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Flying in the face of Steem's original launch on Independence Day in 2016, Steem began the spiral to losing its independence when CEO and founder Ned Scott initiated the "Howey Handshake" with Justin Sun, promising the migration of the Token and ceding the stake which was mined supposedly for community benefit to the buyer without consulting the community or community governance. Two individuals conspired to move a community to a new chain without thought or consideration that all other apps, dapps, tools and libraries (over 400 in total) developed by community members would not be interoperable with Tron. Equally, no consideration was taken over the content which is self-sovereign to the authors and their rights and opinions of their content moving to a different chain.

Recently Steem became the Gaza Strip of crypto, with witness and stakeholders wrestling with Justin Sun (Tron) and his droid witness army for legitimate governance over the Steem blockchain. 

Today marks a sad day for freedom, liberty and the greater crypto community, when three exchanges, Binance, Huobi and Poloniex, powered up user funds without authorisation to assist Justin Sun of Tron to insert his army of witnesses to take over the Steem chain after former witnesses and stakeholders after moved to [block via soft fork](https://www.coindesk.com/justin-sun-bought-steemit-steem-moved-to-limit-his-power), the voting and transfer rights of the Steemit stake under social contract for the development of the community.

Page 21 of the 2017 Roadmap highlights this https://steem.com/2017roadmap.pdf 

> Decentralizing Stake
The Steemit, Inc.-controlled primary account, @steemit, which holds approximately 41% of
the platform’s Steem Power, will be gradually divested of its holdings in an effort to increase
promotion and development of the platform and this distribution shall further the platform’s
security through decentralization of voting power.   

Further social contracts exist for the non-consensus voting of witnesses using the ninja mined stake; witnesses and stakeholders petitioned Justin via Steemit MD and Tron representative, Roy Liu, in the Steemit Corporate Slack, to request of Justin Sun to voluntarily decline voting rights of those accounts in a show-of-faith to the community. These petitions fell on deaf ears and no response was given. 

Seven days later, amidst fears from [news reports](https://beincrypto.com/tron-founder-faces-criticism-over-centralized-hard-cap-removal-and-block-reward-increase/) of Justin Sun running Tron in a centralised fashion, coupled with zero response to the show-of-faith petition, Soft Fork 22.2 was launched.

https://steemit.com/steem/@softfork222/soft-fork-222

In the days ahead, Justin Sun placated the community by scheduling meetings to discuss the matter with witnesses, all the while planning to oust them in centralised fashion by replacing them with a Skynet of his own mindless NPC witnesses, voted in by his cronies at the aforementioned exchanges. This can be seen by the [Steemd Block Explorer](https://steemd.com/witnesses).

![image.png](https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/thecryptodrive/rCwhpGYr-image.png)

## The Heart of a Community  

Following the withdrawl of Binance's proxy vote after Binance CEO CZ back-peddled on Twitter saying that Binance does not wish to be involved in governance issues, the droid witnesses lost some ground, the Steem community has been scrambling to increase voting participation with former witnesses seeing record vote numbers and values pour in support throughout the day,

## Appeal to the Greater Crypto Community

This appeal goes out to the crypto community to take up arms alongside the Steem community and fight centralisation, assist in powering up Steem stake and voting back the original Steem consensus governance, now in position 21 upwards running protest fork 22.4444 (Edit: some witnesses such as myself have reverted back to the 22.1 version label so as not to offend sympathetic Asian users) as per the above screenshot of witness ranking.

Exchanges should not be able to use their client's funds in a non-consensual manner for political voting, nor lock such funds up on a vesting schedule without permission.

## The time to stand against centralisation and censorship is now! Vote for real witnesses:
## https://steempeak.com/me/witnesses 

## One cannot simply sell a blockchain!

@thecryptodrive
Former Steem Consensus Witness
BuildTeam CEO

This is a 100% Burnpost!