RE: The recent controversy between Steemit Inc and the community - the premine, control, and where it leads this blockchain
Any fork is always "a new chain". An existing unforked chain would continue with the existing consensus rules.
There may be one or two (or less likely, but possible in the case of a severe botch) no viable chains after a fork, depending on the actions of independent individuals in the ecosystem (users). By now in cryptocurrency we have seen every manner of forks which have intentionally or unintentionally resulted in new chains, and many which have not (but which could have).
In many cases a fork may be viewed as an upgrade in which essentially everyone participates and that is their choice, resulting in only one chain. But again, this is a matter of the choices people make and that is all.
There is no "reduction of supply" resulting from any fork, because even if the fork did do that, the larger supply still exists on the other fork if people choose to continue to use it. Arguably forks always create new supply, not reduce, and some have even made the case they are inherently "inflationary", which in some sense is strictly true but the economic reality is a bit more subtle (and off topic here).
In Steem people don't really have a choice - rather, the decision is made by the witnesses.
Theoretically perhaps, but unlikely in practice. In any case, a chain that is not recognized by the ticker symbol STEEM would have almost no value.
People always have a choice what code to run. If you don't like how things are working with the witnesses you can change the entire block production model if you want, and/or if existing witnesses don't participate in such a chain, the chain can limp along via backup witnesses until witnesses can be replaced.
What chains will continue and what price they will have is always speculation. Perhaps informed speculation, but still speculation. I don't agree with you that anything not with the magic S-T-E-E-M imprint on it would somehow become worthless, were it otherwise of value.
Moreover it isn't even a predetermined matter what symbol applies to which fork. If the Ethereum community (miners, users, exchanges, etc.) had ended up not supporting the anti-DAO hacker fork as they did, what is now called ETC would have ended up now being called ETH, and Vitalik said he was open to that possibility at the time.
Those clarifications were very much needed. I'm not sure why they were not more predominantly specified in any of the discussions.
I held those statements as correct.