I appreciate your reason and careful consideration of these matters. Something that I have long noted is the ability of the founder's stake to assume instant governance of Steem at the sole option of it's hodler. Steem has only ever been as decentralized as the holder of that stake has allowed, and when Tron acquired it, that decentralization was undeniably threatened.

Frankly, I'm quite surprised Hive account@ned didn't do this long ago.

Many do not understand that all Steem was mined into existence, and all subsequent rewards have just been inflation on that original stake. There isn't really any stake that isn't ninjamined at it's outset, so ppl crying now about that genesis of Steem are wasting their time and our attention. The issue is that Stinc and it's founders repeatedly stated that stake would not be used for governance, which it never has been until it was sold, and was earmarked for supporting development, for which it has been used historically (whether you think it was used well for that or not).

Now Sun says he just wants to sell it and profit.

He has used it to completely centralize governance of the blockchain - colluding with exchanges, potentially criminally (IANAL).

I was happy originally to see Sun and Tron in the position of our potential booster, but now I strongly oppose Sun's actions, because he has much degraded the security of the blockchain, and essentially ended the competent development of Steem by causing Stinc's employees to resign.

His statements have inspired no confidence he has any reasonable plans to improve Steem or it's community, and have on the contrary more than once conveyed plans to pretty much destroy it. I'd really like to see him off our governance mechanism and reduced to merely a stakeholder, but the nature of his stake makes that impossible without restricting it's applicability to governance mechanisms.

Regarding the reduction of powerdown to less than payout time, elimination of downvotes, and other issues, I submit that those are far secondary to the essential decentralization of Steem, and that the proposals I've seen will actually break Steem, preventing spam prevention, bot discouragement, and more, as well as deranging payouts, and making all users far more vulnerable to hackers. I have had my account hacked, lost a significant amount of Steem (for me) that was liquid, and only managed to keep what was powered up because of the extended powerdown time that prevented the hacker from taking it.

While I am open to discussing any and all aspects of Steem, it's governance, and features like downvotes and more, I don't see any point in wrangling over such details while the corpse of Steem is cooking over a fire. If Sun retains control of governance, I don't care about powerdown times, downvotes, or hackers.

Accordingly, I hope you decide to defend the Steem blockchain with your witness votes instead of contributing to it's present demise by surrendering governance to one individual with no higher calling than the profit motive that I can see. When you do, I'll care about the lesser matters aforementioned. Until then, I don't see any purpose in any discussions regarding Steem at all.

If it's kill, I'll let it die. Your witness votes are adding weight to the injuries killing it, which I recommend you change. If you do, and the community manages to bring it back to life as a decentralized blockchain, then Steem governance and other issues are relevant again.

For now, I'm posting because it's still here. I don't have any confidence it will be tomorrow. Insofar as you may act to keep Steem up and working, I ask you do.

Thanks!