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In today's @steemitblog post, entitled "[Steem.DAO UI Live on SteemitWallet](https://steemit.com/steemdao/@steemitblog/steem-dao-ui-and-pausing-steem-sales)" there was an announcement inside which I feel deserved its own post.

The announcement as follows:

> **Update on Programmatic Selling**
We will not be selling any STEEM this month. We have continued to improve revenue generation through ads while lowering our expenses, but we are still a long ways from covering our operating costs 100%. That being said, we have put ourselves in a position where we can pause programmatic selling, as we are this month. This is a very important benchmark for us because it was not something we were in a position to do just a few months ago.

## Leadership matters

It can be said that Steemit Inc, has really worked hard to change their spots and to change the stars for the future of the Steem community. In stark contrast to the company they once were, burning through funds, missing scheduled public appearances and laying off 70% of its staff merely a year ago. Under the helm, of its new Managing Director, Elizabeth Powell, Steemit inc, has indeed shown the grace and resourcefulness of a female thought leader.

Powell, drastically cut costs in rental and many unnecessary superflous expenses and has turned Steemit Inc, into a lean running ship, further assisted by a massively talented dev team that released the cost-saving node infrastructure, dubbed MIRA, which has reduced their AWS hosting costs by circa 80% and has done the same for many Steem based businesses and witnesses (block producers) who have the cost of running Steem nodes. 

Under the direction of Eli Powell, the dev team have kept all promises and released HF22 with new the Steem Proposal System funding protocol for funding community proposals for the betterment of Steem, as well as the EIP - Economic Improvement Protocol which enhanced curation and included free downvotes to incentivise spam fighting and non-beneficial rewards extraction.  

I have had the pleasure in speaking with Eli myself in DM and I can say she is a genuine and down to earth person, with a heart for the community, in addition, her promises are backed by the team's newfound ability to deliver timeously and professionally.  

Big ups to Eli Powell and the team for listening to the community and reducing their selling in their corporate social responsibility strategy.

In stark contrast to Steem, "[XRP HODLers Speak Out Against Ripple](
https://cryptopotato.com/ripple-releases-another-500m-xrp-130m-despite-recent-fork-threats/)" for continuously selling without heed to community sentiment.

I disclose that I hold both Ripple and STEEM, but today I am the most proud to be holding STEEM!

## BURNPOST CHALLENGE

The burnpost idea was originally conceived by @smooth, where a daily @burnpost post was launched that stakeholders could vote on and instead direct rewards to @null which effectively burns them.

What if in response to Steemit's reduction in selling, the community responds by burning a percentage of their post rewards by setting a beneficiary percentage to @null (easily done using steempeak.com). Curators could in turn favour curating such posts over others.

Steemit's selling reduction of 1 month equates to a total annual reduction of 8.3% with more potentially planned as they rely more on advertising and less on the Steem sell-off. 

The community should respond in solidarity by burning at least a rounded up 10% of their organic posts and more if their posts are promoted with a promotion service.

BuildTeam has pledged to burn a min of 20% of every promoted post and sometimes we will burn as much as 50%. @theycallmedan is a big believer in burnposts and this idea stems greatly from discussions I had with him over the last few days, his personal strategy is to vote organic posts and only vote promoted posts with a 50% or greater burn if organic votes thereon were not sufficient.

I standby this idea and challenge the entire community to burn rewards from each and every post, albeit organic or promoted.

Also, standby for further updates from the @minnowbooster account where, we will update you tomorrow of our initiative to augment our service to facilitate these ideals.

Don't forget on all your posts to put a BURNPOST disclaimer like I have in the footer, you can even make some cool graphics, meme's and art for it.

My post really is a 100% burnpost as can be verified on Steemd.com, but you can set your own percentage you deem appropriate as per above recommendations.

## PLEASE VOTE, RESTEEM AND SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE STEEM BURNPOST CHALLENGE!

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**Regards,**

**Ricardo Ferreira**
**@thecryptodrive**
**BuildTeam CEO**
**Steem Consensus Witness**

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If you like what I do, vote for @thecryptodrive witness with this vote link: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Or use the quick SteemConnect link: https://app.steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=thecryptodrive&approve=1

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**Beneficiary Disclaimer:** This is a 100% BURNPOST, by virtue of beneficiary set to @null.