As most of you probably know by now, steem2wls has been dysfunctional since the Whaleshares Hard Fork 2 that has restructured the API, breaking support for all services for Whaleshares written in Python, including steem2wls. This is an update to show you that we are working on bringing steem2wls back. At the same time, in this post we ask some long overdue questions on the state of Whaleshares that we would like to see answered by the Beyondbitcoin/Whaleshares dev team and top-20-witnesses.

What is causing the problems?

Without any announcement of the breaking changes, a new version for Whaleshares nodes was published by the Whaleshares dev team a little over a month ago and witnesses were asked to update in preparation for hardfork 2. The new node version completely changes the way the API works, but the Whaleshares team has not published an updated version of their Python library wls-python yet, nor published the source code of the new node version nor a list of changes, which would make it much easier for the community to update wls-python or beem. As a result, all apps and services written in Python cannot send transactions to the Whaleshares chain anymore.

What is our progress?

With no working Python library around, we have tried to call the API manually. Sadly, the API would not accept any signed transactions. We have asked around, but so far, nobody had an idea how to fix this. If anyone wants to have a look and help us to get steem2wls back online, check out this code snippet that returns the api response "missing required posting authority".

After this did not work, we started to rewrite our code in JavaScript. With a few free days we would surely be able to complete this, but unfortunately, (even though we write this posts as talking as "we" since we feel that this is more appropriate for a project account), steem2wls currently is a one-man-project by @jpphotography and as a student, I am in the midst of the most stressful time of the semester with plenty of projects due to hand in and exams starting in a week's time. On top of that, my little development time in the past weeks has long been reserved for the launch of TravelFeed. I have even spent many frustrating hours trying to get steem2wls back to work during my vacation at the time that hard fork 2 was rolled out, but unless the Whaleshares dev team finally releases an updated version of wls-python or there is an update for beem to restore support for Whaleshares, I will not find any time to fix steem2wls until early August.

As mentioned before, when the service resumes, any Premium subscriptions will be extended by the amount of days affected by the downtime, any funds sent for Premium subscriptions will be processed then.

Steem2wls and Whaleshares

We have many exciting plans for steem2wls introducing several more platforms for cross-posting. Our plan was to offer not only Steem, but also Whaleshares as a source platform. This would have also enabled the much asked feature of cross-posting from Whaleshares to Steem and other platforms, bringing many new users to Whaleshares as a result. However, the recent developments have shown that the Whaleshares dev team cares very little about supporting external developers building on Whaleshares.

On Steem, we can rely on working libraries and a large developer community. Unless there are some major changes in the way the Whaleshares dev team operates, Whaleshares will be supported only as a destination platform as it is currently.

Thoughts on Whaleshares and HF2

Whaleshares still is a young platform and it is normal that there are some issues. However, we do see a problem of having development centralised in the Beyondbitcoin team. While on Steem, Steemit Inc. does not operate nor vote for any witnesses, it seems like several witnesses from the Beyondbitcoin team are in the top 20 or are voting for top 20 witnesses. For a hard fork to pass, at least 17 top 20 witnesses need to approve it. Since consensus witnesses approving hard forks are part of the "checks and balances" system of Blockchain governance, this system is broken if (partly) the same people are approving the code that are writing it or the people writing the code are choosing the ones approving it. Not that this would matter: On Steem, most consensus witnesses check the code of a hard fork before updating their witness and approving a hard fork, but the recent Whaleshares HF2 was never published as source code, only as a compiled version. This requires witnesses to trust the developers and eliminates the decentralised nature of blockchain development. A malicious hard fork could do anything from forking out individual accounts over introducing backdoors to altering past transactions and balances. Even though Beyondbitcoin performing an exit scam can be considered unlikely, centralised development without oversight is a danger for any Blockchain and discourages potential investors.

The new features such as pods and friends are neat, but they won't help to keep the WLS price from falling even further since they don't contribute to make the WLS economy sustainable. While Seem's bid-bots are the reason many of us came here in the first place, they provide investors with the ability to earn a passive income from their investment (the return of delegating to a bid-bot is higher than the Steem inflation) and create a demand for Steem tokens.

On Whaleshares, on the other hand, a passive investor will make huge losses due to the high inflation, which is why no sane investor would invest in WLS except when posting and self-voting several times a day. We are not suggesting that Whaleshares should introduce bid-bots, but there needs to be innovation to make Whaleshares a working economy or it will ultimately fail.

What we do as witness

As a witness and believer in the potential of this platform, we would like to help shaping Whaleshares and make this platform successful. When we developed steem2wls, we thought this would be a great service for Whaleshares to attract more users and more content, but when asking for steem2wls to be listed on whaleshares.io under "extras" such as other tools, we did not even get a reply, despite having contacted several top-witnesses and Whaleshares dev team members. Needless to say, any other tools (such as the inferior manual cross-posting tool Masdacs) linked on whaleshares.io are developed by Beyondbitcoin.

We made some constructive suggestions on how to improve the development process of Whaleshares on the Whaleshares Discord a few weeks ago, but never got a reply.

We also have several more ideas for Whaleshares. For example, to fix the broken economy, Whaleshares could introduce promoted posts within the feed like Palnet (or Facebook). Like on Steemit's useless promoted page, a post would be promoted by burning tokens (sending them to @null), effectively reducing inflation. Since nobody enjoys advertising, a benefit of owning more Whalestake could be seeing less ads, which would further encourage staking instead of selling for active users. If on top of that, targeted advertising could be made possible. Then, we could for example advertise steem2wls to Whaleshares users who have an active Steem account with the same username and have never used steem2wls before, we would be willing to buy and burn several hundred WLS every month for that. This is just one example on how the WLS economy could be improved, there are many more ways.

The communication of the Whaleshares dev team is worse than Steemit Inc. who at least publish their source code and changes open-source and are recently improving their communication. If things continue like they are, we cannot see the price of Whaleshares recovering nor large amounts of new users joining.

If we had been a top-20-witness, we would have not supported hard fork 2 due to the problems we outlined in this post. Whaleshares needs technically compenent and critically thinking witnesses in the top 20. In this post we are asking many questions that need to be answered, and we would like to see replies from individuals from the Whaleshares dev team such as @alexpmorris and @baabeetaa as well as from the top 20 witnesses: @krazywitness @lexiwitness @beyondbitcoincas @bushkill-witness @dbread-witness @powerpicswitness @ijmmaiwitness @kennybll-witness @altruistic @ceruleanblue @unity @moonunit @kantos @ienrikex @nuthman @optimism-witness @god @lit @snug @bangzi