Steem is in the news, Steem is hot! Steemy! Watch out for the sun tho. 

In all seriousness, what a bizar week this was. We have the single largest stakeholder calling in his friends with billion dollars owning exchanges to overrule a temporarily safety measurement (softfork 22.2) and centralise the Steem chain around most probably 1 server running the show. 

When I got the news of the hostile centralised take-over I was flabbergasted. Bam. This is it. The end of Steem. Four epic years together with so many of you. But I also thought... the community won't end. The community is out there. It's on the discords, the telegrams, the steem.chats. But the thing we have in common, what brought us together. That might have ended. I pulled SteemWallet.apps (now back online), I was at the verge of pulling the plug on my servers. Not out of rationele, but emotion. 

But then the community voting started to happen. Large scale. At first it looked impossible. 86 Gigavests was the top witness spot before the sock puppet Tron Fakes took over with the help of Binance and Huobi and now the number to beat was 140 Gigavests of voteweight after Binance / Huobi withdrew their votes. 

And then... slowly but surely the community votes started to pour in. Amazing! And now, currently we are at 7 witnesses in the top20 list, effectively having the community back at the table, at least to block any unwanted forced Hardforks from Tronit Foundation. 

But mind you, this is thanks to Binance / Huobi stopping their votes. They might still change their mind again, and start voting more with their customer's custodial funds, for example for the reasoning: We need to unlock our funds and the new hardfork will give us that unlock. However Huobi and Binance could also simple start power down their customer funds and getting liquid steem within 7 days after 1/13 of the powerdown conversion is completed. 

This is not over yet. 
![26587_xlarge.jpg](https://files.steempeak.com/file/steempeak/roelandp/dKfr0vzW-26587_xlarge.jpg)

#### Please continue to vote for community witnesses, reach out to anyone you know with steem, ask to vote! 
- Please use all 30 of your votes. 
- If you are with the community, against centralisation of the Steem chain... Pick witnesses that don't run 22.5 software. 
- If you vote for any of the following witnesses: *goodguy24, cloudysun, eastooowest, hunger365, paintingclub, flyingfly1, waitforyou1, jumphigh, toke2049, coronashallgo, night11pm, car2001, agirl10000, bostonawesome, happylife123, nicetry001, aheadofslow, high46, respect888, onestepaday*, please reconsider your votes as this is a single server running 20 witnesses!

### Are you on Steemit.com? Consider an alternative!
If you are using Steemit.com understand that this website is now owned by the same people who called their exchange owning friends to overrule the community elected witness list. If you feel that is not ok, consider using a different website to explore the Steem blockchain. I don't want to spread fud, but in the light of recent events, it might be a smart move to consider alternatives. 

And boy are there alternatives. I am currently typing this blogpost on SteemPeak. 

#### SteemPeak.com
what a beauty. Support for Tribes, Communities, Build-in Wallet (include Steem-Engine token support), Steem Proposal voter, Witness voter, Draft posts and Templates. Best of all, secure login / transacting with Steemkeychain (audit-able software) so no need to paste your private key in a browser screen. 
https://steempeak.com

#### eSteem apps for Desktop & Mobile
A beautiful app available for desktop (mac & win) and iOS & Android phones. Long standing and in active development! IIRC they are also coming out with a web based app. Open source developed.
https://esteem.app

#### Busy.org open source steem interface
Busy is yet another interface for the Steem chain. A beautiful minimalistic design. However there seems to be no active development going on. Yet you can! The source code is available and MIT Licensed on https://github.com/busyorg/busy 
https://busy.org 

### Additional steem software tips: 
- Install SteemKeychain for Chrome & Firefox: https://github.com/MattyIce/steem-keychain
- Download SteemWallet to browse a slay of steem interfaces via it's in-app Dapp browser (with SteemKeychain support) https://steemwallet.app 

#### Signalling ~~22.7331~~ 22.1 instead of 22.4444 (for now)
I have updated my witness nodes to signal 22.7331. This is software version 22.1 compatible with all current consensus versions out there. I started signalling 22.4444 as a protest, well aware of the symbolic meaning of 4 in Justin Sun's native tongue. The idea behind it (for me) was to signal the Death of Steem with it's centralization. However, I got word that some people might find it disturbing to have their transactions included in these 22.4444 signed blocks, so hence I changed my protest indicator to 22.7331. Where 7331 is a reference to my recent newly assigned "badge of honor": Hackers! 7331 according to Urban Dictionary:  *Uncool, or non-leet. The opposite of 1337 (leet). Having poor computer skills.* However this versioning might change as consensus is reached among the community witnesses. 

Update: I reverted to vanilla 22.1 after some discussions. Thx @pfunk. 

Thank you for your reads, thanks for your votes. 
Keep em coming. See you on the chain!