WTF Is Happening to Steem?

Four Steemit team members who have been there since the beginning resigned. They quit their jobs after Justin Sun became the dictator of Steemit. At least that's how the community of Steem is perceiving the thing that just happened.

Resignation posts on Steemit: vanderber, gerbino, andrarchy, roadscape

the whole crypto-world is in shock

What Happened?

All the top 20 Steem Witnesses were replaced by ones owned by Justin Sun. It was a retaliation to what witnesses did last week. They upgraded the blockchain version to freeze Justin's assets of about 60 million Steem until both parties come to an agreement on what is going to happen to their beloved blockchain.

The Steem that they froze was originally meant not to be touched so witnesses did what they had to do to protect the community. They did it after finding out that Justin now owns the Steemit.Inc.

What Justin did as an answer was something that has never happened in crypto-verse before. He used the Steem portion that was stored in the exchanges to vote for his own witnesses.

How did he do that?

BOI doesn't know about the legality of all this but Justin obviously has friends in high places. He used Steem from Binance, Poloniex, and other exchanges to somehow power up and give a big boost to his own witnesses. Here's what he said later:

Not only did Justin took over the witnesses, he also called them hackers.

This is what people are saying:

This is trending on Twitter

Now if you haven't heard of Steem before, you need to know what Steem witnesses do.

What is a Steem Witness?

Witnesses are the community elected people who run the steem node, in other words - they are making the network run. You can also call them miners but don't think that they're getting rich from that. In most cases, they're running the network because they're passionate about it. Steem has become a part of them and they don't want to lose it. The monetary reward doesn't even pay the bills.

Now after the yesterday's manipulations, the 20 new witnesses who run the updated version are owned by Justin Sun and all the governance of the network is in his hands. In my opinion, it's not a step towards decentralization, in fact, it's quite the opposite.

See how the witness page looked after Justin's attempt to overthrow witnesses

list of new witnesses
list of the community elected witnesses

As you can see, BOI has voted for them and actually there's an initiative right now to vote for these witnesses and compete with Justin's. The word is spreading fast and now many users who didn't vote before because they didn't understand the system are voting to support the original witnesses.

Update below:

Opinions

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There are things to learn from this. Firstly, it's not a good idea to store your cryptocurrency on a centralized exchange like Binance because one day they can turn their back on you and leave you with nothing.

The second thing is - don't lie on the internet. Especially if you're dealing with a real community. They will come together and find their ways to fuck you up!

Proof

Blockchain is transparent and now there is enough evidence to show that Justin Sun was using Steem from exchanges to power up and vote for witnesses.
If you want to see the proof for yourself, go to this post:
A Case Against Poloniex.com and Justin Sun

Consequences

As Binance exchange powered up their account, they don't have enough Steem to pay out people who want to withdraw. The power-down goes on for 13 weeks.

Dan is the creator of 3speak.online

Future of Steem

Many developers have stopped their apps and users are protesting. We will see what happens in the near future and it can still go both ways. This week there will be a meeting between Justin Sun and former top witnesses. There are also many discussions on the internet right now.

Some say community witnesses should create a hard-fork (big update) on Steem and split themselves from Steemit.Inc and Justin's stake. It would create Steem classic coin and create another network, independent from Justin and Tron network.

Potentially New Exchange

After the recent events, Kucoin* exchange tweeted that they will list Steem if certain requirements are met. They also stated that they're standing with the community and it feels they're supportive.

Kucoin's recent tweet

After reading this tweet, BOI immediately registered on Kucoin to check them out. Soon there will be a review about them on our blog.

What Should You Do?

The only thing we can do is vote for witnesses and help Steemians gain back control. Also - spread the word by clicking on any tweet in this post and retweeting it.

While Taking a Pause

If you've decided to take a break from Steem while everything sorts out, we have an alternative for you to check out.

BOI just recently found out Uptrennd, and it's a great place to earn your side income. Some users are earning more than 100$ a month and the platform is still growing.

While Steem is changing - take a look at our post about Uptrennd!

And if you're afraid that something similar will happen to Uptrennd - here's what Jeff Kirdeikis, the founder of Uptrennd said, when he found out what happened to Steem:

This should encourage you

They also have this initiative going on for Steemit users. You should check it out if you're a Steem user!

Thank you for reading! Until the next time you meet the BOI!

Photo by Film Bros from Pexels

* this post contains referral links to Uptrennd and Kucoin exchange.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://www.bagofincome.com/wtf-is-happening-to-steem/

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