Today: Good news. Annoyance. Uncertainty. Questions. Hope.
In yesterdays report about latest customers since sending out my flagging threats, I already noted a significant drop in upvote requests of about 6% (31$) within two days. In the comment section,
himself argued, this drop was due to him removing his delegation from
to "kill your [=my] account".
It looks like as if for once he did not lie - at least not in terms of him moving out his capital.
Effectively, his move out of caused a drop of 80% in Steem Power held by the bot. The transfers coming in yesterday show the same drop in upvote requests.
Only 12 transfers have turned up in the stats for yesterday, worth a total of 8.101 SBD. That is 97% less compared to the day be fore (Thursday) and compared to Friday last week, the drop equals 98%.
I had to look twice to be sure it wasn't the wrong stats I was looking at. But it's the correct ones, as you can see in the screenshot.
I am surprised to say this, but it looks just like...
One major objective of this operation has just been accomplished: Killing off
income from his upvote business
This is rather unexpected. In my time table, I thought this to happen in about a week from now. That it happened so fast shows, I hit a nerve with attacking his customer base - and with that also his business partners at . It was just the right thing to do.
Nonetheless, getting this result after only three days since sending out the warning messages - and without a single shot fired from my side - the outcome is very remarkable. (Sun Tsu and Clausewitz would be proud of me ;-)
The next steps in the process
As mentioned above, made the decision to redistribute his
SP to "kill my account".
He might be trying that, but with the rules being that you have to wait for 7 days until you can use your SP again, this gives all of us a little break and perhaps even more.
This by the way was another objective: Causing a "traffic jam" for his SP, so he can't use it.
My next moves as planned included a couple of more articles that I already have in the pipeline. They are about bernie, his hazardousness to the Steem blockchain and SMTs as well as articles about his options after all this. I also planned on rallying and inviting more of his victims to the party.
All that will halt for now.
Of course, as soon as it becomes necessary, I will put that on the table again. For the moment though, this seems to be not to be the case.
The biggest issue left is the ongoing illegitimate flagging by 
To me personally more annoying than damaging are the automatic downvotes of my content by and several of his side accounts. Besides me, yesterday and today so far, he flagged eight other users:
(today; illegitimate attack after criticism)
(today; illegitimate attack after criticism)
(yesterday; illegitimate attack after criticism)
(yesterday; meme platform; whale sized Steem Power)
(today; meme related)
(yesterday;
related)
(yesterday;
related)
(yesterday;
related)
I have too little insight into the matter to decide if those were legitimate flags or not. A bit more suspicious but still possibly legitimate are the meme related flags (in case of copyright infringements). I will check that with
later, so far we haven't had contact yet.
Which leaves three users, who left normal comments stating their opinion, on which they got hammered by (especially
got a load..). This is exactly the kind of behaviour that must stop.
Right now, I have to collect more information about the new status quo of Steemit Empire. But I think I might get a temporary fix ready this afternoon to curb his flagging activity to the extent, that he has to pick whether he wants to punish users with opinions he doesn't like, or engage in legitimate flagging.
So... did I win?
Not sure, but surely not yet. It all depends on how he realigns his assets and what options he will have then to engage in irresponsible behaviour - and on the other side, what options there will be to curb his activities in response, after he finished his realignment.
What I can say for sure is that he got scared.
His reactions in the comment section and replies to my articles and comments got increasingly shrill, which is something rather unusual for somebody claiming to have the total control over the situation. Add to that the fundamental re-delegation of his Steem Power and you can almost smell his sweaty armpits.
This is only a speculation, but I strongly suspect, in the background there must have been going down some serious chats with him. His comrades, his business partners at and also other whales who run similar operations had plenty of reasons to talk to him in this matter.
Because with my approach, I have not just shown how to successfully curb his behaviour and massively attack his income source, but I have shown a general way into attacking upvote bots and this strategy can be applied by everybody.
After all, so far there were no flags coming from my side (I can't stress that enough). My direct spending for this operation was less than 1 SBD for transfer memos to - now former - customers, and the current bottom line is that it took me less than a week to bring down one of the biggest upvote bots owned by one of the biggest whales on Steemit.
If I with my mere 719 SP can do that, then everyone can. They know that now and to protect their business model as a whole, they preferred to rather cut their ties with and put him under serious pressure, than facing a possible escalation with their upvote bots ending up on the chopping block as well.
At least that's my working theory for now...
What do you think, what will come next? Is this (almost) over? Did others put pressure on him... is bernie scared now? Let me know in the comments!
Oh, and one more thing...
How about a resteem to celebrate the occasion? And I believe with a few more upvotes it is even possible to get this post out of the red zone.
Thanks a lot! ;-)
You will find all my posts in this matter under the tag #curbyourbernie