Okay, so in case you haven't heard, SteemIt has been sold! The new owner @justinsunsteemit apparently wants to (eventually) transition SteemIt onto the Tron platform (a completely different cryptocurrency platform). And we all know that SteemIt is different from Steem, but let's not kid ourselves, the platform depends very heavily on active development; if the new owner pays the developers to make SteemIt into a Tron DApp, then that's precisely what's going to happen. There will be a hard fork. And Steem will follow SteemIt, even if for no other reason than that's where the development is focused. You can argue with me about it if you like, but I'd point out how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is practically nothing compared to 'modern' Ethereum (ETH).
Not to mention that if the community does somehow manage to steer one way in opposition to the new changes, guess what, they'll only be making the new owner even wealthier because if the pre-hardfork Steem token is still valuable after the new Tron forked version of SteemIt goes live then anyone still holding a large amount of classic Steem (@justinsunsteemit apparently owns a lot now) would be able to dump their classic Steem tokens for a huge profit. Sort of like how Ethereum holders suddenly found themselves with 2 different tokens (ETC and ETH) after that famous Ethereum fork, and were able to dump the classic token in favor of the actively developed one for a very nice profit. Basically, if the community rebels it would only pay back the new owner possibly even more than they spent to buy SteemIt in the first place.
So I for one say that we should remain calm, think things through, and most importantly don't panic. Financial decisions historically haven't gone so well for people who panic. So don't panic, plan. Here's my plan, many of you already know that I own a search engine with a catchy name, and I've been secretly working on a new 2.0 version of it featuring Smart Media Tokens (SMT's) as a reward for submitting URLs to the new search engine for indexing. In truth, I got side-tracked from the project for a while, but now I'm back at it with a fresh new perspective. I think having a new outlook helps.
I love SteemIt and all things SteemIsh. And at first I was very worried that the transition to the Tron Platform would derail my beautiful new search engine before it's begun. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that maybe it's good for SteemIt to have a fresh new perspective too. I would never have imagined SteemIt transitioning to Tron, so maybe this new owner knows something that I may not have figured out yet. I'm willing to give him a chance anyway.
People seem to think that the worst case scenario would be a community-driven Steem fork where we would somehow need to find our own volunteer developers. But trust me, the real worst case scenario is much, much worse; if the new owner thinks their ideas are nonviable due to community uproar, then the struggle to find volunteer developers will be the last thing on your mind if the owner chooses to simply walk away, panic sell and dump everything, effectively making all of our money absolutely worthless.
He owns at least 20% of our entire Steem economy folks, let's try to work with him. Instead of challenging his will like a pesky minnow to a giant whale, Steem may actually be better served by challenging his creativity with your own fresh new ideas. Now's the time to try and dust-off those ideas we've all had for SteemIt but were always to disenfranchised to suggest. There's no better time to speak up and communicate with our new super-whale, after-all he has a lot more money riding on SteemIt's success than any of us do.
So I for one would like to welcome our new crypto Kingpin into the community. @justinsunsteemit, if you have any questions at all, please feel free to ask. I would be eager to assist you with anything I can do. I just hope you'll take the opportunity to 'raise the bar' and help both SteemIt and Steem grow to become a more successful platform, and a more successful community. After all, a happy community is a community that brags about their platform. I've got some ideas of course, but I'm sure we all have ideas so I'll to let the community speak up first.
Let's see if we can get a brain-storming thread going. I literally just powered up all my Steem so I can't offer crypto as a prize for having good ideas (even though I think that would be really fun). But honestly though, if they did use your ideas, wouldn't that be more valuable to you than some small prize amount? So if you have any ideas for a new SteemIt, now is the time to speak up about them. I can hardly wait to see what you all come up with.