Its private property, not a community chest, @ned can do what he wants with his money and the sooner he gets rid of hsi steem the sooner someone else can buy it and the distribution can be more horizontal and probably healthier
also it might be better for a private company to keep their money private.... they MAY need to Pay for some serious development of the website! Thats a Good thing!
They need to USE this steem and not just sit on it! That steem needs to be sold and spent on all sorts of new resources and human capital, we will also benefit from Ned selling steem and using it to pay for ADVERTISING to promote steem all across social media, imagine massive steem ad campaigns across youtube , imagine youtubers paid to promote steemit or an App ned makes for steemit on iOs and android that makes it easy or imagine Partiko giving out their own instant accounts to users who download their app, now imagine Partiko just paying for ads and promoting on youtub4e... @partiko or even @steepshot.app who already has a youtube video Ad could easily spend some money to promote that App and get users on boarded instantly with their own account Creation faucet, Not having to depend on steemit.com, well we could see steepshot or partiko end up being the MOSt popular steem blockchain gateway... that app as the front end partiko is light and works GREAT never gives me issues and is gonna end up
Legally you might be right. That being said there are risks. If it's being sold then OTC would be a better way. If it's not being sold then what will it be used for? It's a lot of Steem and can impact the economics of the entire platform.
Steepshot seems like a dead project. It has not been functional for days.