RE: Steem for Business: Thinking about a Steem-Powered customer loyalty program
The funds were transferred by the blockchain during the hardfork. There's a semantic argument to be had about whether it was Steemit, "the Steem witnesses", or "the Steem community" who did the transfer, but it definitely wasn't the account holders themselves.
Basically, when Hive forked off, the fork include a step that forcibly transferred funds (on that chain) to empty the wallets from Steemit and about 200 other accounts (including myself, my son, and steemchiller, among others) because the Hive agitators were unhappy about the witness votes of those accounts. After Hive forked off, some Hive militants also continued harassing the Steem blockchain with obscene SPAM posting and intentionally harmful witness votes.
In response, "the Steem witnesses" used the exact same code (with a different list of account names) to empty the wallets of the alleged attackers and/or the people who were alleged to be voting for attacking witnesses, dumping the funds into the community321 account. Almost immediately after that transfer, some unknown party transferred the funds to Bittrex - apparently by making use of a compromised key.
So, I think Steemit's counterargument is probably that 1.) "the Community" or "the Witnesses" transferred the funds, not Steemit, Inc.; and 2.) The fact that most of the blockchain attacks stopped immediately after the hardfork demonstrates that it was a necessary defensive measure.
Wow - what a mess. So you had your account emptied for the simple reason that you didn’t oppose Justin Sun?
And in retaliation, the suspected conspirators had their accounts emptied and this is what ended up with Bittrex.
Which almost certainly means that nobody had any funds other than Bittrex and anybody who kept well out of it!
And after everybody lost… Steemit somehow manages to “win” 21m STEEM?!
Yeah, basically my son and I voted for decentralization by supporting enough witnesses from both "factions" to try to ensure that neither could gain full control, but the Hive chain emptied the wallets of anyone who voted for more than 2 of the Sun/Steemit-aligned witnesses (or maybe 2 or more, I forget now).
So far, I think they only won 14.5 million. The other 6 that transferred out to Binance was already in the steemit wallet, and (as I understand it) Bittrex now owns the 8 or 9 million "disputed STEEM" - they basically bought it with their interpleader deposit. The remaining legal dispute is in terms of USD, not STEEM, I think.
To be fair, Steemit lost far more on the Hive side than they gained from Bittrex, but the whole thing was definitely a mess.
Yeah - fair point.
I don't know at what point anybody thought that this was a good idea. And I suppose that some sort of retaliation was inevitable. It's no wonder that 2 years on, there's still so much bitterness about it.