I spent roughly two and a half hours of my day today attending the town meeting. Unlike Justin Sun acquiring SteemIt, this particular issue is something that I'm a little bit more well informed about. Like everyone, I have my thoughts and opinions too. I was originally planning on writing this right after that meeting, but I decided to wait a few hours to let everything sink in.
Emotions were high today. For some time today, many things dealing with Steem including SteemIt were down today. SteemAuto is still down at the moment, but that's purely out of protest for the hostile takeover that happened.
A lot went on but as I understand it, basically Justin Sun bribed exchanges to use their customers' voting power to vote in a whole new top 20 witnesses on the Steem block chain. That's the TL;DR. I'm sure other users on here will be much better at explaining the whole situation in their articles. I've seen some already and I'm sure we'll see plenty more. I have a fairly good idea of what went on, but I'm not the best at explaining it to be honest.
The town hall meeting lasted over 5 hours today with everyone giving their two cents on the matter. Some said that we should try to talk with Justin Sun. Some suggested a hard fork. Many said that we should try to talk it out and if that fails, we need to hard fork. One thing that pretty much everyone agreed on was that something has to be done.
A hard fork is in the works though regardless. A user/developer in the meeting stated that he was already working on a hard fork with things in place that would stop something like this from happening again. Some users thought that it should be called Steem Classic which actually isn't a bad name. The name isn't finalized yet though.
At first, I was all for talking as it would be best. After some thought though, if Justin Sun is willing to pull something like this then I really don't think talking would do much good honestly. Most people in the meeting seemed to agree that they didn't think talks would really get anywhere.
It seems like regardless of what happens over the next days and weeks, a hard fork seems to be coming.
It will take some time, but the good news is that Blocktrades has already stated that they would support the hard fork which is awesome.
Today was an interesting day for sure and I'll be keeping up with the news on what happens next. I'll back the hard fork 100% though. I think it's the only solution that'll probably work at this point.