# Witnesses

I've decided to cast my votes conservatively to show that I don't want this list to change in the face of the recent Steemit acquisition. Again, I think we need to talk about voting at a 1:1 ratio with coins rather than 1:30 but whatever. On such short notice these are the things we can do today.

Justin Sun of probing the waters.

Do we think it's an accident that information about this merger is being posted and then deleted in response to hugely negative blowbacks? I have to guess no. Justin Sun might be trying to figure out what he can get away with here, and our response might matter quite a bit.

On the other hand what if there is another reason he is so gung ho about mentioning this token swap? If we look at the history of Justin's other acquisitions what does it tell us? DLive and BitTorrent are moving forward largely unscathed. Is it so ridiculous to think that he would do the same thing with Steemit?

Justin Sun is a pretty good marketer, known for making a lot of statements that generate hype but aren't quite accurate. Does he have a reason to hype up Steem to the Tron community and act like he owns us? Yes, of course he does. How would the Tron community react if he we like:

Hey guys I bought this bad ass blockchain that we are going to do all our social media on... Steem...

That announcement isn't going to be the best received on the Tron ecosystem. Steem and Tron have been thought of as rivals for quite some time now. "Why don't we do it on Tron," they'd ask. The Tron community needs to feel like they own the Steem community through this acquisition. Once it's all up and running on Steemit.com, they aren't going to know the difference. The backend dynamics will be hidden from the average users like always.

Crux

The crux of this entire issue is obviously the "token swap". If the token swap is 2-way and doesn't have an ultimatum, pretty much everyone is onboard. The TronSteem token would essentially act like a SteemEngine token or whatever else. Steem would be taken off the market to support the peg of this token just like SteemP. If he even goes so far as to start airdropping onto Tron holders... that means Steemit Inc's stake is getting airdropped onto an entire community, and that's overwelmingly bullish (all the while Justin Sun controls all the stake behind the peg).

Our fear is the whole hostile takeover scenario. An ultimatum is issued where we have to hand over our coins or they might be "worthless" as the swap will be ended for no other reason than to terrorize the community. I think it says a lot more about the Steem community than it does about Justin Sun that we are so worried about this. We have been primed for strife for the last 2 years. 99% loss of market cap value to USD. 70% Steemit Inc layoff. Dapps abandoning ship. We are fucking grizzled, and it looks like we are getting ready for some more bullshit that might not even exist. It's happened before more than once.

How many users are actually on board with a hostile takeover? I haven't seen one. At worst everyone is just talking about powering down and jumping ship. Does that sound like a win for Sun? A way for him to get more users on the Tron blockchain? No, of course not. Do you see how he's trying to get the best of both worlds here? Guy's probably not looking to start a war. Finally someone smarter than Ned, I say.

KEK!

Yeah it's harsh, but it does seem the be the overall consensus of this platform. The @berniesanders piss and vinegar is back.

We should be trying to figure it out.

Rather than all this bull shit speculating, why don't we just figure out what the fuck is going on instead eh? If Justin Sun is planning a coup of this network it shouldn't actually be that hard to figure out what he is planning.

NDA

The only people that can help him are the employees of Steemit Inc. These are the only people in the world that can fuck us over. If there are plans to do so, they are working on it right now, and they've all signed NDA (nondisclosure agreements). Find one person who's willing to break the contract and we figure out what's happening. Information is important.

Steemit employees might even be able to legally tell us they signed an NDA, which would obviously be a bit suspicious, but also not the guaranteed worst case scenario we are worried about.

UG (Steemit recovery account)

Justin Sun knows my email, phone number, and is my recovery account, because Steemit knows my email, phone number, and is my recovery account. Seriously consider finding a new recovery account and double down on protecting your master/owner key.

Conclusion

Even if Justin Sun had Steem's very best interests in mind for this whole acquisition, he wouldn't market it like that to his own community. It needs to be a win for the Tron community first. "They bought us." Good for them. Let them have it. As long as the token swap is 2 ways and stays open forever none of this matters.

We need to know what the Steemit developers are working on right now. Did they cancel everything to start working on a secret project, or are they just chugging away at a lot of the same code? In the event of a hostile takeover, if all the Steemit employees up and quit Justin Sun would have no way of co-opting this blockchain in any way. No one in the world has the experience that they have with this stuff, and we all know the source code is very poorly documented and hard to navigate.

Honestly, I'm still not that worried about all this. There are two sides to every merger, and we have tunnel vision on our side.

But why would he say token swap old token new token omg??!!??!

Because marketing. Steem has to be marketed to Tron. Tron has to be marketed to Steem. All of it need to be marketed to the world. This is a balancing act, and we have no respect for it... perhaps because our marketing has been such shit since day one?

People like new things that they own.

In what universe does a person try to buy an application-specific blockchain that has been working years on optimizations and cutting costs... only to be scrapped for a token on another platform? I'm not sure why so many people think this worst case scenario is the path of least resistance and highest profitability. We need to consider that he is actually lying to his own community (and the world) and making it seems like he has more power over all these acquisitions than he actually does. As a marketer, why wouldn't you? I own all this stuff and it's all going to work for me. That's how business works, yeah?

We need more information.

It shouldn't be that hard to get. What are the Steemit Inc developers working on right this second?
That's the answer.

My guess is they're working on integrating some features of Tron into Steemit Inc with the goal of making it look like everything is running on Tron when our blockchain is doing all the heavy lifting on the social media side (just like SteemEngine operates). Why else would you buy a majority share of Steem and the corporation that developed it? You buy the thing, you use the thing. You don't scrap it and try to terrorize the broken community into using the other platform.

If I'm right then Justin Sun doesn't care about pissing us off because he's not actually going to do anything that causes a hardfork. He's just parading in front of the Tron community like he just conquered some barbarians in battle. Let him.

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