Where Does Steem Go From Here?

Last night, I listened to the majority of the meeting between our witnesses and Roy from the Tron team. It was quite boring honestly. It doesn't seem like talks are really getting anywhere with them. Either Roy truly is ignorant about Steem, is trying to stall for time for some reason, or both. At this point, I'm not really sure which.

Customers' funds are still tied up on exchanges and at the time of this writing, exchanges haven't started to power down yet. The Tron team was wanting to hark fork to shorten the power down time to something much shorter than our current 13 week power down period. Our witnesses were opposed to that though. If I had to assume, I'd say that the Tron team may have had some kind of an agreement with the exchanges to where if they powered up customer funds that they could change Steem to have a shorter power down period so that they wouldn't risk pissing off their customers... or something like that. That's my assumption though. I may be completely wrong there.

We have 11 of our witnesses back in the top 20 so at least we're making progress there.

Roy was wanting to hard fork for a shorter power down period so that customers whose funds are currently locked up on exchanges could get them back sooner and then hard fork again after that's done to put the original power down period back into place. What the witnesses were trying to tell him though is that a hard fork takes a couple months to execute with testing and everything. He was saying a shorter power down period would be for "security", but what he failed to realize is that a 13 week power down period is currently in place for security so that if someone's account was hacked that a hacker couldn't simply instantly power down and cash out someone's funds.

There's been some talks about simply creating a sister fork. It's a nice thought, but the problem is that it would take some time to implement. The other is that sister forks never do as well financially from what they forked off of. Ethereum and Ethereum Classic is a great example of this. While the fork tried to preserve what Ethereum originally was, Ethereum Classic's price is no where near Ethereum's. I'm fairly certain that it all has to do with the name honestly.

If Tron wanted to create and control a sister fork of Steem and call it whatever, chances are that it would never do as well price wise as the original Steem. If we however were to create a sister fork and it actually surpassed the original Steem in price, I'd be pleasantly surprised.

For the time being, the best thing that I think we could do is have our witnesses reach out to the exchanges and ask them to start a power down of the customers' funds that are currently locked up on those exchanges. Our witnesses could even help them with answering any questions regarding that. I think that if nothing else that it's a really good first step.

We want to keep a great relationship with the exchanges if possible. Our witnesses could show them that we're not "malicious hackers" and that we truly have our, as well as their, best interests at heart in this situation.

With all this being said, I'll propose this question for the entire Steem community. Where do we go from here in your opinion?