How transparancy protected Steemit from hackers

Did you notice that Steemit is completely transparent? If not then let me tell you a quick story...

Around last week I was fairly new to Steemit, and I was doing a little browsing around. I had about 500 Steem Power in my wallet after posting a really good post the day before. So I was looking at my upvotes of that post and happened to click on my friend Craigs name and began reading around on his blog post and I notice that he had some pretty decent earning posts and I thought simply, "Cool, Craigs doing pretty good....". Then I continued on with my life about 2 seconds later. About 5 seconds later I said, "I wonder how much Steam Power I have now....". So I clicked on "Wallet" and this is a similar image of what I saw...

Out of pure shock and joy my heart started pounding. I began to think, "This is crazy! What did I post?!? Why is my steem power growing so much?!? Did someone send me Steem?! What am I gonna spend this money on?!?". I got ready to text my girlfriend and tell her we were going shopping!

She's going to be so proud! Then I stopped. "Let me go check my blog and see what post is growing so fast!". So I clicked the tab in the right corner and clicked blog. But to my surprise nothing was new.
So I clicked my wallet to check how much faster my steem power was growing. And to my disappointment, my steem power, steem dollars, and STEEM were set back to where it was 20 seconds ago.

My heart sunk as I hit refresh to see if it was a glitch. Nope. Still the same. Then it hit me. "The Blockchain......". I had been sent to Craigs wallet. I was looking at Craigs page just before and when I clicked wallet it took me to his wallet. I was very disappointed for about 10 seconds and then I was over it.

My sadness gradually turned to joy as I remembered the positives of blockchain technology. This is a first for complete transparency in social media. We can now look in someones wallet and see how much money they have, when they earned it, how they earned it, when they deposited, EVERYTHING! To you and I this may seem to be a cool and a good thing for a community. Liars, scammers, thieves, anyone trying to cause harm to anyone on Steemit will easily be found by the public and easily be proven guilty. If you try to lie about how much you are earning we all can easily go to your profile and click on your wallet and see if its the truth. With blockchain technology, there is no need for trust. We don't need to trust what someones says they did or what they say they have to offer when it comes to their activity on steemit because we all can easily go look and check without being a moderator or having any technical experience with blockchain.

Now, there are people who are against this type of transparency and there reason for disliking it seems justified until doing a little thinking and applying common, well these days, RARE sense. Most people enjoy their privacy. We don't want people watching us while we take showers or while we are on the toilet. And we also don't want people looking in our bank accounts and seeing how much money we have, and why is that? Well if someone can see in our bank accounts and see how much money we have then we could become a target for robbery along with a host of other reasons. But if every ones bank account was open to the public would you still feel that insecurity? I wouldn't. I actually like the idea of every ones wallet being publicly displayed for anyone to see because it creates a trustless environment. And if every ones money is sealed on a blockchain then hackers will be easy to find.

If you don't like the thought of your entire account being public for anyone to come have a look at then the question that begs and answer is, "What are you trying to hide?". You don't want people to know how much money you've made? Why? You can see how much they've made so whats the problem? Are you trying to keep something a secret? Blockchain technology brings out the liars and scammers and it puts them on front street.

Up until that last sentence I had wrote this post before Steemit was hacked. And I find it interesting that I chose to write this blog just hours before it was hacked. And a few minutes ago Ned (one of Steemits creators) posted this update https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/important-security-announcement-steemit-ceo-ned-scott
letting everyone know what happened and that the situation was being resolved. Proving that scammers can't win against solid transparency. So I salute Ned, Dan and Bittrex and everyone else involved in bringing order back to Steemit in a timely manner. I had very little doubt
that the blockchain would hold up. So another one bites the dust!

STEEM ON!

• Trevon James