Why? He's got cold hard cash at risk. He doesn't want to destroy it. He wants it to prosper and make him rich. I do too.
The problem is he may not understand how to do that, and may think things will make it prosper that will destroy it. It's up to us, who know who we are and why we're here, to enable him to well understand what will work, and what will destroy.
They want to turn the Steem blockchain into a dapp on Tron, because they only care about the userbase. Most likely they feel its a necessary strategy to stay competitive with EOS now that it will have Voice.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Sun is a Tron prophet. Absent good reason to also support Steem's vision, he's going to take of Steem what he profitably can use to benefit Tron, and ignore our separate raison d'etre.
By demonstrating our unique value proposition, which I believe is actually every bit as valuable as Tron's, we can proselytize Sun into supporting Steem as in independent entity rather than folding it into Tron.
To date the problem has been that PoS enables governance to be controlled by whales, and those whales have an obligation to due diligence and financial prudence in managing their stakes. This has resulted in over 90% of rewards inuring to whales, and a retention rate below 10% YOY. It's not that the whales wanted to kick new users off the platform, but that their prudential duty to managing their stake was primary, and retention secondary.
Sun is exceptionally competent at marketing, and this is an incredible opportunity to benefit from that. However, it will require diligent governance on our part - on the part of the whales that effect governance absent deployment of Tron's 75M Steem that can undertake governance at it's sole option, making other whales no more relevant than the rest of us - to raise retention to industry standards, and allow rewards to encourage high quality users to stay.
Sun is not going to send profiteers waves of new users at great expense just so the whales can profiteer away all of their rewards and keep their ROI high. @ned did, but @ned wasn't able to rein in those other whales because of his philosophy of decentralized governance. I'm not convinced Sun shares that philosophy to that extent, and he may well deploy that stake to do so - if we don't do so first.
Our governors effected EIP in HF22 which successfully reined themselves in to a degree that shocked me, ending the blatant vote selling that nearly destroyed Steem completely. This reveals they aren't utterly incompetent at governance, and are able to grasp that there is a point at which profiteering becomes insuperable and must give up some value to allow rewards to flow to creators.
While that EIP has been successful, it is not successful enough, and we yet retain an opportunity to deploy our competence to raise retention nominally to justify Sun's marketing expertise to invest in bringing new users to Steem. He can simply replace our current governance with the stake he purchased from @ned, and if we don't act now to raise retention to support onboarding, he will do so at his sole option.
Retention is ~5% YOY, and we continue to bleed highly valuable content creators today, because our current governance flows ~90% of rewards to whales, valuing their stakes more highly than platform growth. This has been proved to reduce their long term ROI, but they are risk averse as is prudent, and cash is king.
Sun has cash to invest in onboarding and is competent to do so beyond industry standards. We need to invest in retention right now so that he doesn't need to deploy his stake to make investing in onboarding financially superable.
Whales need to encourage retention by allowing nominal rewards to flow to content creators. A good gauge of nominal rewards is the original vision in the White Paper. ~30% of rewards was expected to flow to creators originally, and this would probably sufficiently encourage users to remain onboard instead of giving up when they realize their work was simply profiting whales through financial manipulation of rewards by stake weighting. Either the whales presently executing governance grasp this and undertake to make it happen, or Sun will do what @ned did not, and effect governance at his sole option using that stake to rein in profiteering so that onboarding masses of new users will result in platform growth - probably on Tron, rather than Steem - and the rest of the whales on Steem will be no more able to govern than the rest of us.
Either we demonstrate we can effectively make Steem a platform that is best allowed to profit Tron by being independent, or Sun will have no choice but to fold it into Tron and make it profitable to him using the stake that enables him to do this at his sole option.
Sun doesn't only care about his userbase. He wants to generate profit, and the userbase is the source of profit. So far Steem has sacrificed it's userbase to flow rewards to whales, and Sun will not pay to flow new users to our profiteers so they can extract the rewards of their content and gain ROI.