Just over a year ago, I wrote the following story, but as I finished I asked myself, “Would anyone want to read a story about Bearshares?” and I realized that there wasn’t an audience, so once again, I tossed another story into my ‘Unpublished’ folder and forgot about it.

Then a few days ago, while researching Justin Sun for a satirical piece, I began to notice similarities between Justin Sun’s vision of Steemit and @bilalhaider’s centralized fork of the steem blockchain.

So now, with the threat of centralization looming over the Steem Community, I feel that this forgotten story may provide a glimpse into what Steemit may feel like under the TRON regime.

Keep in mind, this story contains real quotes from people who don’t understand punctuation, enjoy!

Bearshares – A Cautionary Tale

Have any of you been watching the chaos over at Bearshares?

Bearshares reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, if you replaced every character with another mad hatter and no one seems to notice how bizarre things have become.

When I first looked at Bareshares, I noticed that there was a large Spanish community and I began to wonder why, “Have they somehow tapped into the Spanish psyche? Is Bearshares going to be the South American Golos?”

So, I hopped on the Bearshares discord server, but the only person I met was one guy with a strange name: @bilalhaider, but my dyslexia interprets this as ball-handler, so, sorry ball-handler, but you seriously lost the name lottery.

I began posting a few stories and each received only one vote, but I didn’t care, I mean, seriously, they were paying me in fucking bears! Then, a bear-whale named @me-tarzan, began upvoting all my posts and I was finally earning the big-bears.

Seriously, I had more bears than I knew what to do with, because after asking around, I found that no vendors on the darknet were willing to ship drugs for bear-money, can you believe that shit?

There were actually a lot of other warning signs that bear-world might not be the bear-utopia that it pretended to be, for instance:

• The trending page only contained posts from two users: @halo and @me-tarzan
• There was only one witnesses: Ball-handler.
• The majority of Bearshares helpful links, including bear.chat, took me to pages that wouldn’t load.
• They even linked multiple exchanges, that refused to allow bears to trade on their platform.
• Ball-handler claimed that he wouldn't allow bear-money on the exchanges until he fund raised $500,000.
• One of their most popular tags was noganoo, because bear-people tend to fall victim to scams.

Then, as me and Sarah began experiencing our first Christmas-eve together in Britain, all hell broke loose in bear-world!

I wasn’t sure if Christmas was celebrated in bear-culture, but I decided to take my chances by hopping on their discord channel to write: “Merry Christmas!”

When I arrived, I noticed that this usually empty channel was now alive with chat from angry-bears, demanding answers. As I continued reading, I realized that Bearshares was offline and ball-handler admitted that he couldn’t afford the $20 fee for a back up server, so, the Bearshares blockchain was unrecoverable.

Ball-handler attempted to pan handle $20 and when that failed he announced that he would add advertising links to Bearshares and he left Discord.

As a responsible bear-person, I asked about royalties for older posts that might be used to generate advertising dollars, then two of the largest investors of Bearshares immediately pounced on this.

@halo “I think royalties should only be paid out to people who invest into the platform though”
@loki “skin in the game the way it should be”
@halo “if you don't pony up and support the platform then you don't get a cut of the royalties, $5 a month mebeership fee , I think everyone can afford”

As I watched these two create a caste system, I began imagining them spraying spray-paint into a brown paper bag and then huffing it for inspiration and investment advice, so, without taking my eyes off them, I cautiously backed out of the server.

Two days later, Bearshares was back online, but every-bear was forced to sign up, again, and all our precious bear-money was gone.

As I signed back up, I saw some very strange rules: “We do not encourage pornography, seduction, gambling, plagiarized posts and posts against bearshares and team leaders, you might loose your account for posting such a content.”

“Seduction!?!? What the hell does that mean?” I wondered. “How many slutty-bears seduced ball-handler, that he needed to make this a rule?”

Then I remembered all the rumors about @ned and how he made female Steemians, “audition” for a chance at his delegation; I wondered if maybe ball-handler was looking for love and he was trying to weed out all the bear-diggers.

I was dying to know what the deal was with seduction, so, I hopped on their discord server and saw countless enraged-bears in the process of losing their honey-loving minds!

“What about all our bears?” I worked hard for those bears!”
“Yes, it's not fair, i had 58.000 bears....”
“It's not fair i worked there very hard and i earned good coin . Now everything lost.”

Ball-handler fired back: “I understand that people lost their coins. but when I asked for help .. no one showed up .. When I posted I need funds, for the back up server. where were you?”

Bears began to riot: hurling insults back and fourth until some sensible-bear wrote: “You are not getting my point... what is not fair is to blame” and then some sad-bear explained that he was from a poor village and he had been saving up all his bear-money for a better life.

This was the moment that Ball-handler shed his sheep’s clothing only to become the dictator that we all know and love, “if you think I am not fair, you have the option to Get the Hell out of here”

As I watched the chaos I decided not to ask great-leader my various questions about seduction and the names of all the slutty-bears… You know… For someone to chat with after Sarah goes to sleep.

About a week later, I began to wonder what life was like behind the iron-curtain, so, I opened their discord server, again, and ball-handler didn’t disappoint!

An inquisitive-bear asked if ball-handler was really going to seize the accounts from bear-combatants and ball-handler said something truly interesting:

“You don't completely own your account at any other social networks. like steemit, or any other forks of it. If you screw them hard enough, you can loose your account. so yes, I have control. the same way. steemit has control over its users' accounts”

I scrolled down to see how the bear-people felt about how tenuous their citizenship into bear-kingdom really was, but then I realized that ball-handler had deleted all their comments, so, all that remained were ball-handler’s strange; out of context, responses.

“so anyone who wants to be a witness. must obey the rules. set by the leaders, by me”

“I am telling this to everyone from day one.. if you can't trust me.. you shouldn't be here cause this project belongs to me”

“dictator, now go fuck yourself”

“anyone, who talks crap about the platform, or me, or any of the leaders. gets screwed and its is possible in steemit. and other platforms as well”

At this point, I began to wonder if ball-handler was taking advice from the same wise horse, that once whispered in Caligula’s ear: “Burn them all!”

Since ball-handler mentioned trust, I began to wonder why bears trusted him so deeply that they would put up with this abuse. So, I opened his Steemit account and what I found was truly shocking: @bilalhaider, is a fucking resteem account!

And on top of that, he mentioned that he was performing all the resteems manually, because he didn’t know how to make a bot, and this is the only developer for Bearshares!?

Then I discovered this FRAUD ALERT post.

Ball-handler was impersonating @kafkanarchy84 on steem.chat by naming himself kafkanarchy82 and using his profile picture, then ball-handler used this fake account to attack female Stemians, by creating memes out of their photos, with the reoccurring caption, “Ugly Bitch!”

My mind was seriously blown: “What do I do? Who do I tell? What the fuck!”

I raced over to bear-world’s trending page only to find two names @halo and @me-tarzan stacked one on top of the other like an endless game of Jenga, as if they were in a cold-war race to accumulate the most bear-money ever, even if that meant that they were the only bears left.

Then I noticed that ball-handler wrote this comment: “I tried becoming an artist .. but National college of Arts thought, I won't be able to draw people .. rejected me after watching my entrance drawing test”

Uhm… I hate to ask this, but Is ball-handler the reincarnated Hitler?

I mean seriously, WTF!

I guess only time will tell, but if we see a bunch of brown-bears marching on Poland, then we will know it’s time to panic.