A lot happened on/to Steem today. I personally was in the cinema/offline all day, and when I got back online, driving a tram towards my dinner, I saw some hints of confusing stuff happening.
Of course, for me it was at the end of the day, others woke up to this news. Or went to bed with it. Or are still waking up to it.
Anyway. I don't want to/can't provide you with a very well-written summary of all that happened.
The current witness list shows it best:
Basically our chain got taken over in a hostile way, namely by having 20 'fresh' witnesses voted in to consensus positions thanks to Justin Sun convincing exchanges this was a needed/planned/usual Hard Fork.
The wording of the above sentence might not be 100% correct once we get all the information, but that's how it looks for now.
All the witnesses WE VOTED FOR OURSELVES even after the controversial Hardfork 22.2 have now become non-consensus witnesses, so spot 21 and later.
This means WE, the Steem Community, have lost the people we want to represent us, and we are now 'represented' by one single person/entity.
This is bad.
The best thing we can all do, for now, is forget who we like, dislike, voted for/against in the past, because in reality we have all have one single enemy now: the freshly voted in top 20 witnesses. One is even called 'nicetry001'. Talk about a big F*ck You from Justin Sun.
We want them out. We might not make it, but we have to try, as if we try there might be a crazy whale on our side adding that last boost to his stake and making it happen?
We'll really never know unless we try.
Therefore: vote for the first 30 witnesses after the above screenshotted 20. In other words: everyone who runs anything else than 22.5 should be voted IN.
I've heard in the 7 hour long (!) discussion that witness voting went waaaay up the last few hours so let's just keep on pushing.
How to vote?
Since nodes are offline and stuff is happening it wasn't easy to find a way to make witness voting work. What worked for me was:
- Open the keychain extension in my browser.
- Go to 'preferences' and chance RPC node to steemd.minnowsupportproject
- Go to steempeak.com/me/witnesses and vote on those after the top 20. You can even unvote everyone who is lower than the top 50 so you can push even more of your SP towards people who might actually make it to top 20. (Of course when danger has been averted you can vote back in your favourite witnesses <3)
What else can you do?
I've personally tried to tweet a few things. Binance and Poloniex and Huobi have received funds after which they voted on the 'new' top 20 witnesses. Rumours are they used STEEM that was held on the exchanges to be powered UP so they could vote!
We can't confirm if this is true, yet, but IF it is true that's horrific and a huge shameful thing to do - pretty much hurting their reputation. People like Vitalik are joining in the discussion, and many crypto sites are already reporting on the 'hostile takeover by Justin Sun'. We should leverage the attention that is being given to us and make a lot of noice/ask a lot of questions to exchanges, especially questions about 'where did the STEEM I held on your exchange go to? Did you vote with my stake?'
Follow the #steem tag on twitter to learn a bit more. The discussions are flowing. For me this plus the 'vote your witnesses' was the Call-To-Action I wanted to share quickly before going to bed.
Tomorrow is a new day with new insights and new words to share with all of you. It's also a new day to fight for our right to decide on the fait of our own blockchain.
Let's not be quiet about this.
Cheers.