Yes, I'm using a love locks photo that I took months ago. Not really about love, but it's quite relevant to the post ok.
Last night seemed just like a normal night for me and for Steem. But boi I was wrong.
At 6pm my time (GMT +8), I was told that the Top 20 witnesses that the community has voted for were being replaced by some random witnesses nobody has ever heard of. I must highlight they have lame-ass names.
I watched in horror as 
Looking at the new top 20, they were voted by dev365 which was proxied by different accounts, including exchanges. EXCHANGES! Powering up liquids to vote on witnesses!
Minutes later, 
Hours later, there was a Town Hall meeting at PAL. Everyone was welcome to talk and express their opinions. There were around 200+ if not 300 people were there at the talk, causing my Discord to lag quite a bit as I was doing Photoshop work at the same time. Geez! That's just even a small number of active people on Discord. Some are at work/dinner/sleeping when it happened.
It was hard to listen and read the chat at the same time. It was wild. Some were playing the blame game while others try hard to process what was happening.
While the talk was ongoing, many Steemians have tweeted updates on Twitter. Twitter links were shared on Discord chat so we all could like and retweet them. It gathered some attention from people in the crypto world.
I am merely just an observer in real life and in the internet world. And all the drama that was happening on Twitter... that was like pure entertainment. Steemians got Vitalik's attention. Couple of hours later CZ_Binance posted about it. Of course, they would say they had no idea funds were going to be used to vote for witnesses. That they accidentally got involved. The best part of it was the tweet "Can we remove the vote?" or something like that cba looking for the exact tweet by CZ_Binance, it got buried lol.
Twitter really blew up and was fun looking at replies by some trolls, reporters, tronsters, and just people in the crypto world who got no idea about Steem. It was pretty important to let the people know about what the exchanges did.
News reports from different crypto sites were published. One of it being this.
I went to bed believing that this will be fine soon...
Then I woke up earlier with Justin tweeting about defeating the hackers. HaCKeRZ!! What a beautiful name for the Top 20 witnesses who were genuinely voted by the Steem community. Hackers my ass!
Three of the important people from Steemit Inc. resigned. They fought a good battle. Am always grateful for their passion.
Our Top 20 witnesses haven't been back to their original places yet and everyone is encouraged to vote for witnesses if they haven't done so.
https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses
The best thing on Steem I could say is the community that we have. Even though it was a shocking and sad night yesterday (and still is now), I am happy and fascinated to see the community working together to protect what should be protected. I love how we utilize other social media sites for our voices to be heard. I love the fighting spirit to keep the blockchain decentralized and going. This is truly one of the reasons why people stay. I love how we are strong as a community. I'm proud of that.
I pretty sure don't know what will happen and what are the plans. Like I said I am merely just an observer. I'm not even a technical person and surely don't understand the deeper shit going on in technical aspects and such. I hope for the best and let's keep fighting.
Steem on.
