The messaging coming from Justin Sun/TRON regarding Steemit and Steem reads to me like a complete deprecation of the blockchain. They came out of the gate with imminent token swaps, moving forward with TRON blockchain-based tokens. Further communications including his open letter stick to this plan. Sun may have bought Steemit Inc. but he didn't buy Steem. This is why the witnesses took action.
I'd take Justin over Ned if he didn't seem so keen on imploding Steem and pretending like it will live on on TRON. The messaging points to that though.
I totally understand the desire to be optimistic and hope that all the best things for Steem would come true courtesy of Justin, but there's too much pointing in the other direction to ignore.
You're completely right.
I'm not a fan of naivety, and it's beyond obvious that Justin's plan is to turn our community into his customers. And he will do anything to accomplish this. Even give out millions of dollars.
Question this too: Why did Ned sell to the highest bidder, and not just a high bidder who would actually be a benevolent replacement? There are people who would be willing to buy Steemit, and then use its power to give Steem the practical changes it needs to finally shake off the dust.
But instead, Ned sold it to a person who intends to destroy Steem?
What a shame that the world is like this.
[citation needed]
Tron may certainly have been the most benevolent of bidders, IMHO.
I am utterly confident that @justinsunsteemit has no intention of rendering his investment in Steem worthless by simply destroying Steem.
That's just silly.
Goolag, Fakebook, et alia would have, but why would they invest $M's to destroy Steem? They are investing such wealth in censoring their own platforms to far greater effect already.
Destroying Steem is not silly.
Haven't you heard of EEE?
Did you not read the balance of my comment? I said that Tron destroying Steem was silly. I don't think others destroying Steem is silly. Tron has made a series of acquistions including Opera, BitTorrent, and Poloniex, along with Steem, and these entities are all advancing decentralization. This indicates purpose contrary to any conception that Tron is going to decrease Steem's decentralization or success. It's a matter of considering actions as indicative of intent, and I submit that there is an underlying purpose that concatenation of the capabilities of all these entities can serve strongly empowering Steem and it's stakeholders.
And I have not heard of EEE. What is it?
EEE is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
A Microsoft business tactic.
As for owning Opera, BitTorrent, Poloniex, and others, I will state clearly:
By having Tron own all of those entities, he has centralized them under the Tron umbrella. That is absolute centralization.
Ownership of private stock corporations is centralized no matter who the majority stockholder(s) is. What those companies do is increase decentralization. Opera provides a builtin VPN, which makes it's users far less able to be tracked, banned, or otherwise impeded in their communications online. Poloniex is a gateway to fiat for cryptos, clearly advancing decentralization financially. BitTorrent is a mechanism to crowdsource data downloads, one of the most powerful decentralization mechanisms online. Steemit I assume you grasp how it's a decentralizing mechanism online.
Ownership of those companies was always centralized. Tron putting them all under it's umbrella reveals the company is seeking either to use those technologies and foci to advance decentralization online, or to prevent them from being useful for that purpose. I find them not doing the latter, which they could have done easily as soon as they bought them.
Tron has clearly not EEE'd any of those companies, in any way.
BitTorrent has been associated with Thom Yorke (yes the musician) one of the biggest darlings of the world of centralized media. So, no. there’s absolutely no way I trust Justin. Just another verified face of the global media. In your frame of mind, centralized use of blockchain is an acceptable replacement for cryptocurrency. You might as well be replacing your bitcoin with jpmorgan Monopoly money right?
Very good article @pfunk, and it did open me up to some info I wasn't aware of. However as I mentioned, the danger of this happening was always on the cards. I said as much 3 years ago in my article about Steem only having the illusion of being decentralised. It's just that Dan, and then later Ned, were honour bound not to do anything with it.
However Ned did use it to control the top witnesses and get through the forks he wanted. Look what happened to Bernie when he went against Ned, and anyone else who disagreed with him was voted out of the top 19 using the very Steem you mention in your article.
I saw it as an inevitability that this would one day happen. Hopefully yourself and some of the other witnesses can guide Justin into taking this platform and subsequently the currency into the future.
Cg