I've been here since July 2016 and lived through all the empty promises and price implosions.
Whether Justin was to buy up Steemit INCs stake or slowly buy everyone's funds who are dumping STEEM on exchanges overtime he still had the money to influence the Witness votes.
And what is the difference of STEEM being its own chain or being a TRX token? They are both DPoS with 3 second block times and TRX has smart contract capability. Even Steem-Engine tokens could have likely been migrated to work with the TRON smart contracts......etc.
Justin had done nothing yet and you guys locked him out of something he paid tens of Millions of dollars for.
Did you not think he was going to play defense to your offensive attack?
The mass majority of the community was likely to gain in value from the Partnership / Acquisition. Even your own stake would have likely appreciated.
What the whole thing came down to was you were going to lose partial control and a cash cow that has been a huge cash cow for a very small part of the community that has primarily been selected by @freedom and a few other key parties ....etc.
You guys have masked this war as "Decentralization" blah blah blah.
Most wars come down to power and money. Why were we in Iraq? It wasn't weapons of mass destruction. Mainly control and money
All that being said I do see part of both sides because people have put in a lot of work here and maybe initially had good intentions in some respects even if it wasn't helping the community or the price. But you can't peg Justin as a total villain in this situation. I don't agree with everything he has done overtime but if you are in his shoes are you just going to sit back and let other people lock you out of your investment you just purchased?
It's sad you think this was all about money on the side of the witnesses. I've seen witnesses go with little sleep for weeks since this all started, many of them nearly unpaid backups working to protect the chain from the centralized take over we experienced and you seem to gloss over all that. Please, focus on how DPoS actually works and how serious it is that one person was able to take over the chain, in spite of efforts to protect against that very thing.
I mean yeah it is a serious thing when one person has the money and power to make a power move like that but I just don't see how that is so much different than any other chain. If someone spent enough money even on a POW chain they could take it in a direction they wanted to and if they had enough friends running exchanges .....etc then the same would occur essentially.
Until we have more decentralized means of exchange like a good way to do Atomic Swaps or something then the weak points will always be at the exchanges.
STEEM has been an interesting experiment though and the premise of the SBD could have alleviated the need for the exchanges if it could have reached critical mass and continued to grow as an ecosystem.
I don't know what is going to happen but I'm personally surprised that more Witnesses haven't came to the conclusion that no one can really expect Justin to not launch a counter offensive if he just spent Millions and then suddenly all these people with less influence than him in the crypto world who have less stake in the game are trying to cut him off from the multi million dollar investment he just made.
I just wasn't the right way to go about it.
It is like throwing someone in jail because they might drink and drive when they were no where near a car or showing any intention of driving.