@unrealandy
To answer some of your questions.
as phoenixkonsole already pointed out, there were two different issues that were voted about. Phantom node and Stake grinding.
Here are the articles I wrote about those voting:
http://telosnews.com/index.php/2019/09/16/new-voting-update-telos-to-become-phantom-resistant/http://telosnews.com/index.php/2019/12/17/governance-rocks-has-1-new-voting-and-1-new-bounty/First of all, I want to point out that I might well be wrong about some details. I am not that technical that I would really know about these things that much, but I am most of the time using sources, like in this case as you yourself pointed out that governance.rocks voting link, it read there that it was from DASH.
It could well be that it isn't right, that it is actually PivX issue, but I still don't know any better, so I most likely used that specific text you linked as my source for that DASH part.
And yes, I believe my article might have affected the voting result, it is very much possible. But understand this, I am not official press, I don't belong to any press associations or anything. I am a private person, a Telos community member, who myself, as an individual decided to put up Telosnews.com in hopes of helping Telos knowledge be spread.
So I don't claim to be neutral, or even right. I am doing this as an amateur/hobbyist, and while I of course aim that my articles actually are right. I don't do any double fact-checking or similar, as regular professional press do. I try to write articles lightweight style, hence if you are going to go through all my articles and do some fact-checking, I am sure there are lots of errors there, but as said. I am not a professional press, just amateur/hobbyist.
And as I am not a professional neutral press, for this same reason I can write my own opinions to articles, as I did with grind staking. It was my opinion at that time that the best way would be to fix it at this upcoming fork, and I agree with you that it might well have affected the end result going towards that way.
What comes to the effect of grind staking and phantom nodes.
I still think the phantom node issue is minor. Only benefit someone gets from using a phantom node, as far as I have understood is, is that he saves the hosting cost. He still needs to put collateral there, so it doesn't really affect other people running their nodes that much.
Grind staking on the other hand has become a worse problem than I at that time thought. I still don't think it is that bad a problem, but it is much more serious than I myself anticipated, but then again, I am not that good on technical things, and my guess is that when it comes to anything master nodes, for example, you are probably many times better than me on those.
However, when you say that it affects your master node running, this sounds odd to me. Since to my understanding stake grinding only affects that someone can get the staking reward even it wouldn't really belong to him.
Hence it shouldn't affect master node rewards directly at all, and hence not affect running master nodes at all. That only way I can see it affecting master node rewards is if you are collecting your master node rewards to be staking, in which case it would affect it, but I would still say quite a minor effect.
This is my understanding of the issue, but of course, I might be wrong.
Also, what comes to your estimation of 15 Million, this would imply that someone has right from beginning been using stake grinding and also got every single stake reward for himself. For if I recall right, stake share have always been 10 percent of the rewards, so to get 15 million through stake grinding, would require stake grinders having got every single stake reward right from the beginning, and I don't think that is true. Even I have got plenty of stake rewards until I turned it off, and I have seen many people in forums claiming they have got staking rewards, so as far as I have understood right, and all people are not lying, it cant be 15 Million.
What comes to your proofs, which by the way were good that you brought to show, there is however one problem with them. For as far as I have understood, same person can both win staking and master node reward on same round. So just showing someone got 200 doesn't mean he used stake grinding, especially at beginning I suppose that would have happened to many people actually. Have you checked your own transactions that have you received those 200 rewards at the beginning? For if I understood right you set up quite many nodes at the beginning, so as long as you also had Telos in that same wallet, I think there's a good chance you have received them too.
But do dig this further, since it would be interesting to see if stake grinding has happened already at beginning times, since basically Telos community didn't become aware of it until the end of 2019, so it would be very interesting to know if someone used it already long before that.
And about the vote community being small. Exactly my point why you alone could have decided the voting to go a different way. For me, I was happy for the voting result, it went exactly as I hoped, but obviously you seem to disagree with it strongly. Voting ended less than half a year ago, and yet you keep here shouting that problem have been ever since, did you say 2018? in here, and your writing even gives the impression like you had been preaching about it ever since 2018, which you obviously didn't, since you didn't participate with couple of votes to make the voting go your way.
