An easy way to become popular in Steemit - Try to break the system with your greed

Some of you might have already read a lot of articles on what happened today in the STEEM blockchain. I just completed reading many articles. It was very interesting and quite funny. That's why I wanted to give you some tips on how you can become popular in just one day in Steemit. Today there have been posts about this person called Hive account@nijeah (We still don't know if it is a real person or a decoy of someone else) everywhere in steemit. Because of this wonderful person the steemdev team had to work really hard to push a patch today. Hive account@nijeah should really be very happy about it because his name is being mentioned everywhere today in the blockchain. More than that even Hive account@steemitblog has mentioned about Hive account@nijeah today in their article mentioning why they had to do a patch update on steem blockchain.

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Brief overview on what happened

I'm sure you would have read about what happened in several articles by now. But I would like to briefly explain what happened today in steem blockchain and how it affected the witnesses.

• Everything in steem blockchain was going smooth and the whole world was happy.
• Before 7 days our superhero Hive account@nijeah tried to submit a transaction to withdraw negative vests from their account.
• First attempt he tried with -1 Vests and second attempt he tried with -5 Vests. When he saw the request getting broadcasted successfully, he then got greedy and initiated further transactions with bigger Vest values.
• Hive account@jerc33 has explained this beautifully in this article.
• There was no harm for the next 6 days but today was the 7th day and the system tried to do the task.
• Every single witness tried to perform this operation and ended up in a deadlock kind of situation where the blockchain went idle without any movement.

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What impact this incident has created?

People who did not understand the reason or those who did not take any effort to understand what was the problem, panicked and they sold their holdings. Below were some of the impact:

• The witnesses had to do lots of activities to get back their servers up and running.
• After the servers were up, people started selling their holdings and steem price was dropping.
• Hive account@nijeah became very popular.
• People have started to speculate about the stability of the blockchain.

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Some interesting findings so far

Some people have been giving justifications saying that it was done to test the behaviour of the blockchain. Though steem is still under the beta stage, it is completely unfair to do the testing directly on production. If at all this was a testing activity done, it should have been done in a test environment.

Hive account@nijeah is a name exactly reverse of haejin. We still don't know if there could be a link between our new hero and our old hero haejin. After all, this is a great publicity. Who knows Hive account@nijeah might even get a good fan base.

It was suspected that Hive account@netuoso would have had a connection with Hive account@nijeah. The question "who is nijeah" was asked by Hive account@isnochys in his post. But Hive account@netuoso replied in the same post saying that he has no connection with Hive account@nijeah except a work that he did for him.

I do not own or run the Hive account@nijeah account. Several months back I helped the user with a couple scripts and answered a few questions on discord. I was compensated for my time.
I'll help anyone that asks or needs it on the Steem devs discord server.

Hive account@bobinson identified this as soon as he tried doing a pull from the GitHub repository. You can read his article to know more about his interesting finding.

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We have to definitely take this incident in a very positive note because we can see evidence that we have a highly active supporting team to make sure the blockchain is not affected and is safe for everyone to use. The patch to fix the issue was applied immediately in just a few hours after it was identified. That was really quick.

From this incident, I really understand how sharp a witness should be in monitoring the nodes almost like every minute and observe the blocks. If something goes wrong they have to immediately fix it before it becomes a huge mess. This is really a hard work guy. Hats off to you!