Steem is in danger! Here's how you can help

On February 14, @ned announced that he had sold Steemit Inc to Justin Sun, the owner of the cryptocurrency Tron. The sale of Steemit Inc included the website steemit.com and Steem accounts owned by Steem. Those Steemit accounts contained over 50,000,000 Steem that Steemit Inc had promised would be used to grow the community and not to vote for witnesses.

On February 23, the Steem Witnesses temporarily froze all Steem owned by Steemit Inc until they could talk to Justin Sun about how he would use it. While not all the witnesses agreed with this reversible soft fork change, the majority of them supported it. Justin Sun responded on Steem saying he would talk with the witnesses privately on March 4 and host a public town hall on March 6.

Then yesterday, with no warning, Justin Sun paid three exchanges: Poloniex, Binance, and Huobi to help him. They all powered up all of their funds, funds that belonged to their customers, and voted for 20 new witnesses that were all owned by Steemit Inc. These new witnesses took over the Steem blockchain and implemented a new hardfork releasing all of Steemit Inc's funds. Steemit transferred these funds to multiple accounts, paid the exchanges for their help, then powered up a large amount of Steem and voted for the 20 fake witnesses put in place by the exchanges. This meant that Justin Sun had full, centralized control of Steem and he could do whatever he wanted.

He posted on Twitter that day calling the community elected Steem witnesses "hackers" trying to steal money.

Yesterday the Steem community mobilized. We flooded Twitter and Steem calling out these exchanges for using customer funds to help Justin Sun centralize Steem. Yesterday afternoon, Binance undid their witness votes. This morning, Huobi also backed down. Today, the Steem community put in 30,000 votes for our old, legitimate witnesses. We've managed to help 5 of them get back into the top 20. This lets us block Justin Sun and Steemit from changing Steem's code. We can't stop now though, we need to keep supporting our witnesses and giving them more votes. We need to get 17 of our witnesses into the top 20 before we can make changes to prevent this from happening again.

We need your help.

1. You can spread the news. Go on Twitter and other social media and call out Justin Sun and ask him to stop trying to take over the blockchain. Spread awareness on any social media that you can.
2. If you have any Steem on Binance or Huobi withdraw it and power it up to your account. They used your funds to help Justin Sun control Steem. If they delay your withdrawal, call them out and post about it on social media.
3. Most importantly, vote for the top 30 legitimate Steem witnesses. Every vote counts, every bit of Steem Power adds up. Use all 30 of your votes, they are all worth the same amount. The easiest way to do this is to set a Steem account as a proxy, letting your account automatically copy their votes. I suggest setting @curie as your proxy as they are a well recognized community figure that is trustworthy. You can easily do this by going to https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses, signing in, then scroll to the bottom, enter "curie" into the text box, and click “Set Proxy”. If you want to manually vote, head to https://steempeak.com/me/witnesses and vote for the top 30 witnesses with profile pictures. If you've already voted, make sure your Steem is powered up. Any Steem you power up is automatically added to the power of your witness votes!

I’ve been amazed by how the Steem community has banded together. I’ve seen people who haven’t posted in a long time come back and get involved, me among those. Even if you haven’t been involved lately, your vote matters, and Steem matters. It has been a great community in the past and will continue to be so in the future.

Thanks for your help supporting Steem!

This post is set to give 100% of rewards to @curie