He only needs the blockchain, as it provides a framework, and content to build upon.
Why didn't he just fork the code? It's all open source. Besides, he already said he's not going to need the chain. The first thing he did was announce the migration of Steemit and other Steem apps to Tron. A token swap was supposed to follow.
No, I think he wanted the acquire the users and the dapps just like he acquired Lino and DLive. It wouldn't be the first time Justin Sun acquires blockchains. He and Ned had private talks about the Steemit acquisition for months. Who knows what Ned may have told him. All Ned wanted was the money.
He can use it as a base for his Tron followers, and maybe a few ex-steemians (perhaps the Korean community). What better, he can likely takeover the name "Steem" too, since if we fork, it would likely mean the exchanges would just continue using the old Steem nodes for Justin's copy of Steem, and we would end up renaming our new fork, and wait for exchanges to enlist that.
He's been pandering to the worst spammers, scammers and milkers among Steemians. As far as I'm concerned, he can have that lot. When it comes to the exchanges or Bitcoin, I think they will be much less relevant in the near future. Steem will survive, of course, because it's so cheap to run.
What I'm hoping to see is NewSteem or whatever sister chain most of the community will create being thought of much less as a cryptocurrency project than a decentralized back end of applications. I would like the new chain to create a future for itself on its own merits. The Bitcoin-driven speculation, the insane levels of monetary rewards attracted the kind of crowd I will be glad to get rid of: maximizers, scammers, con artists and spammers looking to milk rewards. It would be great if NewSteem took off as a grassroots movement. I think it is fairly obvious that the monetary rewards did not help Steem achieve mass adoption.
He might even get some dapps out of it.
At least that movie review site is onboard with him.
But the problem with Tron is that it has no users. Literally. Just look at stateofthedapps. Tron is nothing but hot air. There. Are. No. Users. Tron is the ultimate shitcoin, high price very low value. Utterly centralized with one man(child) in charge of governance.
There is precisely one reason why Tron is a blockchain in the first place. Justin Sun is a businessman who wants to make money by riding the coattails of the blockchain movement. And he's done well for himself. But the core values of the movement mean absolutely nothing to him. He's no Satoshi or even a Vitalik Buterin.
Because he wants us to fork it.
If he were to fork it, he'd be left with a no-name chain, with no users and no dapps. He is banking on some of the users (mainly the Koreans) and dapps staying with legacy-steem when we fork out.
If he doesn't get the whole community, the next best thing is to divide the community to the point Steem would have no future after he's done with it. And some of the community will jump ship to Tron.
I don't think you are wrong with your assessment of Tron though. That's exactly why he wants to take over Steem, DLive, Bittorrent and others. He wants to hijack the communities for his own gain.
I hope he will be happy with those milkers. 500 people who post pictures of soup bowls ripped off the Internet and circle jerk that shit to high heavens and who engage in retaliatory downvoting when the rest of the user base downvotes their over-rewarded filler content.
You can bet the farm he won't.
I think Steem as we have known it will end here no matter what. The high rewards will be a thing of the past for quite some time. Steemit Inc's stake, various spammers and scammers can be forked out. The new chain will start from a clean slate. I'm hoping the right lessons will be learned. The only thing that makes Steem valuable in the first place is decentralization affording it freedom from censorship. Popular YouTubers, for instance, do not care about the kind of pocket change one can earn on Steem, except maybe for a handful of top content creators. But what they care about is the very real possibility that one day YouTube pulls the plug on them, their content and their relationship with their audience that they have worked hard to build. Steem or whatever the new chain is called needs to attract that crowd to be successful. These content creators have massive audiences who couldn't care less about any kind of meaningful rewards. They will come for the content and they, too, appreciate guaranteed access to their favourite content.
I don't see that happening.
If I can't monetize my content on Steem, I will do it on a self-hosted blog or on a blogging platform like Blogspot. I have already edited and published thousands of photos. I have a presence on several social mainstream social media platforms where I know a lot of people from decades back from the early days of public Internet. I believe it will be possible to make more money using mainstream platforms to drive traffic than on Steem, except for the crazy days from mid-2017 to mid-2018. (Believe it or not, but I was already offered a photography gig by an entrepreneur in the tourism industry after I had published some photos of mine in the Lahti Facebook group. When I did the same in the Tampere group, some lady wanted to print my photos in condolence cards.)
In fact, I think he's doomed to fail because getting users to onboard his platform has proven a real challenge for him. He's good at raising money from the markets, though. But the easy money may be coming to an end for some time to come. At least in the short term, toilet paper seems to be the hottest new altcoin. :)