Steem Town Hall - ALL-COMMUNITY-MEMBERS-WELCOME

Hey guys, thanks for your help on the post yesterday. I took the information gathered and I asked my attorney, Bull Blockchain Law, to put together a legal opinion. The question is: Did the statements from Steemit Inc over the last four years constitute anything binding? When Tron purchased Steemit do those binding things carry on to the new owners? Are there any legal precedents of actions by entities like the SEC in cases like this?

We'll see what they say. In the end it'll likely just be one opinion. My guess would be that Tron would then work with attorneys to get an opposite opinion. Ultimately neither opinion would really matter because in the USA a court and jury would would decide what has merits. This request to the attorneys isn't meant for the Steem community and the Tron community to try to determine in a court of law what would happen here as that's entirely opposite to the spirit of crypto. What I am attempting to demonstrate is that when the Steem witnesses temporarily froze Justin's assets we didn't do it maliciously and it wasn't targettin Justin. It was targetted stake that was encumbered with these promises.. We believe that the owners of Steemit Inc have purchased assets with liability to this community.

It's like they bought a house with liens on it. The liens don't vanish just simply because new owners are present.

This whole conversation is bothersome to many people and essential to others. Whether something is legal or not matters very little to many crypto enthusiasts and anarchists in the community because legality and morality are rarely the same. However; it can be essential to people in this space, especially businesses and communities that are interested in doing business with crypto. How can they operate here if the laws they're used to have no sway?

My perspective of the history of this "Fiasco"

1. Ned Scot and Dan Larimer started Steemit. They made posts announcing it on bitcointalk. They started with mining to avoid Steem being a security in the laws in effect at the time. They centralized the stake of Steem through mining. They promised routinely over the next four years that the stake Steemit INC made would be non-voting, used to onboard users, and develop the blockchain ecosystem.
2. Steemit Inc used those funds in that manner for four years. How well the funds were used is highly questionable because Steem has incredible technology that can actually scale and one of the largest communities, but somehow still has one of the worst marketcaps. That said, on the 14th of February Ned Sold all of this stake to Justin and pocketed the cash (exit scam?). This leaves the witnesses in a terrible position. This whole chain agrees to operate on Steem with the Steemit stake, but only because of the conditions and limitations put on that stake. If the new owners don't honor the promises that the company has made then this could be disasterous.
3. Witnesses attempted to communicate with Justin and Tron, but our communications were ignored. In secret witnesses gathered to enact a soft fork to temporarily freeze Steemit's assets to ensure they stay non-voting, and are used to onboard users and develop the chain.
4. Justin and Tron, still not communicating, and only seeing this action as hostile attempt by malicious "hackers", colluded with Binance, Huobi, and Poloniex to have exchanges stake custodial funds and use them to overturn Steem's consensus witnesses. Once Tron/Steemit took over the witness positions they put in a new softfork and left 20 sock puppet witnesses in charge of governance on the chain.
5. Through direct action witnesses and the Steem community have managed to retake consensus, and then lose consensus to these sock puppet accounts as various factions come together.
6. In particular a strong voting block from the Korean Community called Proxy.Token is currently maintaining a balance such that neither side is capable of hardforking the chain without the consent of the other side.
7. Because Huobi and Binance staked users funds, and because there's a 13 week unstaking process they're extremely anxious to get funds unlocked and are pushing for hardfork 23 of the Steem blockchain to enable them to unstake faster to remove the customer funds that they froze when they decided to stake custodial funds so they could overturn elected witnesses.
8. Allowing this hardfork temporarily could be negotiated between the duly elected witnesses of the steem blockchain and Tron/Justin in good faith, but in the long term these changes can't stay as this 13 week powerdown is precisely the thing that has kept exchanges from acting in bad faith and unethically with custodial funds in the past.
9. The devs working for steemit have mostly quit. The remaining staff have technical knowledge but have never lead a hardfork of steem. Hardforking steem is actually fairly challenging and even under optimal and voluntary conditions we've stopped the chain more than once. That said, we the duly elected witnesses of steem, sucessfully navigated Steem hardforking 21 times already. The staff on hand at steemit are not equipped to manage hardforking this blockchain especially as they have 20 witness nodes all on one server. If anything goes wrong they could fork the chain in error or simply stall the chain. I contend they aren't qualified to manage the fork itself. Any actions by Tron/Steemit that lead to the chain freezing would be devasting as they are drastically unprepared to handle the consequences of a chain freeze.

Moving forward

There's many ways this could progress. In the quantum world until things have been decided all possibilities exist. We could find a path forward that's hostile and bad for all parties. We can forge a path where the steem blockchain halts and multiple forks go forward. We could find ourselves in a path where more exchanges chime in. We could find a path forward that has both Steem and Tron participating together. We could forge a path forward where tron and the Steem community go separate ways. We could find a path forward where Tron finds a way to walk away from Steem.

There's a lot of possibilities, but ultimately which path we take starts by communicating and building bridges. I'll be in the peace, abundance, and liberty network discord channel with hundreds of steemians and potentially hundreds of new friends. You can also listen at https://mspwaves.com/watch. We'll be there from noon eastern (2hours from now) through 5pm eastern.

All are welcome, all opinions are welcome, not all deliveries of opinions are welcome

I'd like to note that everyone is welcome to share their opinion in the Discord group. We have no censorship regarding sharing how you think things should be resolved or what led up to conflicts. What is enforced though is that we balance Peace AND Liberty. If you can't provide your opinion with respect for the person you're disagreeing with we'll censor your DELIVERY until you can manage to frame the exact same opinion in a respectful manner.

All opinions are welcome. All deliveries of those opinions are not. The motto of the group is do no harm, but take not shit. Kindly abide by the very simple rules.