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This is a brilliant move which holds invaluable marketing power at the same time (just think of the hype already being generated!). Furthermore, Steemit is still in infancy stages (we are still beta!), so by slowing down (likely completely stopping the next few days/weeks) sign-up rate we ensure that the platform gets the necessary updates, tweaks and patches with a significant amount of active users.

I'm assuming this is to slow down the sign up rate so that the servers wont go down. Probably a temporary situation.

I also want to ask why

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