Fight the power!

One good thing about the Binance coup is that I'm discovering more Steemians on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter if you want to read my initial reaction to the takeover; I don't need to preach to the choir here. For the record, on February 14, I told Justin Sun:

You can buy a company. Maybe you can even buy a blockchain, and a number of apps. But you can't buy a community.

Here's @jga explaining how the attack worked:

I finally switched from blogging on Steemit to Steempeak. A big step, because I'm very reluctant to try out any new interface. Last week, I spent €509 on translation software (it was on sale), and I haven't installed it yet. It's a miracle I ever got involved in crypto, where you're expected to install a new wallet for every coin every six months or so.

At the moment, I'm doing everything I can to support the real witnesses. We're getting close! (Screenshot below from Steemian.info, a few hours ago.) Many people weren't voting for witnesses, and the exchanges will have to power down soon. I cancelled some of my own preferences and started voting for all electable witnesses from #21 to #43. We might still get back control without a chain split.

Advice: if you don't want to bother selecting witnesses, set someone you trust as a proxy voter. On Steemit, that option is below the witness list. I went through all of my accounts and set @edb as a proxy. If you give up and want to sell, please do so on Bittrex, which hasn't abused its customers' coins. Or @blocktrades if you don't care about getting a good price. If you have Steem on Binance, Huobi or Poloniex, try withdrawing it and see what happens.

I'm also powering down and powering up at the same time, and I might lease some Steem Power for a week or two. Bitcoiners would say I have a high time preference. That means prioritizing the short term at the cost of the long term.

The future of Steem will probably be decided in a Discord chat room, and I don't have a big stake, so I won't play a role in that decision. After the witnesses' soft fork freezing Steemit's balances, I was going to say I finally felt ready to invest in the future of Steem without holding back, since it wasn't one person's plaything anymore.

Now I'm still trying to understand what CZ and JS were thinking. I was expecting a more subtle form of manipulation. They could have divided and conquered us, making promises, supporting moderate witnesses, buying up coins on the market, and quietly bribing apps and witnesses. But apparently, they didn't have the patience for any subtlety and went for a frontal attack.

And how do they expect to stay in control when the exchange coins are powered down again?

Finally, I want to give a fatherly word of caution. Please don't express your anger as racism. That's not a good look. I don't support references to unlucky numbers, the corona virus or the suggestion that we will be censored by the Communist Party of China. Justin Sun and Changpeng Zhao are as much a product of Silicon Valley culture as of Chinese culture. There are more than a billion Chinese people who aren't trying to take over our blockchain, and they're not the uncritical sheep many Westerners take them for.

For comparison, Twitter is in danger of being taken over by a billionaire called Paul Singer, known as a vulture capitalist who specializes in buying up distressed assets. And the problem isn't that Singer is Jewish, but that he may have political motives, as a big Republican donor, a warmongering Zionist, a supporter of gay rights since his son came out, and a friend of president Trump despite campaigning against him originally.

By the way, if you're an American living in a Super Tuesday state, and you don't want a few rich people to buy all the power, vote for Bernie Sanders today.