Great write up.

To be honest, I think a lot of all plans were already started before the announcement. Most probably with Ned as “advisor” and his advise likely may have been - or at least hinted at - “the community and witnesses are unworkable” and “just port it to TRON and benefit the users who follow, dapps will follow since they need users”. Also “don’t wait for them or ask them, they are going to give you hell”.

That is why the initial announcement was not done to the community first, nor an introduction of the new overlords, no. It immediately went to porting and token swap, complete with announcement that exchanges would support the new TRON-based token.

Even if, of currently around 10k daily commenters, only 5K followed that would still be a massive increase to TRON who only have around 24k daily users according to dappreview.

Additionally, suddenly having both control and a massive amount of STEEM it would be possible to increase the volume of the token very easily via large scale washtrading on poloniex, and later also on polonidex.

This is not a vulture at work, this was a blatant attempt at M&A where the end goal wasn’t necessarily about making much money of Steem ASAP but a big bump in TRON activity (at least 25%), and maybe some more dapps on TRON too. At below market value acquisition, and thus probably not more than $5-8MM cost max, that alone would represent a reasonable investment already. It would also have allowed him to shitdrop STEEM all over his chain, without caring too much about the actual cost of STEEM to him.

Let’s be honest, almost every other day we are reminded on social how many dapps his origin chain has. Yet, a quick look at blocktivity shows a chain which has barely more ops daily than Steem, and that only since rather recent times (blocktivity has no ops/day history, sadly enough). All that while we have probably less than 15% of the dapps TRON has.

Don't be fooled, the end goal hasn’t changed. Definitely not after two major exchanges publicly distanced themselves from him. That only motivates JS more because since it has become a face saving exercise to win this war. Yes, now it is effectively a war for him. And Bloomberg’s post about Buffet’s “lunch date” will only have amplified that feeling for Justin.