I figured there might be some members of the audience in the cheap seats who weren't up to date on Proof of Stake or who might not have actually thought about what it actually means. There's always a few. You have to play to the audience.

I absolutely understand what you mean about previously extant arrangements. There has been a couple of really good posts about the earliest activity on the blockchain, looking at the posts, looking at the exchanges, and looking at the comments on the code itself, which I have found extremely interesting.

Two rounds of ninja mining, deliberately obscured configuration and design (which still seems to be the order of the day, having looked at some of the stuff that passes for "documentation"), and a standoff organization. That trench was dug around the perimeter from day one.

I do find it mildly ironic that all of those choices are coming back to bite them in the ass because of the difficulty of making the database architecture truly decentralized. If, from the beginning, it was fast and easy to set up full witness nodes – it would have been done already. If, from the beginning, Condenser was well documented and clearly coded, and if they had accepted design ideas from outside – half of the things that have been in the last two roadmaps would've been implemented by now. If they actually wanted to implement a good, customer-servicing social media platform, they've had more than enough opportunity and more than enough feedback to actually start implementing things moving in that direction – but their big innovation is adding advertising to their front insight, nearly half a decade (or a full decade, at this point) from the introduction and widespread adoption of ad blockers.

If one wanted to cynically wonder if they had deliberately hamstrung themselves, there is plenty of material to make that argument.