I appreciate your perspective and experience. Thank you for your comment.

Do you think Steem is a security? If so, why? It passes the Howie test without a problem.

Do you think a theft took place, if so why? No property was deleted, removed, destroyed, etc. It think it would be more accurate to describe this as a temporary access restriction until the owners of property (STEEM token holders, the witnesses they vote for, the users of the Steem blockchain, etc) can dialogue with an owner of special property about their intentions. This would be similar to someone buying up a stake of tokens destined for a worker proposal system. If the intent of the property for many years is not maintained, don't the people who made decisions based on those promises have recourse? No need to involve courts when we have non-violent mechanisms we can use.

In what ways, do you think, extortion took place? No threats or demands were made of Justin Sun or the Tron Foundation.

Blockchains are not governed by individuals, but a group of them, located in all sorts of jurisdictions (not just the US). Yes, one might argue joint and several liability is in play and that any one node operator could be held accountable for what an association of operators did collectively according to the 2/3+1 consensus model, but again, what legal jurisdiction does bitcoin fall under? Ethereum? EOS? Steem? These are blockchains and so far, no node operator of a blockchain (that I know of) has ever been tried in the way you describe and that includes many events such as the ETH/ETC fork, the BTC/BCH fork , etc, etc. This was a temporary measure to come to a shared agreement. Justin responded favorably and is coordinating a town hall meeting. Why pay lawyers when we can all work together for a mutually beneficial outcome? The Steem community has put many years of their life into the content on this chain and they elect witnesses to protect it on their behalf.

No demands were made of Justin or Tron. Similar to the intention of the code introduced in Hard Fork 14, this code is intended to come to an on-chain consensus on what has been an off-chain promise since day one.

If anything, Ned might have some concerns about whether or not he fully disclosed the nature of the property he sold. It's possible he did which is why Justin isn't freaking out. See the posts I link to which show some examples of the promises that were made about the Steemit ninja mined stake.