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What are you calling the new chain? I consider the "new chain" to be the chain that adopts the hardforking protocol change even if a supermajority of witnesses back it. I imagine this new chain would give special treatment to vested exchanges and power down their stake. I don't think it would make any change to Sun's stake, which currently has no protocol-level restrictions on it.

The legacy / community chain would also have Sun's stake. It's possible the community could decide to destroy ninja-mined stake. This perhaps would be the right move if Sun creates his own hardfork. But I think it may not be necessary. Do nothing. Leave Sun's property alone. The protocol should really be distinct from disputes.

So in essence, if he got involved in the politics without an
organic consensus, he'd in essence be forking himself over.
This as opposed to the Steem community forking him over.
I like this, it might be the smartest post yet on the matter-
if I'm not missing any important angles, which I could be.
If he's put on notice that astroturf-forking is tantamount
to forking himself over, he would be less inclined to do it.

If Sun is able to changes the protocol in a backwards-incompatible way, the community can either:

  1. upgrade their nodes to the new protocol, thereby accepting the rotten rules but keeping a single chain.
  2. remain on the existing protocol, thereby having two parallel protocols running that share a common ledger up to a certain point and then diverge (like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash).

"...the community could decide to destroy ninja-mined stake."

All Steem originated via the ninjamine. Steem disbursed as rewards since then was not mined, but all other Steem was mined. How do you propose that stake originally not produced via the rewards mechanisms be separated from Steem created through the rewards pool?

It is not possible to burn or otherwise destroy ninjamined stake as a whole. There simply would no longer be a nominal supply of Steem without mined tokens.

Just cut to the chase: the founders gained too much stake to enable the blockchain to remain decentralized if their representations that it would not be applied to governance have been renounced. It is that specific hodling that threatens governance, not all the rest of the Steem in existence. The reason it is a threat is not because it was mined, but because it is so large the governance mechanism cannot survive it's application to governance.

I agree totally and don't have a specific proposal for addressed mined STEEM, except that we probably shouldn't encumber or interfere with it until there's a hard fork resulting in two chains going forward.

If an entity like Tron or the exchanges decides to hardfork and therefore create two chains, I think it's more justifiable to punish them and their tokens on the legacy chain.

How do you propose that stake originally not produced via the rewards mechanisms be separated from Steem created through the rewards pool?

Freezing or seizing the STEEM / vests from certain accounts that ninja-mined comes to mind. It's a sub-optimal solution because if someone ninjamined and then transferred prior to this, they'd keep the STEEM. Again, I don't really favor seizing other entitity's assets unless they continually demonstrate that they are using the assets to threaten the survival of the network.

I note that freezing the stake of Tron is exactly what witnesses attempted to do, and failed.

We no longer have that ability, and unless Tron and the exchanges execute code voluntarily to prevent their governance of Steem, the blockchain remains the exclusive possession of Tron.

The ball's in Tron's court. We await their pleasure.