I am not 100% sure but I think @birdinc which was the official Manager of Business Development at steemit.inc is behind the blurt chain. At this post he says that "they" are working to build and run the production blockchain code to prepare the hardfork of the 4th of July.
I don't think that Justin Sun has any relations with the new chain. I am coming to this conclusion from this post which is three months ago. Birdinc says that after the creation of hive blockchain, steem has died and he is happy for the early success of hive.
I like the fact that they will disable the downvote fanction. It is not right to decide what is abuse and what is not depending the money you have stake in the form of power. Poor users are getting downvotes for spam comments from users who use comment bots and they spam the same message thousand times everyday. Don't you think this is ironic?
About plagiarism the copyright owner can follow the legal path and sue the content thief like it happens in the rest of the internet.
We all know that the downvotes are not used only to fight abuse and plagiarism. Anyone can downvote a post he does not like the writter or want to hide its content for his own interest. If this is not censorship what is it?
How do you fight real abuse without downvote function? Let's say I have an account with a few million Coin Power and I upvote my own 10 spam posts every day. What can be done against something like that?
i don't know what can be done. But the user of the account with the million coin power, invested his money and can use his stake as he likes even if he wants to benefit only himself. If he can't harm others with his downvotes, it is fine for me. If this is abuse, circle voting can be considered abuse too. for example 10 users with huge coin power vote each other everyday, no matter the quality of the post the reward pool everyday gives the same coin to these 10 users? where is the difference? At least without the down vote function they cant harm poor users.
Also, this can attract new investors and push the price to the moon.
I am not a developer and I really don't know what can be done, but the current system is not so fair for the new users who are posting few times, and then they disappear.
Personally I enjoy the tipping system of whaleshares and golos.id maybe blurt will follow their example. who knows.