Is the Tron-acquiring-Steemit news fake? A followup keyboard investigation
Yeah, I believe that you've heard that - rumor, or at best unconfirmed news, has it that Justin Sun of Tron is going to buy Steemit, the company behind the biggest social media blockchain Steem.
It was all over the news, Chinese or English, yesterday and on Steemit of course.
But all the reporting comes from one single source - the famous Chinese crypto news channel, huoxing24.com (火星财经, meaning Mars Finance). It was founded in March 2018 and is invested by many famous global and Chinese venture capital funds. Binance is one of the investors.
You can still see many search results regarding this unconfirmed news if you google "火星财经 steemit"
All results are still there... except the first one - the original source.
If you click it, it will bring you to the news page: https://news.huoxing24.com/flash
The only starting sentences that we can see is "火星财经APP（微信：hxcj24h）一线报道，12月9日，据知情人士向火星财经透露，波场即将收购区块链项目Steemit。5天前，波场创始人孙宇晨曾在微博透露，近期又"
Which says "Huoxing APP (Wechat: hxcj24h) first hand reporting. On Dec. 9, according to an insider who told Huoxing Finance, Tron is going to acquire the blockchain project Steemit. Five days ago, founder of Tron, Justin Sun revealed on his weibo that recently ..."
Google has snapshots. Let's find out. The following is the text version.
The last one in the picture is the one. Here we can document the original link: https://news.huoxing24.com/flash/20191209235315636737.html and now it's like this:
Yes, it is CENSORED. Ouch! A censorship upon a rumor about changing ownership of a blockchain company that gave birth to a censor-free blockchain. How ironic.
If you search 'steemit' on https://news.huoxing24.com, you do get some results but not that one. The latest news is on June, about Steem and Pivot...
The conclusion is simple: the very source of the rumor was removed for undisclosed reasons.
What does it mean?
Well, you can have your own answers. This is as far as my keyboard investigation can take you.
The following is just my reasoning for your reference amusement.
Possibility 1: Justin Sun forced, yes I believe he is influential enough to do so, Huoxing news to remove it because this is true, at least partly true or ongoing, but not ready to tell the world.
Possibility 2: Huoxing reporter made some mistake and reported it and now they withdraw it and pretend nothing happened.
Personally, I tend to think the first scenario is more likely. Partly due to other facts like: 1) Sun did not clarify this, 2) Steemit also did not say anything so far and 3) The Steem price is still up
Of course, there are other possibilities like some colluded price manipulation etc... I'll leave that to your imagination. ^_^
