John McAfee posted a tweet criticizing TRON and Justin Sun. The problem would be that TRON bought Steemit.
According to McAfee, Steemit is a community, before an online service, and since communities per se can’t be bought, he claims Justin Sun failed to realize this.
“I believe Justin Sun forgot one thing about Steem: it is a community.
And … communities cannot be purchased. It’s like trying to collect water with a sieve”.
While it has to be said that Justin Sun and TRON bought the Steemit platform and not the Steem protocol, they now seem to have power over the governance of the protocol as well.
Steemit.com is in theory only one of the various websites powered by Steem’s blockchain and the STEEM cryptocurrency. In fact, there are several websites that allow reading and writing content on this blockchain, but there are many fears that TRON may now acquire too much power on the net.
As a countermeasure, a soft fork has been implemented that has deactivated the voting power of a large number of tokens owned by TRON and Steemit.
However, the acquisition has been defined by many as hostile, due to the fact that with more than 42 million STEEM Power (SP) collected on Huobi, Binance, Poloniex, the Steemit team has regained its votes thanks to a new unilateral soft fork.
Therefore what is going on seems to be a real conflict, well represented by McAfee’s tweet: on one side the community, which considers the acquisition by TRON hostile, and on the other side, Justin Sun and his new Steemit team that seems to have enough power to impose their choices.
The Steem whitepaper still reads:
“Steem is a decentralized network that is operated by witnesses in jurisdictions around the world. All user actions are publicly recorded on the blockchain, and can be publicly verified. This means that there is no single entity that can censor content that is valued by STEEM holders. Individual websites such as steemit.com may censor content on their particular site, but content published on the blockchain is inherently broadcast traffic and mirrors all around the world may continue to make it available”.
It is clear from these words that many members and users of the Steem community are concerned about what is happening, that the network seems to be becoming much less decentralized than promised, and that there now seems to be a single entity capable of making unilateral decisions and imposing them on the entire community.
