I've been running the Exchange Transfer report for 126 weeks (I'm a couple days behind this week as I've been traveling) so I know better than most about what money is heading this way and that. Of course I don't know for sure but I do see movements to and from exchanges, even for orca sizes (my reports show the top 50 in both directions). Steemit, Inc themselves have said they do programatic selling, so I don't think this being made up.

I don't know who @freedom is and all my attempts to find out haven't made progress.

Reject a witness vote? That would be quite interesting. I agree, the Freedom account does represent a risk to the system, but those funds could be spread out into multiple accounts as well if they really wanted to hide their stake. The difference here, I think, is that Steemit, Inc via Dan Larimer way back in the BitcoinTalk days at launch made claims about how the funds would be used. Many in the community are frustrated with the downward selling pressure that brought that 80% stake down to 20% stake (and the price of STEEM with it). Also, Freedom doesn't have a previous track record of pushing in their own witnesses in order to deploy code (as Steemit, Inc did with HF9).

No, I'm not "Dan's agent." You sound silly saying that. I've never met Dan. To say what I've been working on since April with eosDAC "governance crap" is insulting, especially when I wrote this post helping the EOS community get out from under the ECAF constitution drama we've been dealing with.

What you call a "witness voting circle jerk" others call voting for people you know well who have put in more work that most people realize to secure this chain. I don't often look at who votes for me, and I don't make my decisions based on that at all. I can't speak for others in that regard.

I didn't even know about "the pull request" until I clicked a link to join a witness slack about a week ago. It was never a very serious threat, IMO, as it was just some dude who forked the code and created a PR. As I've said before, none of the consensus witnesses were ever fully serious about doing it, though it was being talked about. Ned over-reacted and/or used it as an excuse to power down more. At that point, I got voted into a committee of nine witnesses who then elected three people to talk directly with Ned to try and improve the broken community relationship. As part of that group, I agreed to keep things discussed there private (not at all my preference as I greatly value transparency). That's why I didn't post about what was being discussed.

And which FUD post are you referring to? The committee may not have accomplished much as we didn't prevent the power down or the exchange transfers, but there are more community discussions about the governance problems in Steem than ever before and that is a good thing.