Sun Yuchen used capital hegemony to control Steem, causing controversy, the integrity of stolen users' voting rights was questioned

Recently, in order to prevent capital power on the chain, Steem witness nodes jointly launched a soft fork. God V described the incident as a large-scale proving ground for "bribery attacks" in the DPOS consensus mechanism. He explained that the bribe originated from a "centralized exchange that misappropriated the voting rights of currency holders" and a "centralized" decentralized community. ".

Two weeks ago, the founder of TRON Tron announced the acquisition of Steemit Inc. Sun Yuchen, the founder of Tron Tron, expressed the hope that this "marriage" would create a "new era of decentralized social networks". This is another social network platform that Sun Yuchen won after the acquisition of seed BitTorrent.

However, on March 2nd, Steem Witness @Luke Stokes found that Steem began to become “centralized” after the acquisition.

"A large number of Steemit Inc accounts replaced previous witnesses to Steem," he said. That is, Steemit Inc and centralized exchanges use their holdings of Steem Power to raise witnesses related to Steemit Inc to the top 20. These exchanges include Huobi, Poloniex and Binance Binance.

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@Luke Stokes pointed out:

"Just this morning, the Dev 365 account suddenly received the support of Huobi, Poloniex and Binance Binance, several large centralized exchanges and other accounts, and eventually became one of the top 20 witnesses. Community members Steem tokens mortgaged on centralized exchanges are being used by these exchanges as tools to take over the Steem blockchain. "

According to Steem's white paper, the Steem blockchain uses the DPOS consensus algorithm. Steem's blockchain uses a rotation system. Each round, 21 witnesses are selected to create and sign transaction blocks. Twenty of the witnesses voted in favor of the vote, and the other was shared by all the witnesses who did not reach the top twenty. After each round of 21 witnesses, they will be reordered to prevent any witness from continuously ignoring the block produced by a certain witness. Witnesses are disqualified once they miss a block and have not generated a block within the last 24 hours.

In simple terms, the consensus algorithm used by the steem blockchain is similar to the joint-stock company we are familiar with. Any user holding steem power can be understood to be a shareholder of a de-Sinchem company, while 21 witnesses can The analogy is a board of directors elected by all shareholders. All users holding steem power can participate in the voting of witnesses. Steem power is the locked steem token. If the user wants to have the right to vote, he needs to mortgage the token in a centralized exchange. This will generate a potential capital concentration time bomb, that is, once the exchange locks the user Steem tokens can take over the voting rights of users.

@TheycallmeDan said: "The Steem blockchain case has given us a profound revelation. Centralized organizations lead decentralized communities through abuse of power. As a result, we have to finish playing." After the "centralization" vote was found, the community initiated The soft fork, community members said that they were concerned that TRON acquired the Steem Token, which accounted for about 20% of the total, held by the previous project party through the acquisition of Steemit Inc.

At the end of 2016, the project founder Ned Scott revealed in a public interview that Steemit Inc dug nearly 80% of Steem Token instead of 50% Steem Token in the early stage of the project, and this part will be used to build the Steem ecosystem.

In 2017, Ned once again promised the community not to use the part of the tokens previously mined by the team for voting and other operations, but whether Tron Tron will take over the previous agreement will become unknown, thus prompting the community to initiate a soft fork and hope to temporarily freeze The following accounts will not be thawed until a new agreement is reached between Tron Tron and the Steem community.

After learning that the community initiated a soft fork, Sun Yuchen first voted for new witnesses such as United Binance and Huobi, and then launched a soft fork 22.5 to unlock its frozen Token and transfer it back to the exchange.

@TheycallmeDan explained:

"Binance, Huobi and other centralized exchanges use the crypto assets of users Steem Token to exercise their voting rights without the consent of the users to elect the witness they want. After unlocking the frozen Steem Token, These tokens are transferred back to the user account. "

The "centralized exchange that misappropriated the voting rights of currency holders" made an act of stealing beams and changing posts in the process. Users who have done transactions in the transaction know that users put their own crypto assets (such as BTC) from their wallets and charge them to centralized exchanges, such as Huobi or Binance Wallet, and then exchange them in your account Give you a Huobi-BTC or Binance-BTC, and the BTC in your account at this time is not the BTC you originally held, but BTC-Huobi or Binance-BTC, the so-called stolen coin, It is the exchange controller who transfers your crypto assets, and the person who controls these crypto assets is not the user himself.

In this regard, some users have questioned the integrity of these cryptocurrency exchanges: "If the centralized exchanges use the currency in the user's account without the user's consent, then how do we know if they have used our Coins to manipulate the market? Centralized exchanges are not credible. I want to raise all my coins. "

At the same time, the soft fork 22.5 caused dissatisfaction in the community. Many nodes shut down and eventually paralyzed the server. After the situation became more serious, Sun Yuchen proposed to meet with the top 50 witnesses to discuss, and Sun Yuchen would "bribery" the centralized exchange to vote. "Swinging the pot" gave the hacker, "It is misleading to question our malicious acquisition of Steemit. Our original intention was not to take over the Steem project, but to protect everyone's interests from hackers." A word did not get "buy it" by the community.

Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, a centralized exchange, also acknowledged the incident on Twitter and said that in light of the community's response, Binance will withdraw its vote and added that it was just an ordinary upgrade / fork.

However, in the meantime @Luck Stoke still found that the votes of the witnesses selected by the centralized transaction were far from the votes of the witnesses selected by the community, that is, the witnesses selected by the centralized exchange still dominated.

It is reported that Steemit is a decentralized social website and an application-type DApp on the Steem blockchain. It was developed by Steemit Inc. EOS founder Dan Larimer was one of the founders of the site. Users can use the Steem token (the basic token on the Steem blockchain) on this website to reward users who upload articles, images and comments, as well as those who provide and like popular content. Users who contribute more to the website can get Steem tokens and use them to pay for goods and services.

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