This is absolutely nuts.
I haven't really been paying attention to the new witnesses, but I notice that all of them were made to pledge that they will never freeze anyone's stake. Based on that, Justin Sun and Steemit Inc voted them in. Ultimately, the buck stops with Justin Sun and Steemit Inc. If they stop voting for these terrible witnesses, the game's over. I'd suggest getting in touch with Eli Powell first, and asking them to threaten to withdraw votes for basically breaking that one pledge they asked for in the first place! Additionally, I would recommend getting in touch with blocktrades, roelandp and others who are also facing a similar issue. They are long time members of the community, will have a plan and will surely help you out, and perhaps even work on joint legal action. They should have contact info available on their profiles / websites. Also, get in touch with crypto media outlets, make some noise, spread word on CT (crypto twitter) and Reddit - the PR would be so shit stained that these fools will be forced to relent. If you need any help, feel free to add me on Discord, @liberosist#8254.
Lastly, you're the best whale to appear on Hive/Steem in quite a while. Keep up your great curation, as you know it's the secret to building this community!
PS: All/most of these witnesses have posts making the pledge, and more bragging involved. Some will give away personal information unwittingly. I see three of them are still pinned on Steemit, others will have such posts on their blog.
Many of us watched Steemit Inc juggle the witness votes shortly before that softfork to ensure the code could be activated. Pinning it on Steemit Inc might be easiest and there's enough evidence to prove without their involvement, none of these funds could have ever been frozen or lost.
That's a fair point. I have been avoiding this drama like the plague, and naively hadn't considered that possibility. Now that you mention it, yeah, it's quite likely they were involved. I see that they deny being involved, but obviously, few will believe a word coming from Justin Sun at this stage. Nevertheless, when threatened with legal action and some rotten PR, I do believe they'll take some action. If they don't, their chain is pretty much dead.
I've been staying out of it as well... until I heard about this softfork. Went to steem to do wallet maintenance, noticed someone had resteemed the softfork post. I thought it was satire at first. Then it started to look like extortion, so I pointed that out in a comment. Sat and watched the witness screen start changing. I left a comment under blockbrothers message where they said they do not approve, shortly after they lost their top witness slot for saying they won't run the code. I watched everything. It's dirty and there's proof everywhere. They claimed later they had no involvement but somehow nearly everyone saw what they actually did. There's proof, screenshots, me calling them crazy. It's all there. They did it.
Funnily enough, one of the operators behind 22.888 received around two weeks ago a comment containing also this snippet.
Holy uncanny photographic mental processes, Batman!
Damn, that's crazy. This is one of those rare instances where incompetence meets malice.
@blockbrothers might even have some inside info. I had asked them questions and they didn't answer.
Justin Sun and Steemit Inc. were the ones who made sure the funds were frozen. They took witness votes off of all the witnesses that wouldn't run 22.888