Also I think @themarkymark might have better insight about the rings and such.
I remember steem-dragon, matreshka, hinomaru-jp, menacamel and some others no longer in the top 30 were obvious sockpuppet accounts meant to project a hologram of international diversity.
A lot of the sock puppets did a feign death right before the theft to look innocent, but you can look at the activity to see their alts voted in immediately by Justin Sun.
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I wasn't around early on, I got here July 1st 2017, so I missed a lot of the early times. I kick myself for missing out on the mining and the early development but I didn't hear about Steem until about a week before I joined.
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