the control of a few ASIC manufacturers has definitely harmed the narrative about decentralization, which could have wide-ranging effects on trust, adoption, and ultimately market value.

There could be positives, too, so it isn't guaranteed that even the negative perception of centralization is a net negative. There is a narrative and some supporting theory about ASICs being good for security, which I think is over-simplified and could possibly be outright wrong. But in reality right or wrong doesn't matter short term as much as perception.

Note: above packages include both GUI and CLI.

Upcoming point release - new release candidate

After fixing numerous problems with the previous release candidate (build issues, newly discovered information leak to remote nodes in the upstream, etc.), we're once again preparing for the upcoming point release

It won't require any sort of fork, just upgrading.

If you are aware of any bugs or issues please be sure they are reported in the next few days so we can evaluate whether there are fixes worth including in this release. This could include testing the current unreleased master branch if you are able to compile from source (binaries should also be available soon), as that is likely to be same as the new release (unless new problems are discovered).

Report issues here:
https://github.com/aeonix/aeon/issues
https://github.com/aeonix/aeon-gui/issues

Well, yes, it was always the case that people could check signatures on the binaries they download and would have detected it immediately.

Perhaps that is the point you are making.