So is there a way forward, Hive account@drakos? Or are we just hanging around until we fork off a new chain free of Sun and the ninja stake?

I ask this because I don't see the witnesses making any realistic negotiations. Sun ISN'T going to remove his sockpuppet witnesses while there's a chance his stake could be ring-fenced again. You guys must surely know this. Yet you keep "negotiating" like this is an option.

Instead of repeatedly asking him to remove his sockpuppets without offering anything in exchange for this, why not try and negotiate their removal? I've posted this before, so sorry to anyone who has to keep reading it, but we should try and get Sun to commit a portion (25%?) of the ninja stake for development (via the SPS or some other independent mechanism). In exchange we could offer him 4 week powerdown, as that's something that has received some support prior to all this. He could of course run and dump his remaining 75%, but with 25% locked up he has an incentive to stick around and get that 25% and more back through growing the chain.

As it stands, it looks like he'll eventually force a hardfork on us and then possibly dump 100% of his tokens. If we can give him a reason to stick around (to grow his investment), we can make a statement that no more of his stake will be ring-fenced (other than perhaps removing witness voting rights), and he can then get rid of his sockpuppet witnesses. This should at least be attempted if we want to save this version of the Steem blockchain.

Unless we are all just treading water waiting for a fork off to a new coin/chain...