So I'm sure everyone has heard about the purchase of Steemit by Justin Sun and how the Steem blockchain community moved to block Sun's power to potentially "takeover" the blockchain. If not, here is a start to your own research. Make sure to pay attention because there is so much happening in this brand new space of blockchain/cryptocurrency/smart contract.

Check it out...

This here is a screenshot of the top 14 witnesses that were all new this morning.

Actually, the top 20 witnesses were all voted in new this morning, March 2 2020. 

In case you are unfamiliar with Steemit witnesses, they are the consensus mechanism used in the DPoS (Decentralized Proof of Stake) Steem blockchain. This type of consensus mechanism (DPoS) utilizes a voting and election process to protect the blockchain from centralization and malicious usage. For comparison, Bitcoin is a PoW and using mining power in order to keep the blockchain decentralized.

In other words, if an entity, or group, gains majority of the witnesses on the Steem blockchain (majority of mining power for BTC) they gain control over the nature and path of the blockchain. In this case, a group was able to takeover the process of voting in witnesses. The way in which that voting takes place is through the use of the native token Steem. Each vote is an amount of Steem Power which is made from Steem. In order to takeover the top 20 positions you would need a lot of Steem converted into Steam Power and that is just what happened.

If you were not aware of the purchase by Justin Sun of Steemit then you are no made aware of it. Upon this happening, the core group of witnesses made a move to hopefully prevent this from happening by limiting the power that the new owner Justin Sun could potentially wield over the blockchain. As of now it seems that the way these 20 witnesses were voted in was by several exchanges which hold users staked coins. That's right, exchanges such as Binance voted in the witnesses by using massive amounts of Steem and this Steem potentially came from users staked coins.

If this is the case it would be quite sad indeed and raises some doubts over whether this movement of decentralized blockchain services ever catch on. The "mainstream adoption" means that "the masses" begin using and the masses have always wanted to be ruled from central delegates. It's even in the bible haha.

Something else to note is the user names of the top witnesses: 

goodguy24

nicetry001

almost as if they were saying f u to the community who made the fair decision to limit Justin Sun's power after his purchase. I presume it will be considered "just business" over time and that we will see this more and more with the commercialization of crypto/blockchain/smart contract services and protocols.