@ned's stake made this an inevitability. I'm glad he waited to sell as long as he did. There were two possibilities in the sale: sale to a Goolag or bankster, or sale to a visionary that wanted to make Steem transcendent. @ned did good by us by choosing a visionary, and now let's hope Justin Sun has a great vision.

A problem we will face is that stake @ned sold is the ability to centralize Steem. The only reason it wasn't used to do that is @ned's philosophy, and now Justin Sun's philosophy is the controlling factor.

I think there is a way to resolve the issue that @bryan-imhoff suggested, and that is to change how we vote for witnesses. Presently our stake is undiminished on each witness vote we cast, and this is why 75M Steem can simply replace all the witnesses. @aggroed revealed that @yabapmatt had ~50M Steem in votes, so 75M is enough to install even top witnesses all by yourself.

But making witness votes 1 Steem 1 vote means that every vote you cast depletes your VP for witness votes. If Tron cast 20M votes for one witness, they'd only have 55M votes left. While Tron could probably control who gets to be consensus witnesses with 1/3 of the VP on the platform in normal conditions, they couldn't simply force all top 20 into power. They could force several, particularly if supported by whales like @freedom, @pumpkin, @blocktrades, and @berniesanders.

Thanks!