The evidence doesn't point for freedom to be an account owned by Ned. If you review the history of the account you can see that it's an early miner but it started mining one week after the infamous steem relaunch.
So it's not a ninja mined account. Besides, the fact that it has been frozen with the last softfork and since Ned and Sun have what appears to be a good relationship point to it being owned by someone else.
Who could that someone else be? remember @freedom is basically behind all the wrong decisions taken by Steem top 20 witnesses during three and a half years, decisions that actually made Steemit go from a top 20 in marketcap down to the 80s.
You know I looked at Steemd and found @ned and @dan accounts created on 31 March 2016 for @freedom it says: freedom found a pow Mar 31 '16. So the account was created at the same time as the others.
The Ned and Dan accounts were created after the ninjamine so those dates are not really important. The thing to look at is that the freedom account voted for the witnesses that supported SF 22.2 and Ned was very vocal against that. It doesn't make sense to think that that account belongs to him and it doesn't seem likely that Dan is behind it either (it doesn't fit his profile of abandoning projects to move to other ventures).
It probably belongs to someone that was in the know in the beggining but that was not part of the inner circle of steemit but the only thing we know for sure is that it was an early miner like smooth or berniesanders...the rest is just speculation.
What is true is that he has the same amount of Steem as he does Hive. You know what I have noticed he no longer receives payouts from bid bots so I guess the Hive hard fork destroyed them at least on Steemit.
Bernie ninja mined, if I read one of his posts right.
The term ninja mine is very often used incorrectly around here. Sometimes people say that the steemit stake was pre-mined...which is not correct either. A pre-mine is when the founder of a project starts the process without making the code public until after they have acquired an advantage in the amount of stake over everyone else.
Since the code for steem was made public before anyone started mining (including steemit) there was no pre-mine. The controversy arouse when a bug was discovered and the mining was restarted. Everyone else except steemit was not able to restart mining until after a day or two (when the new code was made public). If I recall correctly Bernie was not able to restart mining until after a few days later (his user on the Bitcointalk forum was NextGenCypto)
That head start after the mining was relaunched is what people refer to as the ninja-mine. Although that head start was not enough to give steemit the majority stake. What they did is launch an army of nodes (I think using amazon web servers) until they reached a target number of coins.
All of this was public and steemit justified it by pledging to use their stake for development. Otherwise no one else would have participated at the start.
Side note: alot of the complaints against the witnesses are justified saying that they ninja mined the stake which is untrue...the only ones that ninja mined were steemit. Also, if you look at the list of people who are top witnesses (now on Hive) only one of them was in that initial group (abit). The rest became witnesses months or evern years after. Which shows that most people just complain without checking the facts themselves.
Myself I tried to start mining steem a couple of months after that but I just couldn't figure it out (my node kept forking) so I just gave up and re-joined four months later as a regular user.
@blocktrades was also there at the start. But anyway if you are right, these witnesses should have taken care of the ninja mined stake at the beginning, they didn't, so why try to do something nearly four years later? Doesn't that strike you as funny? They always went along with @ned, they were responsible for Steem going down to 7 cents, and then when it was pumped to 8 dollars they were also responsible for it going down to 10 cents. @berniesanders ninja mined, he has said it himself I remember him saying he found a loophole, probably others found this loophole too. In any case I hope Hive prospers but based on the past I highly doubt it.
If you look at Steemd.com you find a lot of interesting things but I dont really think it is worth going into them.
Oh yeah I forgot about blocktrades. The only way to take care of the ninja mine would be to hardfork it out of the supply. I am pretty sure that Ned would have taken action against it (just like Justin Sun did). I don't think that they were in a position to be succesfull (at some point steemit had 80% of the coins so trying to push them out would have been futile). Blaming the current blockproducers for not taking action back then ignores the fact that they are different people (excluding blocktrades, abit was out of the top 20 for a long time).
Except for a few exceptions most of the early miners cashed out after the power down period was changed (from 2 years to 13 weeks) on December of 2016 and they turned off their nodes. Only after new witnesses started to be in the top 20 did we start to see pushback against steemit which eventually resulted in the current situation.
Also blaming the witnesses for the price decline ignores the fact that they were not in charge of development. Their main purpose is to produce blocks and to protect the chain.
The drop to 7 cents was the result of almost all of the early adopters selling (miners, bloggers, steemit, etc) and the drop from 8.00 to 0.10 had more to do with all crypto falling 90%+ from the ATH. Even BTC dropped 85%+ in value from 2017 to Dec of 2018. So putting the blame on steemit and the witnesses for that is superficial (although the lack of development on the part of steemit inc did play a role but it wasn't the main reason).
If I knew what I know now I would have sold all my steem on January of 2018 but I don't blame anyone but myself for not taking action in time. I am not going to make that mistake again and I will sell all my crypto sometime in 2021 (if I am still alive).
I practically had no Steem when it pumped, I would have sold it if I had had any reasonable amount. Too late to worry about that, right now I do have some liquid Steem I will sell if the price is right, I have some debts I have to pay off and a pump now would do wonders for me.