As you probably know, if your head isn't buried in the sand, yesterday Justin Sun took control of the Steem Blockchain by force.
Justin Sun is also known as our Supreme Leader, Dear Respected Comrade Justin sun, Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Steem, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Steem and Supreme Commander of the Steem People’s Army.
How could he took over so easily? Basically, he took advantage of two flaws of the Steem Blockchain, one that is embedded in the code... and the other one created by the Steem users themselves.
Flaw #1 - The Stake of each user can be used multiple times to Upvote Witnesses. This means that a single person with lots of STEEM POWER can select 30 Witnesses of his trust.
Flaw #2 - The STEEM of many users were not stored at the Steem Blockchain but at Centralised Blockchains like Binance, Huobi, Poloniex and Bittrex. Justin Sun was able to convince Binance, Huobi & Poloniex to use the money from their customers to upvote for the Witnesses. Only Bittrex stayed out of this power play.
How can we fix these flaws?
Solution for Flaw #1 - Change the Witness Voting method so that our stake can only be used once. This would mean that, if you wanted to upvote for 30 Witnesses, you would only be using 1/30 of your Steem Power for each Witness Vote. (Or something like that...)
Solution for Flaw #2 - Take your STEEM out of exchanges, if you are not expecting to sell it on the short term. (You can lock it in your Savings Account at STEEM, if you are scared you might be hacked.)
Sources and other Interesting Reading Material:
"One user told CoinDesk he initiated a withdrawal of 500,000 STEEM on Binance following last night’s news and it took three hours to arrive, shortly following the Binance CEO’s announcement that it will “likely remove the vote.”
The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin has recently hinted at the part played by big exchanges in the recent takeover of Steemit by the CEO of Tron, Justin Sun.
Going by what Vitalik recently insinuated, the takeover of Steem blockchain was orchestrated.
The young co-founder of Ethereum recently wrote this, “Apparently Steem DPOS got taken over by big exchanges voting with depositors’ funds.”
His observation came about, in response to a tweet shared by Luke Stokes, the co-founder of Foxy.io.
He shared a video and wrote, “Your stake in Steem on centralized exchanges was just used to take over the Steem Blockchain.”
- Justin Sun and Steemit Inc Disaster Explained
In the meanwhile, what can you do to help restore the Steem Blockchain and remove Justin Sun from Power?
Right now, it seems that the only solution is to upvote for Witnesses that you might not necessarily agree with... and I mean all those who are running the code version 0.22.4444:
Plus those who have reverted back to version 0.22.1:
I'm joining this movement... but when all of this is over, I'll probably revert my Witness Voting to the only Witnesses that I feel I can trust. Right now, there are only 7 of them: @busy.witness, @curie, @dsound, @good-karma, @prc, @steemitboard, @steemitportugal
I'll investigate what the others are doing but some of them I already know and don't like, mostly because of past decisions that I don't agree with. The remaining soldiers who are leading this movement will likely keep my vote, too.
For now, I'm upvoting all of you, whether I like you or not.
