A lot of people in the Steemit community are upset and want to know why Steemit CEO @Ned powered down 1,800,341.511 Steem ($2,970,563.49 USD). I checked his wallet and noticed a few things that look suspicious!
- One day before he powered down there was a transfer of 1 Steem from his account to an account named
Hive account@brixtongg. The caption of the transfer reads "Test" as if someone is testing to see if it works. My theory is that a hacker somehow gained access to 
Hive account@ned 's account and was testing to see if the hack was successful. It would also explain why Hive account@ned was transferring money to a brand new account.
- After the initial test Hive account@ned 's account reflects that he powered down 1,800,341.511 Steem.
- A day after @Ned 's account was powered down: 1,000 Steem was sent to the same account Hive account@brixtongg The odd thing about this transaction is up next.
- The following day a total of 110,872.084 Steem was sent to Hive account@brixtongg It's odd that this much was sent to a new & empty account, and that it took two trial transfers first to make sure that it would work. If @Ned was the one handling his account he would not have needed to send trial transfers, especially a day apart. This leads me to believe that it wasn't @Ned who powered down, and not @Ned who made the transfers.
This happened shortly after one of 
Hive account@surpassinggoogle's online friend's got hacked and couldn't recover her account. I included screenshots of her conversation from Facebook so that you could determine for yourself if she was hacked and if there is a bug in the Steemit system that doesn't allow people to recover their hacked accounts.
UPDATE: @Ned hasn't uploaded any new blog posts to Steemit but he has written a few comments.
In one of his comments he mentioned that he wants to make his stake in Steem (the currency) private. That way people wouldn't speculate and write news articles every time he buys or sells.
So it looks like Hive account@brixtongg is another one of his personal accounts and that he will be hiding his personal stake in Steem so that people won't know how much he owns, or when he buys or sells.
I guess the "test transfers" were done by him to make sure he was sending the 110k+ Steem to the right account!
