Over a week has gone by since I heard from my Country Representative for the Italian Community @girolamomarotta, who with great distress informed me that the @steem-fanbase website had been attacked, and that the curation trail that he manages through the @steemauto.app had, during the same time, been altered, and not by the account owner @xeldal
He informed me that he privately contacted @steem-supporter, who is the owner of the privately run, non-open source, centralized Steem app, known to everyone as Steemauto, and as any normal person would do when finding that an app is not working as it should, @girolamomarotta attempted to report the "bug" to @steem-supporter in hopes of finding a solution.
My Country Representative told me in private that he was convinced that @steem-supporter had intentionally altered the curation trail so that the @xeldal account would give lesser % upvotes, and that he felt that @steem-supporter also was responsible for the attacks on @steem-fanbase, as this new app will clearly become competition for @steemauto.app
@steem-supporter, in a certain sense, felt the bloodhounds sniffing him out, and out of panic published a rushed post lamenting about how much he has suffered over the past year at the hands of bullies and envious Steemians. This post, in my opinion, was intended to distract people away from the underlying issue of the security breach that he is responsible for, namely, the altering of voting rules from within the @steemauto.app
Read my Story and comment --- Do read it please
Within this post, he published part of the private conversation that took place with @girolamomarotta
@steem-supporter accused the Italian Country Representative of being a "wolf" and claimed that @girolamomarotta was trying to bribe him to fix the curation trail in exchange for witness votes. @girolamomarotta then published more of the conversation showing that it was @steem-supporter who was actually extorting him for witness votes.
All of this naturally caused me to become very suspicious! So I brought the issue up on my podcast The Tino Take.
This podcast was offered in the comments of @steem-supporter's post, to which I received the following reply:
In this reply @steem-supporter acknowledges that he has no intentions of making his app open-source and that he is making modifications to the app. He further attempts to convince the public that he has contact with @xeldal and @enki and that they would be sending a public memo acknowledging that they are responsible for the changes in the curation trail. Those memos never arrived.
I then began looking into the voting record of @xeldal and @enki and noticed that they were suddenly upvoting @steem-supporter beginning in this month of May 2021. I published this curious finding in my community in the following post:
@steem-supporter appeared on the scene around April of 2020, during the STEEM/HIVE split, positioning himself as a dedicated supporter of Steem. He began several projects which led to the reanimation of the formally famous open-source app Steemauto, which allowed Steemians to create curation trails and manage auto upvotes. The old repository from github was cloned, and hence many former curation trails, and fanbase auto-votes, were reactivated. He also went on to manage a witness node for the Steem blockchain, and eventually on the 5th of June 2020 became a Top 20 Consensus Witness. He recently lost that status on the 13th of May 2021, which was 5 days after he first began receiving upvotes from @xeldal and @enki on his post Installing a Full API server with HF version 0.23.1 with MIRA. This is also the very same period in which my Country Representative noticed changes in the curation trail he manages, and reached out to @steem-supporter to find out why. On the 18th of May, @steem-supporter attempted to extort Witness votes from @girolamomarotta in exchange for "fixing" the curation trail:
On the 19th of May, @girolamomarotta received his last normal 50% upvote from @xeldal and @enki
The next day, on the 20th, that vote was changed to 25%
On the 21st, @girolamomarotta, outraged and concerned about the negative effect this would have on his activities, conceded to agree to give @steem-supporter Witness Votes in exchange for "fixing" the trail!
On the 23rd, after not receiving any Witness Votes, the upvotes were further reduced to 10%
On the 25th, the upvotes were raised to 15%
On the 26th, I published A Steem Con in Our Midst, as well as Are You a STEEM Supporter, or Does STEEM Support You?!, which I will talk about in a moment.
At this point, @steem-supporter was continuing to insist that he had nothing to do with these alterations, and that it was the account owners who were making the changes.
I also observed these irregularities in my posts, as I receive 30% upvotes from @girolamomarotta. On the 27th, I published Lungo il Sentiero del Denaro Sbucano i Demoni and received a 4.5% upvote from @xeldal, but did not receive the usual upvote from @enki
On the 28th, @enki magically returned for The Tino Take - Take 76
And as of the 29th, @enki is no longer matching the vote of @xeldal
As I was curious to understand why @steem-supporter lost his position as a Consensus Witness, I went to have a look at his transfer record over the past year and discovered that he has been siphoning hundreds of thousands of STEEM into his Binance accounts. So I published Are You a STEEM Supporter, or Does STEEM Support You?!
I then gathered some more information and published a post in Italian to inform my community of my findings and hypotheses.
Lungo il Sentiero del Denaro Sbucano i Demoni
What was very fascinating to me was the screenshot of the tool that @steem-supporter uses to alter the voting rules of the @steemauto.app and I noticed how @steem-supporter has a particular interest in... guess who... @enki and @xeldal
Please take note that @enki follows @xeldal with a 100% upvote, and in particular have a look at the fact that @steem-supporter can EDIT the fields, hence change the voting rules!!!
So congratulations @steem-supporter, you are very clever at coding, scamming and pretending to be a victim. @enki is now upvoting at 100%, all of @steem-supporter's posts, and many Steemians are cheering him on, as he gets financial results! And financial results are what matter in this dog-eat-dog world of corporate capitalism. It was George Soros who said, "I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do." I assure you that @steem-supporter cares very little about the consequences of his actions. Maybe this is all a capricious game of revenge for having lost his status as a Consensus Witness? Maybe this is an act of envy and jealousy towards the successful rebuilding of the Italian Community? Who knows for sure! What we do know, is that we Steemians have lost this battle, and are now looking in the face of the death Steemit's curation trails!
Proposal to Resolve the Problem
I take great pain in offering this proposal for a resolution to this problem. We are dealing with a serious security breach that will only further damage Steemit's reputation. I would like to call on our Consensus Witnesses to investigate this matter by checking the database to see if @xeldal and @enki have actually been active on Steemit during these past several weeks that this breach has been taking place. If they have not been active, then we are face to face with the uncomfortable reality that @steem-supporter has been altering the voting rules of two major Steem Stakeholders, without their consent. If this is the case, I humbly, and with great displeasure, request a Soft-Fork in which we freeze the @steemauto.app account, thus preventing it from executing any further upvotes.
Thank you all for your time and consideration!
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