The question for some people is why would they want to stay on a chain with justin when they could pretty easily not be on the same chain.
They believe he adds discomforting centralization and has zero history of work on steem. And now instead of 4 developers just 1 experienced developer. Meaning what really can he do that we cant do ourselves with fraction of the stake.
Could the community and past steemit employees do more than justin for much less and without years of downward sales pressure?
So it maybe isnt even a matter of if those funds are his, if they properly tranfered or if we should trust him.... it becomes WHY?
A chain split is an option, however, will we lose out on SMTs, RC delegation and access to top exchanges?
Creating a sister chain that burns all of the remaining Steemit stake could go badly, on the other hand, the reduction of all that stake could improve the price of the remaining tokens. Its a gamble, but I think what we can take from this is that much of Steem's design needs to be reconsidered.
The SMT code is still available, and it was a non-Steemit dev, @howo who was doing final testing on it paid for by SPS. There might be, and probably is, some further refinement needed before it could be considered deployment ready but I think it could be done in time (and quite frankly I wasn't convinced it was going to happen very quickly with Steemit working on it either).
The others I don't know.
Okay, I was not aware of that. That would be very good news for Classic Steem if we go down that path.
If enough feel the same way as you do then to them I say, make a sister chain model after STEEM and give it a go. I'd support it but I don't support forking a man's stake that he purchased with his own funds.
I honestly dont think there are many at all that would support anything like that. Maybe a witness like that exists but certainly haven't heard of anyone willing to do that. I think people thought that was the case with 22.2 but honestly they just were worried about a hostile takeover and wanted to get @justinsunsteemit to explain his intentions. That's how I read all the witness discussions from back then people were opposed until they were convinced it was a temporary measure
They gave @justinsunsteemit just days from the AMA to the soft forking. This man is a millionaire many times over with other investments to tend to. Days is not enough time to jump to the conclusion of ........ well, lets fork his stake. The witnesses fired the first shot in this mess and Justin Sun fired back as he should. I don't agree with how he did it but I certainly knew he wasn't just going to sit back and allow his millions in invested private Steem to be messed with.
Private Stake should never be forked regardless of the situation. The only legit reason is if the private stake owner agrees to it.
I cant be 100% certain but I think that is the total consensus of witnesses. But obviously they also wanted to protect the chain. Think about this justin could have done some incredibly bad stuff when he had all 20 block producers... like really destroyed everything. It's not a matter if we think he would have it's just bad that one person could have. And at the time there was lots of talk of token swaps moving over to tron. Etc
Justin Sun bought Steemit, its his property to do with as he wants. Token Swap is a non issue for me. Anyone can offer a token swap, some may have accepted the swap but I think its likely most wouldn't have. I think the fear built around that potentail swap was unwarrated.
I understand the potential downside of Justin Sun stake but lets be honest here a handfull of people already dictate who the top witnesses are. If the witnesses are serious about the current narrative their pushing (not haven one person with too much voting power) then they need to rework the whole voting system so its more fair to those who don't have a bunch of Steem.
Thanks for your comments @jarvie. I respect your thoughts andopinion on the matter.