Anyone with a powerful enough machine and strong enough internet could be a witness. Even you can install the software to run on your own machine (to be a witness node) and run your own witness and get producer rewards. Prior to the hijacking, It is up to your ability to use your own marketing skills in the community to get yourself up into the top 20. If you were in the top 20, you would have 1 of 4 votes to necessary to prevent future HFs/SFs.

Ned Scott and many others ninja mined a lot of coins a long time ago. Ned Scott then promised to the community that they wouldn't be sold or be used to influence the witness votes; they became for all purposes restricted coins. Justin Sun was scammed by Ned Scott when Ned Scott Sold him restricted Coins likely without disclosing that they were restricted, or worse specifically telling him that he could take over the chain when it wasn't his to give. Justin Sun immediately was planning to move steem to the Tron BTSF platform and a coin swap. That implied the death of the chain. It also implied a new mintage and distribution which implied theft through dilution. He also pledged to do a coin swap to tron users, which meant they would dump and destroy value. The death of Steem to an HTFS meant the death of the block chain, the end of decentraization, and yet another social network taken over by the Chinese communist. The witnessed were told they could be able to question Sun at the AMA-that wasn't allowed to happen. They tried to reach him for comment-he offered none. There was an existential threat to the chain, and Justin Sun had no business plan except to destroy the Steem chain. The Witnesses codified the tokens to the previous agreements that Ned Scott had made to the community. So in the end, the Witness had not wronged Mr Sun. The coins were not Steemits to give to Justin Sun for any other purpose than ultimately how the witnesses restricted them. That was necessary to prevent a hostile takeover-a hostile takeover like what Justin Sun just did that went off the Richter scale. Certainly Sun engaged in conspiracies that resulted in multiple felonies to take over the chain. God willing, he will go to prison for it.

The 20 new witnesses are not decentralized. They are operated by Sun/Tron/Steemit mostly with illicitly used restricted ninja mined stakes. They are 100% centralized. It is beyond most peoples ability now to be in the top 20 if you disagree with what the centralized planners are doing. So your vote fore the sun witnesses are not for decentralization-the exact opposite of it.

When Justin Tron Promises decentralization, it is a complete lie. Even his cofounder quit because tron was no longer decentralized. From a development stand point a tron tranaction is only 200 bytes. I am not sure how much free data that equates too as I couldn't find it in the documentation but even the full 200 bytes is not ripe for decentralization. In contrast, steem handles 64kb trasactions. If 64kb isn't enough, you can chain them together for rather large data stores. What Tron claims is decentralization is to put things on a BTFS database, which at his own discretion he or the CCP can delete. And history shows that Sun has deleted competing development technologies on his chain because he didn't want the competition.

Even if you disagree with the old witnesses, the Tron witnesses simply are not decentralized. If you ever want to have a voice on the governance in the future, the ninja mine stake needs to be restricted again. Once they are gone, By all means, fire up a witness server if you have a spare computer powerful enough and a strong enough connection. Work on the marketing to bring the type of change you want to bring to the chain.