At this point, it seems like most of the community is in agreement on one thing: they don’t want Justin Sun here. The primary disagreement seems to be how to achieve that. From what I’ve been told, even Justin himself has said he doesn’t want to be here. He just wants to get paid to leave.
So the purpose of this post is to list the reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea to pay him to leave and why I won’t be participating in any such deal via coding support, money (among other ideas, I’ve been told via intermediaries that Justin would happily sell Steemit to me now), or even as a simple endorsement of a deal.
What’s the value of Steemit Inc now?
In my opinion, Steemit Inc has nearly zero value now
Wait, what about the Steemit stake it holds?
While it controls a stake with a quoted value of many millions, it will never be possible to realize that value now. My best guess is that it is worth around $200K USD, and that's only if the owner considers it ethical to dump the stake that was promised for development. My estimate of its dump value being so low is because it can only be dumped slowly, which will give the market time to see what's coming.
This is also one of the big reasons why Justin is lobbying to get the powerdown rate changed to something like a day. The faster he can dump it, the more value he can get from gullible buyers who think they are getting coins cheaply, never understanding that the coins they are buying will never regain their value, because all the value is going to leave (more on this point shortly). Time is not on his side in such a dump, because the more information people have, the more they will realize that what he’s selling won’t be worth buying.
As a side note, all the above is one reason Steemit got sold to Justin to begin with, in my opinion. Ned has dealt with Steem long enough to know that he was unlikely to extract the value just by dumping it and he didn’t have a plan for how to profit by using it for development (he tried that and failed already). So instead he sold the company for less than half the value of the Steemit stake and was happy with the deal.
Wait, what about the IP and developers?
When Justin acquired it, Steemit absolutely had some strong value, in the form of intellectual property, branding, and experienced blockchain and frontend developers. But now, all the developers he acquired are gone (they’ve all quit).
Branding, good will?
Despite all the mistakes it has made, Steemit Inc also had some good branding and good will from its role in starting the Steem blockchain. But almost immediately, Justin began destroying that via his public statements and actions. I don’t want to rehash that, because almost everyone else has already deeply analyzed those actions (most reasonably with a few bizarre exceptions).
At this point, Steemit Inc itself has no community to support the value of a coin it controls: the only community here is the Steem community, not the Steemit community, and it mostly wants nothing to do with Justin (some are even willing to pay him to leave).
What option does the Steem community have if it won’t compromise?
Before long, we will launch a new coin that is essentially a re-branded hardfork of Steem, airdropped on all Steemians, without airdropping to the Steemit stake. This new chain will maintain all our collected posts and our transaction info and will support all the same Dapps we’ve come to know and love.
I believe all the economic value will move to this new chain and the chain with Justin's stake will ultimately just die. He can keep his chain running for a while, trying to find uninformed people to sell it to, but it’s not going to last long with no devs, no real plan from Justin on how to keep it alive, and most of all, no community to support it.
In other words, I believe the value in your existing Steem coin account will migrate to a value in this new coin. And I believe the value (i.e. the price) of the existing chain will just drop as Justin dumps on that chain.
I see this as a big win for the community and particularly existing Steem holders, as we free ourselves from an entity that has just been dumping on us economically for a long time, without properly returning that value with enough technical development or publicity.
Another cool thing, from a marketing perspective, is we will be a literal demonstration of how a community is what gives a coin value. We should make every effort to capitalize on this in cryptocurrency media, just as we’ve done so far in our DPOS vote fight with Justin.
Does the community have the skills to operate a blockchain?
We have more developers committing to work on this new chain than we’ve ever had before. We already have a team of 36 experienced developers, including key devs that were involved in the initial development and maintenance of Steem. And new developers are joining us daily. By contrast, from what I know, Steemit had 4 devs, and currently has none at all.
And we don’t just have devs, we have marketing people, business people, artists, and idealists. Our combined efforts can do far more than a narrow-minded, profit-driven Steemit ever dreamed possible. As many here know, the community constantly reached out to try to help Steemit, and was continually rebuffed. We plan to be be the opposite of that, with an all-inclusive, decentralized approach to development, marketing, and on-boarding.
Does the community have the resources to launch a blockchain?
Yes, we do. It’s actually much easier for us to launch a chain, because of the many lessons we’ve had operating the Steem blockchain. And as far as financial resources go, several prominent Steem stakeholders have privately offered both computing resources and significant financial support, including my own company, BlockTrades. Even at this early stage, I’m utterly convinced we have sufficient support to launch and develop this new blockchain.
We’re also already hard at work lowering the costs of operating the servers that power the Steem ecosystem (web sites and Dapps). We’ve identified key areas where we can dramatically reduce operating costs over the costs paid by Steemit and we’ll be ready by launch to deploy these higher efficiency API nodes and services.
But isn’t compromise always better?
One of the first things we’re taught as children and often taught again in life, is the importance of compromise. Generally speaking, compromise is often a good idea. But compromise is not always the right choice: 1) it usually fails when you can't trust the other party to keep a compromise agreement and 2) it doesn't make sense to compromise if the resulting value trade is uneven. Both of these apply in this case, I believe.
Making any kind of deal with Justin at this point would just be a case of handing over dollars that we can use for development to a guy who can still go after Ned for financial restitution as well. Any payment to Justin represents both an economic loss to us and a potential financial win for him (since if we pay him off to leave, he can even potentially profit off a legal recovery from Ned too). From both an economic and moral perspective, it makes no sense to compromise with Justin.
What about exchange listings?
Some of our community depends on the ability to translate their Steem into fiat money. They will not be forgotten in this move. To protect them, we will need to get exchange listings. We’ve been in promising talks with some exchanges already, without disclosing too many details to them, and I’m sure we will be able to obtain plenty of listings as we show that our chain is the true community chain. But no matter, I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we have one exchange listing within days after launch.
We win by fighting, not by compromising
The ongoing fight with Justin has been and will continue to be a huge publicity win for us. We are getting more publicity now than we have had in a long time.
Steem has long been ignored by most of the crypto-space as a failed project of Dan Larimer. We are now being giving the opportunity to show that the community we have is so much more than that, and that we can emerge under the umbrella of a new coin, as a dominant player in decentralized blockchain development. Our strength is the personal contacts we have with each other. We are not just strange looking addresses on a blockchain, we share more than just number transactions, we share ideas, beliefs, and fellowship with each other.
More to come
Now, one thing I haven’t done here is lay out all the details of what we will do with our new, revitalized chain. There’s a lot of ideas for that, and some obvious first steps. But the long term plan is one we will need to build together. The important thing now is to align on what we value and how we want to approach the future. Not everyone on Steem may stick with us, and we have to accept that. But we should reach out where we can, if only to save them from losing money investing in a Justin-run chain (that is mostly why I’m writing this post now, even though I haven’t had a chance to express all of my own ideas or the ideas of others for future work).
I will certainly never downvote you for a comment of this sort. I'm sorry if someone did, but people's emotions run high in times like these.
But I think you're wrong on many points, starting with:
>majority of people out there seem to hope that our witnesses and Justin will find way of working together
It's definitely not the majority of people I know, it's pretty much the opposite.
I've seen a few individuals and one block of users (zzhang group) that seem to think that is the best solution. And frankly, I think that group simply doesn't have enough information to evaluate the situation correctly. Like you, they seem to believe that Justin actually has plans for this chain, something I feel has obviously never been true: his only plan was to move everyone to TRON. I've seen the original contract with Steemit Inc, so I can say this with some certainty.
All his attempts to deny this plan after he got so much opposition to the token swap have fallen flat. And each time his subordinates like Roy, Eli, David, etc promise something, he then goes and does something that shows their words don't matter, it's just what he wants to do. And what he wants is to control the chain and stamp out opposition.
>Personally I can find it very difficult to imagine any product/project being successful, knowing that major investor/stakeholder (marketing guru) and community build around project are in open and very public conflict. It's hard not to feel that we're in serious trouble.
Describing Justin Sun as a marketing guru at this point is just pretty funny to me. He's revealed here just how bad he is at real marketing. I was actually expecting him to be OK at this, based on his reputation, when I first learned he was coming to the chain. But the disastrous "AMA" that he had with Ned where they droned on about things no one cared about, ignored all feedback from the audience, answered literally only 3 questions form the AMA (choosing only the easiest to answer) and then fleeing because of "battery problems", made it clear to me he is no marketing guru.
He seems like a Bitconnect guy: he can make a lot of noise and fool people who don't understand any of the technology of blockchains. This type of guy makes money off new, inexperienced speculators, not experienced cryptocurreny investors. And he does it by selling them crap and empty promises, so I won't be a part of such efforts, even if it is a way to make money. No one of sound ethics should ever stoop to making money this way.
And he simply doesn't know how to market himself to informed crypto people. He acts in ways that immediately make them angry (for example, attempting to centralize the chain via sockpuppets). And it's obvious that he doesn't even know what the response will be to such actions.
Finally, marketing aside, it's clear that he has never understood the battle he should have been fighting. He's been fighting for token-based control of the blockchain, without ever realizing that the value of this chain is the community that supports it, not the tokens themselves. Instead, every action he has taken has made the community less willing to work with him.
>I'm failing to see how new chain could hold any value. And I'm really trying. Also what would make people keep their steem and sell all airdropped tokens, bringing price to it's knees with no time? Wealth cannot be just doubled like that.
I don't think the overall token value will double in this case, although there can be an increase sometimes during a fork.
But overall value should be about the same as before in this case, because I don't see Justin supporting Steem in any meaningful way for very long. So I expect Steem value will go towards zero quickly after the airdrop of Hive, and value will migrate to Hive coin as most of the users will migrate there. Some holdouts will stay on Steem for a while, but as Justin dumps Steemit stake and fails to support the chain properly, the price of Steem will tank.
>Sometimes conflicts cannot be won.
This is true. But I haven't heard a single argument from you yet that explains why you think this one can't be won, or a plausible strategy for how he will fight back against our plan. I've written an entire post with reasons why it will be won. So to convince me otherwise, I need to hear concrete reasons beyond "marketing guru".
And if your other reason why you think this conflict cannot be won is "Justin's wealthy", let me say a couple things about that. First, I firmly believe that Justin's real wealth is greatly exaggerated, based on the amount of time that was spent negotiating to acquire Steemit Inc, quibbling over terms of a relatively small amount. I wouldn't have even spent that much time on the negotiation of such a sum, and my net wealth even including intangibles like IP is only a couple hundred million at best.
I think he's sitting on a bunch of TRON tokens, that give him a theoretically large wealth, but not one that he can realize, because of lack of sufficient market willpower to absorb those tokens if he tries to sell them. This is similar to the problem he will be facing with the Steem tokens, except it will be worse with the Steem tokens.
Also he's been very cautious about acquiring Steem tokens lately, and he hasn't even powered up the ones he bought yet. This is a sign of a man having severe doubts about his plans.
Thank you for taking the time to reply @blocktrades. I very much appreciate it.
Indeed, emotions are very high since Justin purchased STINC.
> It's definitely not the majority of people I know, it's pretty much the opposite.
The truth is that we all usually attract people who have similar opinion. And those who disagree usually keep quiet to avoid being downvoted.
I've actually troubled myself and asked over 100 users about their opinion and hardly anyone wanted to take side. Most would like to see some agreement happening and it's not true that majority of people want that conflict to escalate. But this is just my opinion and indeed - we disagree here.
> Like you, they seem to believe that Justin actually has plans for this chain
That's the thing. I never said that. Hoping that witnesses will find a way to work with major stakeholder doesn't mean it. I do agree with you, that he doesn't have any plan for this chain. However at the same time it seem to be very obvious that witnesses and some "whales" declared war against justin from day 0. Amount of insults and hostile comments towards him has been very strong since very beginning. And I strongly believe that things could be played out very differently.
Unfortunatelly, we're past that stage already. Witnesses used their enormous influence to escalate and "WIN" this conflict and promote narrative "us versus him".
Good friend of mine said lately, that trying to figure out who started a fight and who escalated is like "egg and chicken" problem.
> Describing Justin Sun as a marketing guru at this point is just pretty funny to me. He's revealed here just how bad he is at real marketing.
Could be. I presume I was wrong. Surely you know more about it than I do.
> He's been fighting for token-based control of the blockchain, without ever realizing that the value of this chain is the community that supports it
I sometimes wonder how many witnesses or large stakeholders share your belief. How many of them see value in the community.
I've been here for over 2 years and I kind of never received any support to me or managed by me community/hive. Neither did anyone I know. I can only hope that current conflict will change large stakeholders mindset and they will indeed start seeing some value in communities and start supporting quality content creators (outside their circles).
Either way we are where we are and let's assume that this new chain would go live. Bringing any value at all to this new chain may be very difficult.
> But overall value should be about the same as before in this case, because I don't see Justin supporting Steem in any meaningful way for very long. So I expect Steem value will go towards zero quickly after the airdrop of Hive, and value will migrate to Hive coin as most of the users will migrate there.
My impression is , that only those who would decide to burn some of their STEEM should receive aidropped new tokens. If you will airdop them to everyone (just like PAL token did), then this token will have zero value (just like PAL token did).
Hoping that majority of people will not take opportunity to dump newly airdropped token is kind of wishful thinking.
> But I haven't heard a single argument from you yet that explains why you think this one can't be won, or a plausible strategy for how he will fight back against our plan. I've written an entire post with reasons why it will be won. So to convince me otherwise, I need to hear concrete reasons beyond "marketing guru".
> And if your other reason why you think this conflict cannot be won is "Justin's wealthy"
It's not about wealth. Like you said - it's about communities. And businesses. And investors. Uncertainty and conflicts are always huge killers.
Surely from your point of view this conflict may be won. However like I said - all I can think of is tons of "dead bodies" and destruction that will take place. Winning a conflict by simply making someone else lose more - it's not a victory.
I brought example of trade war to show where am I standing in that particular matter. US think they will win. China believes that they will break Us. But at the end of the day millions will suffer and one party will simply lose more than other one. Will it be a victory to celebrate?
Anyway, things went already to far and I absolutely wish you all the best.
Thank you again for your mature and polite reply.
Yours, Piotr
