Hi,

I've said it before, why is there so much hatred in steem / steemit

You were probably the main catalyst, and we believe you will continue to be as long as sorry is more important than justice and criminals are more important than victims.

Economic interests usually tend to play a major role in blinding people to seeing and seeking the truth by pushing people to be indulgent and understanding at a time when they should have been firm. Your argument and logic are quite simple to understand because they follow a simple circle that can be summarized as the following:

Commit a crime --> Apologize for it --> Be fee again -- > Repete indefinitely.

The community also does not need a well-known serial scammer to manage a sensitive tool where people enter their keys. You were well aware that that individual, is well known for stealing keys and publically bragging about it, but you kept pushing him to the front by leveraging and pandering to the community. Grave mistake! People need to be careful to no use community capitalization to bend the truth, people did it before with the Minnow (PAL) Project to attack Steemit Inc and this should never happen again.

You believed that a well-known serial scammer deserved the hammer of forgiveness because you had close economic ties with him, which we find unfortunate considering that there were plenty of other witnesses who could have easily helped you with your project, us included. "It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance." wrote Thomas Sowell. No one has the higher ground here. If anyone has it, it would definitely not be someone who supports a serial scammer under the guise of equality and inclusivity.

Stating that there is no proof is an insult to other witnesses who voted for both of you before. But if proofs also disappear when someone says sorry then this is another story.

Whether you want to withdraw is up to you. You do not have the right to bargain with the community as if it were a business trade. All pseudo investors use this card to threaten the community, not knowing that Steem is much bigger than any of them. If a pseudo investor is willing to dump his STEEM, he is more than welcome to do it, but we would highly suggest that he avoids trying to take the community hostage. We would also rather have investors who understand economics and growth than investors who are just here pandering to the community and scammers to facilitate value extraction. Also, being a witness, as we mentioned, is not a right. If every pseudo investor on this chain is going to require his node at the top 20, we are not at the end of our troubles.

Witnesses should be cold-headed, hardened, and skillful people. We reserve the right to regulate the reward pool as we see fit. Because there was no reward regulation on the chain, things became loose; mercenaries, scammers, and farmers flourished; and serving witness votes became a ping pong game and a business in itself.

Our intentions go beyond what you are trying to paint, and contrary to some people, we cannot be bought since it goes against our fundamentals, and we are ready to go down with the ship and lose everything if it is needed to stand for what we believe in.

Thank you,