My thoughts and what YOU need to do now

I was very late to the party yesterday. I found out on twitter and I have to admit I was shocked stunned and surprised. I had often wondered what would happen if some mega-rich organization were to buy up all the available steem and try to take control of the platform. Would it be possible to centralize steem? I guess my questions have been answered. Under the current system, yes, steem can be bought.

Some quick thoughts. We should not have 30 witness votes. If there is a top 20, then one should not be able to vote more than 10. 20 in my mind is not very decentralized and having 30 votes makes it easy for money to buy all. This has been raised before, but no one seemed to care. Are we all too trusting?

Steem witnesses made the first move here. A move which in general I supported. However, one witness seems to be like an abusive husband. Pointing out the bad, the worst-case scenarios, making people scared and then at the same time, being the one to have all the solutions and the one to rescue the platform. I felt all along the language used by this witness was above what most here would really understand, and way beyond what was really needed. Commanding authority and yet setting himself up on both sides of the fence. I bet he is getting rather excited about how this all plays out. Do I blame this one witness? No, but for sure he played a big part in how this all went. I guess I'm a bit emotional. In fact, I know I am because last night I started a power down and probably venting towards this one because of that.

So a counter move was made by Justin and as we have seen, money talks. I do not agree with his actions but I understand why he took them. The Tron team are writing new code as we speak. They did a post on what to expect, including a 3-day power down. That's how Tron works. Lock in for 3 days if you want to vote on a block producer (or whatever they are called over there). With a 7-day payout window, RC and how steem works, 3-day power down is ridiculous. I would have a concern that like his last post when the soft fork was launched, this is to buy time. For all we know this new code could include a real and forced token swap.

Witnesses play a vital role and you need to make sure you are using your witness votes. This is what you need to do now. Vote for your witnesses. We as a community are slowly increasing the voting vests towards community witnesses. Now that Binance has removed their vote, the gap is closing. But it's not happening fast enough. I would urge all of you to vote today and if you are unsure, you can set me as a proxy. If you don't know how to do that, drop me a comment and I will explain. You can also put some pressure on HuobiGlobal to remove their votes. Binance did it. and I would suggest we back off them now and focus our attention on Huobi. here is their twitter account. https://twitter.com/HuobiGlobal I will be tagging them and some media outlets today. I hope you will try to do the same.

On the positive side, look at the steem community. I am proud to be part of this community. Stay strong and I am sure we will get past this somehow. After all, we are STEEM!