RE: Why Did We Choose This Path?
I think the witnesses got complacent and didn't fully understand the influence Justin Sun holds - as you correctly point out, he's a top crypto figure. I had been warning everyone since the announcement that he owns Poloniex and is in bed with Binance. A lot of Steemians will retroactively argue that, "See! This is why they did it!", but that makes no sense. I don't believe much of what Justin Sun says, but I do believe him when he says he has no interest in governance and only did this to defend his assets.
Witnesses will also argue that it was a defensive move, but censoring millions of dollars worth of fairly purchased assets is as aggressive as it gets, temporary or not.
In the end, what should have really happened is a diplomatic agreement between the witnesses, stakeholders and Justin Sun. Instead, the witnesses fired shots first, and now we have war.
To be clear, Justin Sun's ( and exchanges') methods have been absoutely despicable, but the dude probably spent a couple dozen million, you can totally see why he would fight tooth and nail to get it back.
The best case scenario right now is to release Justin's 75 million with an emergency hard fork with a fast power down, he will have no reason to bother with Steem after that. The price is going to be suppressed in the medium term, but it'll finally lift the shadow over the ninja-mine long term.
Thats a dishonest take of events. You pick and choose what you want out of the timeline and ignore the rest.
Has no one considered that he simply wants to appropriate steem, a blockchain that is notoriously controllable with the ninja mined stakes, and I'm not just talking about neds. Because basically, 90% of the core development work has been done and we're now at a point where with the right focused marketing and contacts steem could be used to onboard huge amounts of people from various mainstream markets/medias.
I think Justin Sun is lying his ass off about everything, creating smoke and mirrors about governance etc when what he wants is to decimate any governance and take full control of a blockchain he can then pump millions into marketing as his product. Essentially hijacking the last 3 years of dev work that has got steem to the point where online subject specific communities can be created, and we're months away from SMT's being potentially launched. This opinion I see spouted that he doesn't understand steem is crazy. He could pay people $1000/hour to explain all the weaknesses and nuances of steem if he wanted, and probably has done already.
He is a master manipulator and knows how to act like an ignorant, arrogant social media dictator, when I think that half of it is bluff and bluster. There is no better way to win a war than to lull your enemy into a false sense of security of inflated expectation of strength. I'm pretty sure that don't give a fuck attitude he has on social media is real, but that doesn't mean the guy isn't a master strategist.
We'd all be well advised to assume the worst in his intentions and the levels he is misrepresenting both his blockchain knowledge, and ability to divide and conquer. If you go into every meeting, or interaction with that assumption, then the little psychological tells will become obvious and counter strategies easier to formulate.
Just my opinion but I think the fact he's pumping money into buying steem to try his best to insure his hostile take over has nothing to do with ego and just wanting to win! It is because he wants steem's technology, a technology that would take Tron foundation many years and millions/billions to develop themselves!
If they can win this takeover and hardfork with the contacts he has on the exchanges, he won't give a shit that all us die hard steemians stay with the forked non-tron chain, because he'll find a way to weasel his forked steem as the main recognized version on the major exchanges.
In this scenario we'll be fucked as well as forked... that's my analysis of what he's up to.