Hi Hive account@acidyo. Nice to hear from you again :) No, not rude. It's a valid question.

A lot was going on back then, and many things seem clearer on the other side of events looking back with hindsight. It is easy to look back now and say that they were clearly bad actors - but at the time all of this was going on they had not shown all their cards yet. There was evidence back then that they had some intention of making things work and working towards mutually beneficial goals. Decisions were made and paths were chosen though, so at this point there are a lot of things that theoretically could have played out differently but we will never know.

In the end I feel like everything worked out for the best, so I'm quite happy with that. Hive as a platform and community has exceeded anything that we would have been able to accomplish if we had not split.

I do remember the events at the time though regarding my own involvement and decision quite clearly. It literally cost me my top witness spot and it was an extremely difficult decision to make at the time.

You can see my quote in the post I made before I was voted out:

"I fully acknowledge and appreciate the severity of the situation, and fully understand why the witnesses running this software have chosen to do so. Personally however, I have chosen NOT to apply the changes to my witness node.

Regardless of the messy situation that got us here, and the very real security risk that Tron currently poses to our chain - I see them as a stakeholder who acquired their stake through a legitimate over-the-counter purchase, and I am not OK forcing restrictions on the way a stakeholder uses their stake."

There was a very clear objective from a lot of the large stakeholders to "eliminate the Steemit Inc Ninja Mined Stake". Not everyone held that view, but it was enough of a factor that it would not have been possible to maintain my top witness spot without supporting that objective.

The alternate fork that I ran on my witness node (link shared above) would have prevented the stake from being used to vote on witnesses. Ironically it would have done nothing to prevent the exchanges from doing so (which is what ultimately took over the chain) but it was a solution for the imminent threat that everyone was worried about. Yes, they could have powered it down and transferred it to another account - but at the time this was only meant to serve as a short-term "band aid" solution until a more diplomatic approach could be sought out, and a power down would have been something that we could have had at least a short amount of time to react to.

One of the other things I was suggesting before I was voted out was:
"We create a fork of Steem (similar to Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic) in a way that voids out the ninja mined stake (or does something with it such as funding the DAO) and we let Tron proceed with the chain they have full control of, and we proceed with a new chain without them."

It wasn't the way I envisioned it at the time I wrote the post, but that's basically what ended up happening in the end. At the time I was hoping we could find a way to all work together, but I had always seen a fork with a new chain as the next best alternative.