I helped with some moving on Monday in 34-35C heat, which went to about 43C with humidity. That's 94F and 110F with humidity. It was so hot and sticky, sweat pouring from my forehead.

That night, Steem went down. I waited a few hours and then went to bed, as I had another day of moving on Tuesday.

I didn't get onto Steem until later Tuesday, and saw that a patch was released to resolve a bug. Plus my server host had a network outage, which was resolved by the time I became available. So my node went down while I was moving my girlfriend's stuff into my place.

I got the patch installed and was back online in a few hours after doing a replay.

The Bug

The Steem bug was from a user called @nijeah who tried to submit a negative withdrawal as a power down. The Steem blockchain had code to prevent suspicious power downs from being executed 7 days later, but it didn't account for anyone trying to do a negative withdrawal. Now this problem is fixed if anyone tries to do it in the future.

The negative withdrawal would have done the opposite of a regular withdrawal of SP from your account. Let's say you powered down you SP, it takes 13 weeks to get it all out. With a negative withdrawal, instead of powering down your account, you would be powering it up for free.

But this wasn't allowed to execute in the code, even though the attempt was allowed because they didn't foresee this use of withdrawals. The result was the blockchain being unable to produce a new block after the scheduled negative withdrawal powerdown produced the error and was prevented from going through. No tokens were lost. No accounts were affected.

nijeah / haejin?

One thing that's interesting about this name "nijeah", is that it is the reverse/mirror of the account "haejin", which is now infamous for posting 10 posts/day and upvoting himself to riches with his 300,000+ SP. The "haejin" account was created in June 2017, and the now infamous negative withdrawal account "nijeah" was created in December 2017.

Was "haejin" a problem back in December 2017 and someone just made an account that reversed the infamous name? Or is there another reason for this account name being the exact mirror of haejin? I don't know...