Have you ever watched the movie Ocean's Thirteen? Because it sure looked like a crypto version of it happened today.
As featured yesterday, the Steem (STEEM) Blockchain prepared a hardfork which will essentially seized the holdings of certain users who has openly supported its rival-fork chain Hive (HIVE).
This move is touted by Steem as retribution to the Hive supporters for
a) initially attempting to lock Justin Sun's fund following his acquisition of Steemit.inc.
b) Excluding many Steem / Justin supporters from the Hive fork-airdrop.
Almost immediately after the hardfork, the seized funds were itself seized in a move that must have made Robin-hood himself proud.
Fifty original bitcoins moved from a wallet that has been dormant since 2009.
This marks the first time since August 2017 that an account has moved coins from 2009.
Interestingly, in a court filing, Craig Wright legally claimed he owned the address from which the coins moved from.
Wright denied moving the coins, which now presents a legal catch-22 for Wright in his ongoing court case.
Earlier this week, PIVX (PIVX) developers claimed that the Mcafee's Ghost (GHST) white paper was plagiarized from an outdated 2018 PIVX white paper.
PIVX stated that while their codebase was open source, the whitepaper is not and “was fully copyrighted in 2018.”
McAfee admitted that Ghost “copy-pasted” parts of its white paper from PIVX, yet nonetheless intend to sue PIVX for defamation.
Steem’s latest hard fork has been completed but the entire seizure was ‘rescued’ in a mysterious transaction to Bittrex exchange.
The hard fork planned to transfer the funds of 64 Steem accounts to another Steem account named “community321.”
Shortly after the funds were transferred as planned, the STEEM tokens worth about $5.7 million were sent to Bittrex exchange.
The community321 account explicitly asked Bittrex to return the “stolen funds” to their owners:
"...please return them to their original owners prior to the fork :)" - the transaction memo noted.
(Editor: It gets better, after the 'heist' was concluded, the account even left a message on the blockchain)
Participation in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system to put your tokens in to serve as a validator to the blockchain and receive rewards.
Regardless of the twist that occurred, the news of Steem's account and fund seizure has come to some as a shock, not expecting a decentralized blockchain network can seize the entire holdings from wallet address.
While the early adopters of the crypto space are no doubt powered by the belief that no 3rd party should have control over one's wealth, the market has seemed to signal that this is no longer an important ethics to have in regards to crypto.
Question:
On the scale below, how important is self-sovereignty when it comes to owning crypto for you? (should crypto be confiscated from a person for whatsoever reason?)