Steem/Tron - Exchange Debacle - Right Or Wrong?

Welcome back to the channel, and I hope you're having a great day. So I want to talk a little bit about this Steam Tron situation a little bit more, uh, because it hasn't really de-escalated. I think it's pretty much, um, a lot of the same issues, uh, haven't been resolved, uh, since the, the very beginning. And I think specifically I want to focus on more in relation to, uh, the exchanges, you know, what's happening with them, uh, you know, what happened with these exchanges and, um, you know, was it appropriate they do that and what does that mean for, for the cryptocurrency space. So, um, so a lot of these Steam communities still haven't got past the situation with, um, Justin Soon's, uh, uh, want to take possession of what they call the Ninja Mind State. And, um, in my last video where I talk about, um, why I side with Justin Soon on this, I just want to be clear and say that I don't take any sides, but in particular with, uh, how I believe contracts work. Um, you know, it would seem that I think, uh, the relationship between Steemit and though— and that stake, I believe it belonged to the company. And I believe when Justin Sun bought that company, he, he bought that stake. And some people don't believe that. They believe there was an agreement, uh, that was solid enough to warrant that that stake remained in use by the Steam chain, right? For its benefit. And I completely understand the side of Steamians. You know, this has been a situation where people have come from their own perspectives with their own rights, idea of right and wrong in this. And there are situations and there are such things where it could be possible for both parties to be right. But then when both parties are right, you're still faced with the situation, and then what happens next? And in the ethical, in the moral business idea, where it is true that we have this distinction between morals and ethics, and what is legal. In other words, there could be laws in place that, um, you know, aren't necessarily fair or ethical or even moral, but they, they exist anyway. You know, we had laws through history that were, uh, were not fair. We've had slavery. We've had laws that said women couldn't vote. Uh, we've had all these legalities that were the law but weren't necessarily moral, ethical. But there are— because our morals and ethics are changing, they seemingly change in business and our society as well as we go on, uh, it can become difficult in some cases to hold to just a moral and ethical standard, especially in situations like this where both people can come out right and it could be nobody's fault. But You still have to rule, uh, in one way or the other. And then we tend to lean more to legal, the, the legal standings of a situation. Now the problem is there have, you know, been some people have looked at what the Stephen community is, uh, deeming to be a, um, a, a contract. And some believe it is, some believe it isn't, uh, I heard this, I don't know if it's true or not. You know, you have to do your own investigation to check this out because I just heard this through a chat room. I heard that the former employee of STEAM, of STEAMED, uh, Androarky, right? Um, he was a lawyer, uh, he was an actual lawyer, um, and, uh, What I'm getting, what I'm hearing is that, uh, he said something to the effect of the contract wasn't— it didn't look like a contract, right? Um, now, you know, the community can reach out to Andraarky. You know, this is something that has to be hearsay, but we have to go on. I didn't hear him say it, but I did hear what I would say to be some reputable people in the community saying that he reviewed, uh, the, the, um, the, the information that was available and that it did not look like a contract, right? Um, if that's the case, then that would mean— I'm sorry, that, uh, Justice Soon would have the legal standing in this, but maybe the Steam community still has a more ethical claim, right? But then that takes us back to what I just said prior. Previously. But this, this isn't what this conversation is really about. I just brought that up to, to, to, to, to try to help the Steam community understand that I am not unsympathetic to the message of Steam, of the Steam community, and what they saw as, uh, what would be the appropriate right thing to do. I get it, get it 100%. But What I really want to focus on is what happened with the exchanges. And, um, you know, obviously, or of course, if it is so that the stake was purchased from Steemit with Justin Sun and it's all legally his, then it would have to be the case that what the exchanges did was wrong. At the very least, what the exchanges did was wrong. And I thought that, and I believe that, but unfortunately that gets even a bit more messy, guys. Let me explain what I mean. So where it is true that customers deposit funds into exchanges, the key word here is centralized exchanges, right? Um, and, and one would presume, or, or one would then go on to look at that deposit meaning that those are customer funds and they shouldn't be used in any way. Whereas, whereas that sounds true, it may or may not be true. So the problem is, when you deposit money into an exchange You have, in a sense, handed over your, your cryptocurrency to this exchange. Now, everything that happens on that exchange, how money is moved back and forth, is, is not that the actual cryptocurrency is moving from place to place. It is just sitting ownership of that exchange, right? They're holding that, and their obligation to you, uh, is to now trade that deposited funds allow you to withdraw for something, right? Withdraw for whatever it might be. It might be, uh, US dollars or currencies or some other cryptocurrency, whatever the case may be. And at that time it becomes something else, and that is something else. But it could very well be that centralized exchanges, similar to what we get in our banks, right? Because centralized exchanges seemingly have taken the place of, of banks, right? When we use a centralized exchange, there's nothing like cryptocurrency. We have to turn over documentation and identification, and, uh, there's an account set up and there's rules to the accounts, and the customer funds are held in the fiduciary responsibility of that exchange now, but it is now transferred to them. And so I guess what I'm getting at is, much like a bank when you deposit funds to a bank, what you get is you get something like, um, uh, what could be an agreement between you and that exchange that those funds, um, you know, are basically in their hands. And it could even go over to something else, like it could be, uh, even to the effect of, um, Uh, that exchange, that bank, uh, has the right to do many things with those funds, right? Just like in a traditional bank, when we turn over our funds, what they do with them, they go take them, they take that money out and they go loan it out. They, uh, do all these various things with it, right? Uh, and they manage the money and buy this or that. But then when they are, um, doing that, you don't technically have access to your funds. They're gone. Uh, it is the deposit of others. This is what is on deposit with others. That isn't your actual money that is being utilized at that point in time. So then, in that way, is it true that those customer funds are actually the funds of the exchange during that time? It could very well be. Could very well be. Now, of course, we know some exchanges have withdrawn have started to basically power down and they're not using their esteem to vote and things like that. And don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not saying that this is ethical or should be ethical. It could be totally wrong, but I'm just presenting another look at this that may not be as cut and dry as we may have thought. I think it's also, uh, interesting to note that, um, you know, within the idea of, um, this Ninja Mind stake and it being used to the betterment of the Steam community, that it may even be the question that what we're deeming proper use of that, those, those, that mined cryptocurrency that was basically, uh, pretty much, uh, going to be, uh, held for the purposes of the benefit of the steam chain. Could be that not all are in agreement with what exactly that means or what exactly gets done with those funds. Now another thing that's come out is that Justin Sun plans to, at least it relates to the voting power, distribute the rights of that voting power back to the community. Now I have no idea how he would do that. but that would be something that would be very transformative to the, uh, uh, uh, to the chain, right? Very transformative to the, uh, the, the voting system and, and, uh, the community now having this, this ability to vote, uh, in a more decentralized way, I guess I could say for a better word, all of that stake going back and using that way. If that is true, that would most certainly be a game changer and probably be one of the greatest ideas I've heard what could be done with that stake, further decentralizing the chain by giving that back to the people. Um, you know, also it's the, the issue of, uh, or the situation of Is it possible that Justin Sun could be a good thing? In other words, the amount of attention that Justin Sun brings to the Steem chain, where he could take the chain, where it could end up in the future, it could possibly end up with a lot more users, a lot more money. And the one big issue with that would be if Justin Sun is leading the path in that leading the charge on that, then it would follow this very centralized formula. That is something that is foreign to the Steam chain and something that Steamians do not want. But there is another idea that, uh, excuse me, that I'm beginning to understand, and that is that in the true nature of decentralization, a lot of it depends on just not what your abilities are on the chain or who can actually change certain features on the blockchain, but it is also what part of the chain and how much of the chain is controlled and decentralized by the masses of people, right? You know, as to say that when we move cryptocurrency, we're moving information, and that cryptocurrency is part of that chain, is representative of that chain as well. So the more of it you own or the less of it you own is in direct correlation to if it's decentralized or not. In other words, it would be ridiculous if one guy owned 99.99% of all the cryptocurrencies of a chain, but he declared that that chain was decentralized, right? It wouldn't make any sense. But that is what we're saying when we take out the idea of decentralization when it comes to the actual holdings of the cryptocurrency and the value, right? Which is— excuse me— which is why I want to lead you to the next part of this video to in a better understanding of that and giving us something to think about with the idea of decentralization and the future of the, uh, SteemChain. So a lot of it is also when we're looking at decentralization, it's not just the, um, the, um, the decentralization of the value of the network across the network, but also how our dPOS works in relation to the voting, right? And the part of voting, as we know, is stake-weighted voting. So people have the most money, they can have the most weighted votes, right? And with state-weighted voting, it also keeps people from gaming the chain, right? Because you gotta pay essentially for the votes. So this has spawned a lot of conversations about how to fix this. Like, is there a way we can have something like one STEAM for one vote, right? Something like that. We've also experimented with tokens, like ideas like an NFT token, right? Non-fungible tokens, meaning that could represent maybe one vote on the Steem chain, and you could purchase this, this vote, and so on and so forth. So everybody would be able to purchase this token and have one vote per account, something to that effect. Also quite interesting with the exchanges, uh, have been that how they held the stake and was able to vote with the stake. If maybe there was some way you could use the exchanges to to cash your votes, right? And it would be more of a democratic system. And that way it can also be one token, one account. And those accounts could be verified because they would be sitting on a centralized exchange and not a situation where they could have multiple accounts that aren't basically KYC'd or identified or something to that effect. But of course the problem with that would be then you would kind of be relying on off-chain parties to facilitate that, you know. So it's a lot of, uh, things to work around with that. But getting back to just the idea of account-based voting, we recommend something like BitcoinMYK. It's a project that I founded that's going into the Steem, uh, I think of it more like an overlay on the Steem blockchain. And what it does is, because we're able to piggyback off of chains like Steem, we're able to facilitate and be incentivized to do so a system that allows through our token that runs on the SteemChain that facilitates basically each vote that's cast, you basically receive the same amount, right? Per post in our tokens, right? The token kind of does that. But in a similar way, this is something that could be covered not only with the fair distribution of STEEM that could indirectly lead to a more fair situation, a more decentralized situation of voting, and help to solve the voting issue overall. This, we believe, are steps that would allow us to do that, and it works quite simple. You're rewarded tokens in relation to your votes, to your posting, so on and so forth, right? And so that's how we solve that problem, uh, and we believe it's a step in the right direction. We've always pushed for democratic voting, account-based voting, and it's been quite difficult because blockchains take a lot of resources to run. And if somebody could come in and game the system, they could pretty much just usurp all that value out of the chain. You can have hundreds of the same person under the same account, right? So you would have to have a, um, a sidechain type situation, if, um, for lack of a better word, where it could take a lot of those risks and create a more fair distribution system. And hopefully it leads to a more fair voting system for what the future of the chain comes to, whether that be directly or indirectly. So I think the good thing about all of this happening is it is going to allow us to address some of these shortcomings of DePOS, and, uh, you know, in that way potentially, uh, get us on track to where we want to be. But, uh, you can join BitcoinNYK today. It's absolutely free. You start receiving your, um, your cryptocurrency free. Very reminiscent in some ways of what we're getting with EOS Voice. If you don't understand what happens on EOS Voice, you receive a fixed amount of tokens every day to have your fair representation on that chain. The big issue is that you have to KYC, and that's very unattractive, unappealing, grueling to people who are accustomed to a decentralized chain. But the BitcoinNYK project is a very unique situation where because it's piggybacking off of the Steam Chain, it is able to take a lot more risk than normal. And so because of that, we think we can be flexible and do some things potentially that we have not seen before in these type situations. But join us today, start experimenting, play around with it, ask some questions, and it may help us to move closer to that solution. But that's all I wanna say in this video. If you like content like this, Don't forget to like, subscribe, hit the bell at the top of the YouTube video. It lets you know when all our latest new videos come out. Uh, again, don't forget to check us out. Get your free cryptocurrency from us. If you have a problem getting it, contact us on this video, contact us on our site platform. We will assist you as soon as we get that message and get in your token so you can partake in some of the value. Of the BitcoinNYK project as well. And until next time, as always, take care.