Today was a sad day of another attack and another attempt to scam long term Steem users. As multiple attacks against long term Steem community continued for the last couple of months by Justin Sun, today he decided to take it even further with an attempt to steal Steem assets of about 64 users worth about 24 million Steem. Miraculously, the account designated to receive stolen funds as a result of Hardfork-23 decided it was a wrong thing to steal. And that account, @community321, to prevent the theft and do the right thing decided to send them to @bittrex, only left save haven which Justin Sun cannot retaliate against, bully, bribe or scam.
I understand this puts Bittrex in a difficult position, as it wasn’t something they asked for to meditate on. At the same time, I recognize that Bittrex is an industry leader that demonstrated honesty, integrity, and leadership in the Bitcoin and Crypto space. I have no doubt Bittrex can rise to the occasion and stand with what is right.
Scammers and frauds like Justin Sun have polluted the crypto space that was supposed to be a place for innovation to empower ordinary people. Silence on the part of the leaders in the space like yourself, gives more power to scammers to continue with their fraudulent activities, victimize innocent and novice crypto enthusiasts, bully vulnerable participants in these economies.
While understandably it is a challenging matter for you to take on, I believe you are the leader in the space more capable to tackle the matter in the most professional, honest, and fair manner. I have read your initial answer to the situation. I understand you wouldn’t want to be in this situation, but since you are you would like to follow strict unbiased rules. Which is fine, however interpretation of the may rule suggests double standards.
You state you honor the blockchain integrity and consensus. In its simplest form, Hardfork-23 designated an account, @community321 to be the recipient of the stolen funds. That account decided that stealing is a bad thing and send @bittrex the funds so it can securely distribute them to original owners. It put the highest respect and faith in @bittrex, as a long term honest entity to do the right thing, and requested in the memo. This is blockchain speaking. If you would like to honor blockchain integrity and consensus as you state in your answer, the right path to take is to distribute funds as requested in the memo in a secure fashion so they cannot be stolen by scammers again. The Hardfork-23 designated an account to receive stolen funds. That account chose to do the right things and make sure they are returned to the rightful owners and they thought Bittrex would be in the best position to accomplish that.
I believe, Bittrex is more than capable of doing so, even though I understand it may require extra effort. This would mean a lot in the space, show a positive attitude of leaders like yourself, and create confidence in ordinary people like myself and advance the space further for a better future.
Of course, scammers and frauds like Justin Sun will claim hacks, etc to further oppress ordinary users who earned and bought their assets over the years. That’s what scammers like Justin Sun do. They prey on vulnerable victims, enrich themselves with their scams, and bring a bad reputation to the industry. The whole SteemHostileTakeOver action was done by colluding and/or tricking exchanges like Binance and Huobi to participate in Justin Sun’s scam. Binance especially did the most damage with using user funds on exchanges, staking them, participating in the governance of Steem, and overthrowing community elected witnesses aka block producers. Even though Binance and Huobi withdrew support in this scam once they realized what they did. But the damage was already done. Without their actions, Steem governance would still be intact and community elected consensus would function as intended by protocol.
At the end, when it was clear Justin Sun had no regard for the community and had ill intentions towards the community and users property, we as a community decided to stop fighting scams like Justin Sun and decided to leave and build our own blockchain by, for, and of the people. We have created the Hive blockchain. By the way, we greatly humbled and thankful for Bittrex to be one of the first exchanges to list us.
What I am trying to say is that, once it was clear Justin Sun has demonstrated no interest to engage with the community and listening what community visions are, and just focused on executing scammy plans of his, we had no choice but forfeit the blockchain that we worked years to build. We deiced it was a better path forward to start fresh without dictatorial regime that puts all users' assets at risk. So we build Hive, left Steem for Justin, and we're in the progress of migrating. According to Steem protocol, users stake their Steem assets and lock them up for 13 weeks to participate in the economy. Which most of us have done. Once we started Hive and started the migration, most of us started to power down our stakes. It takes 13 weeks to completely power down our funds. Again these are funds we have earned or bought on exchanges like yours. Most like yours for the most part.
As we are leaving Steem Justin Sun took over the entire network. We were ok with that. We just wanted a peaceful exit to be done with it. However, he decided to conduct a revenge attack and froze large stakeholder accounts. At first, it seemed like temporary revenge. But recently we found out it was part of the plan to steal users' funds while maintaining sole dictatorial regime, no community consensus whatsoever. We gave him Steem, we gave away our home, our blockchain. What is wrong with this guy? As a notorious scammer he is, he wanted to steal funds to enrich himself more.
So Harfork-23 was born. Which was done in complete secretive manner, and code released for review only 24 hours before the hard fork. This was a sad day. So frustrating scammers like him can get away with criminal activities like this all the time.
This morning Hardfork took place. Miraculously, @community321 decided to make the wrong right. I am sure whoever that is, chose you to receive the stolen funds because deep down we all know Bittrex is the only one left that Justin Sun can’t touch.
In my opinion, legally, blockchain-based, the court of public opinion, morally, or just based on common sense Bittrex can rise for the occasion and rescue ordinary people from being bullied, scammed, and stolen of their personal property.
I am not personally affected by this. However, it is highly possible I might be the target for this kind of theft too. But we are a community that stands for justice, speaks up when oppression is happening and connected with a common goal of contributing to good for all.
Please take this matter seriously. Don’t let scammer Justin Sun get away with a scam. You are too smart to fall into these schemes. I really hope you will come up with a way to securely return the funds to rightful owners.