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i havent opened an account on Hive yet, Im not really sure what it is.

Hive is a fork of steem. Only decentralized, and without the censorship. So you already have an account on hive.

how do I find, and access my Hive account? I cant even find Hive in a web search

Holy crap, and how do I send my steem dollars to my ethereum wallet now? wtf have the done to it? There used to be a process of just putting in your wallet receive code. Now when I try to send it the link takes me to an online exchange with graphs and lists of coins all sorts of incomprehensible shit all over it which I do not understand in the slightest. I just wanna send my steem coins to my wallet like I always could. It used to be a very simple process. Now it looks widely complicated to the point of being derranged

Ethereum is a completely different chain. There used to be something called blocktrade(s), which I am not familiar with, that might have supported such an exchange through the steemit interface-but i am not familiar with it. blocktrade(s) was an old witness that provided said services and Justin sun froze his account as part of Sun's centralization efforts.

Technically your steem, steem dollars, or SP is already in your wallet. If you want to trade a steem based coin for another type of coin (such as ethereum), you might need to go through a traditional exchange like bittrex. As usual, when starting [or using one irregularly] a new exchange-only send a small test amount to make sure it got sent to the right address.

this wants me to sign up to an exchange, provide photo ID, passport and every other bullshit you can name, just to pull my steem dollars and and send to my exodus wallet... this is utterly fucking ridiculous... wtf happened?

There may be other exchanges where you can trade crypto that don't have aml (anti-money laundering) and kyc (know your customer) in place, and quite frankly there are many scammy exchanges so it may be best to a well recognized exchange.
Justin sun of Tron purchased steemit, and threatened to move steem off the block chain onto btfs and then create a new steem tron token and air drop to tron users. This was an existential threat to the chain, so the witnesses moved to codify the restrictions of the ninja mined coins. Justin Sun has a history of abusing restricted votes, and destroying competing projects.

Justin Sun responded by doing a hardfork to the exchanges and installed ransomware on machines of the exchanges [polyniex was owned by Justin Sun-and thus not technically ransomware in that case] , the ransomware powered up all of the binance and houbi stake so no one could use it, and that stake was used to vote for justin Sun Witnesses. Highly illegal. It is likely he had all 20+ witnesses running from a single machine, and they couldn't even do basic maintainance like update the price of steem.

The Exchanges released their vote, but didn't reverse the harm they had caused as justin sun powered up the ninja mined stake to support his sock puppet witnesses, and the exchanges are still doing a 13 week cycle powerdown. The witnesses got the community together to organize to retake the chain, and they started to gain strong grounds in doing so. But Justin Sun was going to the South Korean community making promises, and offering incentives of $2500 a month to help him overtake the chain. So much of the south Korean community decided to hold the chain in a stalemant-or so they erroneously claim. Giving Justin Sun an unlawful leverage is not a stalemate-It is a personal favor. Many people couldn't withdraw their steem from the affected exchanges, but a priority of withdrawels was going to Justin Sun by the hundreds of thousands. Then some users, and many of them are likely the same person under different names pretending to be from different countries, started coddling to Justin Suns demands making promises to respect peoples private property-as sun demanded that his stolen property be protected and that transactions not be frozen. The old witnesses did not take anyone property, even if Justin Sun did steal it from the community. They froze it wanting answers from Justin Sun, who during a month long negotiation would tell them one thing, do another, and lie on twitter.

Sometime about the end of march, beginning of April, the old witnesses made a fork of steem called hive. They and the bulk of the community left steem. About this time, Justin Sun was making updates to the consensor api (how people pull data from the chain) to block users and posts that they didn't like.

Despite all the claims promises of not freezing peoples funds made by the new Justin Sun Chosen witnesses, and despite all the cries of protecting personal property, Justin Sun/Steemit moved to freeze the assets of the old whales-saying that they threaten his control of the block chain. Effectively they locked down Block trades, which was the integrated system. It is operating on hive I think, but they can't use steem as a means of exchange-nor can they Trust Justin Sun. Freezing an account doesn't stop existing powerdowns. For one whale who was powering down to a wrote address (misspelling aka phisher) who tried to timely correct the error prior to the funds being sent, because his account was frozen the old powerdown to the bad address was stuck. It has been weeks now, the witnesses know, Justin Sun knows, but they keep knowingly and willingly permitting his account to be drained to a phising account. So he stands to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars of his hard earn money. You can't trust the new management.

steemit stake has been delegating millions of ninja mined stake to abusive people and witnesses on the Justin Sun steem chain, who are doing everything they can punish the old community.

At the same time steemitblog is offering thousands, even hundreds of thousands of delegated steem to users. But there are only a few people even applying-and if you can guess it is the butt kissers. A tactic down by despots to gain support of the poor, or to buy/reward favor with warlords. Same tactic hammas used too convince their followers to do suicide attacks. They are over 40 days in a 100 day promotional scheme (note: 91 days is 13 weeks, when most of the old crowd will have powered down) and the price at last look was down against btc-it did go up against btc yesterday.

Perhaps they may do something near day 100, and about that time the steem exodus to hive should about end removing the bulk of the sell pressure. But now that essentially ned scott is back a the helm controlling steemit again (reportedly justin sun has distanced himself, and no longer talks about steem-and notice the 100 day marketting is not justin sun's style) and controls their witnesses, they are destroying the product for western markets. Their salvation is china, and given their talks of centralization from the very beginning and the censorship focused updates, I would think they are going to try to get approval to be permitted behind the great firewall of china. I don't think Ned Scott and his team is competent enough to do that, but someone who could is still paying Steemit's payroll probably could...Justin Sun. I could be wrong; maybe Justin Sun will declare one day that he can't keep funding the incompetents presently running steemit or the very witnesses he selected-Particularly if @Darthknight ends up Suing Justin Sun. Any potential future is just looking at the present and making guesses about the trajectory. The markets will always do their own thing.