There are a few questions that I have had lately related to the steemit.com website and it's relationship with the actual blockchain and the mining process. Since these questions are related to the security and potential censorship of the community, I feel like they're worth asking and having a nice discussion about.

1. Who operates the steemit.com website?

2. Is the website source code also open, and if so how can we verify that the distributed code is the one that is being used to generate the website?

Since the majority of users will be interacting with the blockchain through steemit.com, how can we verify that the website is legitimate and does not contain malicious code?

3. What are the risks of censorship through the steemit.com website?

The whitepaper briefly mentions that "Individual websites such as steemit.com may censor content on their particular site, but content published on the blockchain is inherently broadcast traffic and mirrors all around the world may continue to make it available." My concern here is that, as far as I know, steemit.com will most likely be the ONLY way that the vast majority of users interact with the network. Thus, although anyone could technically still publish to the blockchain, and advanced users could still see those posts, for all practical purposes steemit.com could still choose to censor certain posts to the majority of users. Is this a legitimate concern? Is there any procedure that periodically checks the posted content on the website against the blockchain?

Could our private keys be stolen by steemit.com?

Since, as the whitepaper suggests, there is a risk of censorship on steemit.com, isn't there also a risk that our private keys could be stolen, or improperly stored by the website owners? Clearly the website interacts with our private keys, since they are required for posting, etc... Is there any way we can verify that this is being done securely? Are our stored keys encrypted with our login passwords?

Obviously I'm not implying that there is any funny business going on, these were just a few questions that I had been thinking about lately, and I thought others might like to hear the answers as well.

Best,
Trogdor :)