I was using Steem for probably about a year before I fully understood the ninja mining situation (2016-2017), mostly since I was busy doing so many other things, the ninja mining wasn't a big topic and I hadn't been into the mining scene much. It did, however, become quickly obvious to me that Steemit was not acting as a responsible tech company would do in their situation. Without having direct insight into the working of the company it wasn't possible for me to know exactly what the problems were and so I was willing for a while to put them down to the complexity of the challenge or the inexperience of Ned and others. Over time, it became more apparent, though, that Ned was not reliable and way too avoidant to be trusted. I decided to put 'some' of my professional time into helping steem and developing things for it, but nowhere near as much as I would have done if they had appeared fully trustworthy.

It blows my mind somewhat to think that Ned would plan to mislead 50,000+ people in order to get a few million dollars for himself - however, having previously put time into studying various ponzi schemes (where the people ended up in jail mostly) - I have actually seen this before. I am not saying Steem is a ponzi scheme, am just saying that there are precedents for such deception and denial.

Anyway, my main aim in this reply was just to point out that as a system architect/engineer and business analyst, I realised very quickly (even without knowing the fully details of the ninja mine) that Steem could not be fully decentralised without it being reset with a new baseline that is more fair. I would still like to see that done but don't want anyone who has invested in Steem to lose their money. A middle ground that takes existing tokens into consideration in an intelligent/fair way would be ideal.