Thoughts on the Recent Witness Meeting With Tron(Roy)

Well I just got finished listening to this three hour conversation and it didn't even occur to me to speed up the video until around two and a half hours in. First off, THANK YOU so much @fredrikaa and @starkerz for being what I can only describe as the grown ups in this talk.

Look, I get it, people are pissed. The community is pissed. The witnesses are pissed, but is it really that hard to take emotion out of it and talk about solutions? Like if the only thing you have to add to the conversation is repeatedly saying "POWERDOWN NOW!!!" then wtf are you even doing there? We get it, we all want them to powerdown, but instead of needlessly antagonizing this messenger guy Roy, how about we focus on the shortest path to actually getting what we want?

I feel like so many people's attitude is basically, screw Tron, this is all pointless, Steemit is dead, let's just fork and be done with it etc, but I haven't seen anything to demonstrate that this is all pointless yet. Is it really that hard to understand what actually happened here? Who the real bad guy is? It's FUCKING NED! Ned screwed Justin and sold him on a bogus idea of what Steem was. Justin puts out this media blast probably legit thinking we'd be excited about being a Tron token. Then is surprised to learn there is an actual such thing as a REAL decentralized community and unlike his previous acquisitions, STEEM is not a company to be bought. Then he looks up and realizes all his assets that he just acquired have been taken hostage.

PAUSE

So for everyone that wants to pretend that this action was nothing and non-aggressive, STOP, that's bullshit. Why are we all so flabbergasted by what Binance and Huobi did? They locked up custodial funds without the users consent. What did we do? We locked up a users funds without their consent. Forget the whole history on those funds or how much it was(irrelevant) because I think it's likely and highly probable that Ned may have skimped on the details a bit on that. What do you all think?

RESUME

So then in an unprecedented move to out do our unprecedented move, Justin makes a call and gets FREAKING BIG BROTHER BINANCE _{and Huobi, and Poloniex} to jump in and have his back voting in 20 sock puppet witnesses to regain control of his stake in the most gangsta move crypto has seen thus far. Keep in mind this was LITERALLY the ONLY way he could have done this. Anything else would be asking him to come and negotiate with a bunch of people that he doesn't know or trust with zero leverage about something he just legally purchased, with the worst case scenario being that they could nullify his stake and leave him ass out. A scenario that many in the community were calling for mind you.

Then if that wasn't enough unprecedented moves the Steem community rallies like no one thought was possible and shames the exchanges into unvoting and voting for witnesses at a level Steem has never seen, to the point that we took well more than enough witness seats to stop any hardforks from going through and now we're at a stalemate.

When I look at this situation, honestly I don't see any demons or villans. I see a shitty situation. I can understand why the witnesses did what they did AND I can understand why Tron did what it did. So the question is, how do we get out of this situation and that's where this chat comes in. Some things that are clear to me after listening.

• Roy is not a technical person and the majority of his(Trons//Exchanges) issues, are not real issues. ie They're worried about a potential HF during the powerdown where their funds could be frozen. The witnesses explained to him over and over that this was impossible but since he's not a technical guy, he was resistant to just take their word for it because he doesn't actually know how it works.
• We've already won. This is a PR nightmare for them and they just want it to end. We don't need to be vindictive or "teach them a lesson", they are going to suffer the consequences of these actions no matter what.
• They're just trying to save face at this point. They messed up. BIG. They're currently just looking for a way out of the PR nightmare. They want to LOOK to the exchanges like they're doing everything they can to get them back liquid as possible. Witnesses made it clear, it makes no sense to HF Steem just for that purpose and that it would defeat the purpose because the amount of time that it would take to complete a HF would be longer than the powerdown time. Look, if that's the case, then just play along, say we'll look into it, wait a day, then say after careful deliberation and investigation we've found that it would be best not to fork and for you to powerdown at the normal rate.
  "That's not our responsibility!" "They deserve it! Screw THEM!" "Well they shouldn't have powered up users funds in the first place!"
  All that is true. The question is, how do we get what we want in the most efficient, and bulletproof method as possible.
• They seriously don't get decentralization. This is both bad and good. It's bad for obvious reasons, because this is a decentralized chain, but it's good in regard to the idea that I think that there's a possibility that this is a long string of horrible misunderstandings and mistakes that have more to do with a whole lot of emotions, but most importantly, not malice.

Justin for sure has a pretty loose relationship with truth. Calling the witnesses malicious hackers etc. A mistake. So we can keep going forward making marks on the wall counting up each others mistakes and justifying why we did what we did or we can try to find a path forward. I vote for the latter.

I unfortunately feel like I'm in the minority with these opinions but I'd love to hear what you all think. Let me know in the comments.