RE: My Thoughts on the Steemit/Tron Merger/Acquisition
If that's the case then it's too late. The community would need to fork and start anew to fix this vulnerability, or completely start over. As we now clearly see from @ned's decision to sell to Tron, the vulnerability has always been there. I guess that's why most of the crypto investing world has avoided Steem like the plague. I must confess that in my technical ignorance I didn't understand the implication of Steemit, Inc.'s large stake myself until all of the drama surrounding Ned stepping down as CEO with the witnesses threatening a fork during that time. I still don't fully understand how all if this works honestly. I have a basic working knowledge, but it's very limited.
Now all of that said, you seem to have a good mind for strategy in regards to nefarious state actors. What's the worst they could do to a person like me consuming and posting counter-narrative content? Other than just nuking the whole platform, I'm thinking doxxing, which in my case would be exceedingly easy even before this development. For me it's a nothing burger, but I'm sure some others might have some concern in this area. I've been if the assumption that my anonymity in the internet has been dead since 20 or so years ago.
While it is in fact too late, institutions are not mortal, and life after death isn't a meme for immortal entities.
Sun has reasonably stayed his hand regarding deploying his newly acquired stake, and this reveals that Steem is actually potentially more beneficial to Tron - his primary interest - as an independent entity. However, he properly understands that heretofore governance of Steem has failed to well grow the platform because whales were rationally compelled to avoid risk and take the cash that @ned allowed them to do by failing to use his imperial prerogative to effect governance at his sole option. @ned did this because he believes in decentralization and did not have a compelling model to effect in his understanding.
EIP worked much better than I expected, and this leads me to understand that I also do not have a compelling model that I should impose - were I to have that stake that makes that possible - but should defer to the decentralized mind of Steem that did deploy EIP with great success. That success at ending the destructive vote buying was an effective limitation on profiteering that the whales undertook to rein themselves in.
Now we have Tron wielding both the power to effect governance at it's sole option, and the competence to onboard masses of new users. Sun is presently hodling his ability to replace the witnesses at his sole option, which is an opportunity for our extant governance model to refine the platform to support onboarding Aunt Millie without destroying governance.
He won't wait forever, and this limited time opportunity needs to be seized today by our whales so they can govern well in the time he has given them to do so before he folds Steem into Tron and does what he sees fit. Steem can prove it is best able to profit Tron by remaining an independent entity by doing so - improving retention, which will require whales to give up ~25% of their rewards so that new users and content creators are nominally encouraged to stay onboard - or he will have to do so to make spending the money to onboard new users profitable to Tron.
As to anonymity, there are levels of actors that can pierce that veil. At the state level, you are correct, there is only pseudonymity. Goolag knows who we are. At lower levels of competence, pseudonymity effectively prevents our being compromised.
I do have existential concerns in this area. I have been physically attacked by bad actors associated with states, and my family has suffered threats and actual assaults. However, the expense of undertaking operations at those high levels limits deployment of malevolence, and dissociating this blog from my person has effectively ended the profitability of such ops to those actors. This is not the only means I have used to effect that mitigation, and literally stripping myself of assets, eschewing many mechanisms that contribute to my risk and are useful to bad actors as vectors for malevolence also secures my person and family, to an unknown and ineffable degree.
Simply posting content pseudonymously is probably not physically dangerous. I personally have challenged corruption and this enabled me to be targeted in person. By divorcing my pseudonymous posts from my physical person, I have ended that threat, but at the cost of no longer being able to act in person to challenge corruption. I have learned the hard way that I am incompetent to succeed against extremely competent institutional organization and cabals.
Imma post presently regarding how Steem might be able to prove to Sun that it is best left a decentralized independent entity, instead of folded into Tron and governed at Tron's sole option. We'll see how competent our whales are at financial prudence, which will be vastly improved by Steem's remaining independent.