What a tumultuous period the STEEM community is going through. After hitting rock bottom on price and levelling out for a number of months, members of the community may have thought the worse was behind them and only bright futures are to come. That may well still be the case, but we have a very large externality to take into account now, and that is of course Justin Sun of TRON fame.
Those of you who followed the news and activity surrounding the announcement of Steemit being sold to the TRON foundation would be quick to note that from the very outset, the acquisition of Steemit coincided with a very real hostile take over threat of the Steem blockchain. And as much as we know that a decentralised blockchain cannot be bought, the threat of a "migration" or "swap" must be taken as a hostile take over, responses to which, must be measured and proportionate.
Now, I'm not going to jump the gun and say that everything regarding this piece of news is necessarily bad. After-all, it is not like Steemit Inc have not made their share of paltry bad decisions affecting the progress and health of the network, but the extent of which Justin intends to "support" his new STEEM investment remains largely unknown.
Insofar as his investment is concerned, Justin has repeatedly shown that his interests lie in boosting TRON and the interests of it's investors / users. After eluding to the token swap and publicly saying that STEEM will remain status quo for now, he has quickly begun ramping up "marketing" efforts to suggests the opposite.
Two examples of which are below :
I believe these "items" were produced prior to his public redact of intentions to take STEEM to TRON and that the marketing machine was originally intended to bring some upside to the TRX token. If what he said live on air should be taken seriously, then his actions following those statements should be consistent with what he has said.
With these two posts on twitter and youtube, we must once again take with a grain of salt, anything that Justin says, as he has now shown that his word counts for nothing and that he will say anything and everything to appease the community, regardless of what real action is being planned.
Some good things to cheer us all up
Despite the inconsistencies in communication, the STEEM community has at large, rallied to keep the original STEEM chain in-tact and are prepared to fight the potential hostile take-over with various degrees of efficacy. This is a growing sign of decentralisation and the first signs of a real decentralised blockchain community at work.
Technical execution of Justin's intentions to move STEEM to TRON remain a huge question mark. STEEM was intentionally designed for decentralised social media and benefits from highly scale-able architecture beyond what is feasible on a Smart Contract platform such as TRON. It is very likely that should some implementation of STEEM be made on TRON, it will likely be a much worse product that is then proposed to a decentralised community of stakeholders. Through free market enterprise, the prevailing product will end up speaking for itself, and I remain optimistic that the STEEM blockchain pertains exclusive social media benefits that will ultimately win the majority of users.
Justin may be playing the dumb but there is also the chance that he knows very well that a migration is simply not feasible and is using himself as a FUD machine to increase his interests in the STEEM network. Remember, Steemit INC will continue to work on the current chain and ship the communities and SMT products, which themselves are tremendous additions of value. A large interest such as Justin stands to gain the most should the STEEM network appreciate significantly. Creating FUD is a perfect opportunity to pick up comes from those who feel the future of STEEM are threatened.
We have a lot of questions and a lot of time to wait before we can see how things will play out, but at this point, it's really just picking your poison. We should give things time and place more trust in community supporting the chain. This is after-all, the biggest value proposition.Not putting our faith in Ned @ Steemit Inc or Justin @ Steemit Inc.
