Just want to correct a few things...

1. This was not an action undertaken by "the top-20 witnesses." There was much more collaboration and support from other witnesses and investors. There were at least 65 people who were invited to and/or engaged in discussions.

2. The accounts in question were already not voting for witnesses and had not been voting for them per the agreement between Steemit Inc. and the community.

3. Portraying this as something that happened "behind closed doors" and that this is somehow inherently bad completely fails to recognize the situation that you yourself pointed out just before making that statement. The potential security risk to the Steem blockchain was there, it had always been there, and there was a lot of confusion and lack of good information about what was happening. Mitigating an existential security risk isn't something that can always be or should be discussed openly in public or with the very entity that potentially poses that risk. "Conversations take longer than three seconds." (Thank you, @mattclarke !)

4. The DPoS protocols have always allowed for witnesses to ignore certain transactions on the blockchain. Nothing changed yesterday.

5. No accounts outside of the Steemit accounts in question have been affected or will be affected and at no point did anyone in our discussions consider ever touching stake that was not "ninja-mined" by Steemit Inc. The "slippery slope" argument certainly does not apply, as most of the witnesses I saw required quite a bit of rational persuasion to reach the agreement that we reached. Investors have little to fear, unless they simply do not like/trust DPoS in the first place.

6. The "precedent" that you speak of about a small group of people being able to "nullify" an account "in secret" has always existed and has in fact been used on this very chain in the past. In fact, as @smooth has pointed out elsewhere, this has been done many times on this and other blockchains to mitigate/neutralize security threats. This is neither new nor unique to the Steem blockchain.

7. Purchasing the stake in question here makes no difference regarding the obligations placed on it by its previous owners who brought it into existence. That stake was owned by Steemit Inc., which had "ninja-mined" it, put conditions on it regarding its use, and expressed those conditions of use to the community on multiple occasions between 2016 and 2018. Users and investors have come to Steem and invested in Steem based on those conditions/promises. Steemit Inc. has simply gained a new owner, but the stake is the same and the conditions still apply.

I want to make it abundantly clear that neither I nor any other witness that was part of the discussions would ever think that purchased stake that was not part of the original "ninja-mine" by Steemit Inc. would ever be open to any kind of "freezing." To ignore the very large distinction between the Steemit stake in question and tokens purchased on the market or earned on the chain is a great disservice to both your followers and the other witnesses and investors that took part in the discussions for the past 10 days.

It's actually a bit insulting to draw these parallels and spread that kind of fear, knowing that nobody ever made any comments even remotely close to wanting to freeze or "nullify" any user's stake. Many people openly expressed their concerns about even temporarily ignoring transactions like the ones that would currently be ignored by the 0.22.2 soft fork.

So I'm not sure what the purpose is to try to paint this as anything other than 1) trying to secure the blockchain, which we felt we adequately did, and, possibly 2) attempting to ensure that the stake in question will continue to be used as previously promised by its original owners.

Nobody...ever...has to worry about losing anything or having anything "nullified" by the current witnesses. Not just the top-20, but pretty much any of the witnesses that participated in the past week, which was at least around 50.

I understand that you disagree with what happened - and that's OK. But, in my opinion, it's not OK - and is in fact detrimental to the community and the blockchain - to insinuate that all assets are now at risk because of the very specific/targeted and temporary actions that were taken in order to mitigate an existential threat to blockchain continuity/security.

I would hope that the large consensus of witnesses, reaching far beyond the top-20, would be an indication that the risk was greater than it is being talked about here and that the actions taken were justified in order to protect the security of this blockchain.