which is paradoxically the exact opposite of what you need to do if you want to preserve blockchain evidence of a crime!
How's that? The evidence literally can't be destroyed that's the whole point of blockchain.
All they need to do is prove their target was signing blocks with the private key recovered.
It's not like all the witness nodes are just sitting in the same place.
If they start going offline new ones will just get voted back in.
Again, this is the entire point of the system.
I would make the argument that Sun doesn't need to powerdown any of his stake to tank the market. He owns enough liquid Steem to do it all without a powerdown. He had at least 5M liquid when this all started and who knows how much he has now. He got a Hive airdrop of at least 5M coins and a lot of that got pumped back into Steem when Binance opened the Hive doors.
Now that 26M coins have been taken off the table and all the powerdowns are about to complete, selling pressure is going to go away, not the other way around.
You guys seem to be making so many errors reading this situation I just can't imagine it's going to turn out like you think it will. Same team though. I'm obviously rooting for our side, and like you said, Steem could tank at literally any moment, that much is certain. It all depends on the whims of one individual.
I'm wondering who will still run Steem if the witnesses who ran Hard Fork 23 are taken away: all the Justin Sun Steemit Inc sock puppets and the three known human witnesses.
Do you think the Hive witnesses who still run a few bits of Steem infrastructure will have much reason to once the bulk of the power downs have ended?