Hello, @Justinsunsteemit. As @inertia said, Welcome to Steem.
It's been a rough start.

I speak on behalf of myself only, as the 3rd biggest community elected proxy voter & I am the 3rd largest Steem hodler on the entire blockchain.

I leave emotions out of things and think of business logic first. I am not here to be anti-Tron nor do I have any desire to continue battling you if you were to remove the sock puppet witnesses currently occupying our blockchain.

In order to move forward, you will need to retract your "hacker" statements. Now that you know the truth those statements should be retracted and an apology is needed.

Steem has lived with the Ninjamined stake, promised since day 1 that would not vote and be used for community development. Steemit INC (USA based company) provided guarantees to the community about how the funds would be used. We never locked Steemit INCs funds, nor forked him out.

As a show of good fate, I would like you to remove the sock puppet witnesses, so we can talk on the same level rather than from a hostage standpoint.

"Meanwhile we would like to reassure you that we intend to commit to Steem for the long-term and we plan to bring a lot more value to Steem than even the value of our holding. We see the potential for growth here for both of our chains is tremendous and sincerely look forward to working with you on an ongoing basis."

These are the type of statements Steemit INC made since day one. That is why a lot of investors invested in this ecosystem because we knew there would be funding for future development. I would like you to publically renounce interfering in our governance with the Ninjamined stake. These are not demands, this is me letting you know what I would feel comfortable with as a large stakehodler on this platform. The current 30% of the Steem supply is enough to cause strain on decentralized governance.

In the town hall talks, you said you would be willing to donate a chunk to the SPS (Steem DAO) to help fund development and further decentralize the stake, as always intended. This would lower the amount you hodl thus lower the threat of a possible takeover if you ever go back on your word.

You ask us to say we won't support witnesses that freeze funds. Asking us to agree to that spins the narrative. We can agree that we started off on the wrong foot, there were no ill intentions at all. Ned did a shady deal without informing you, and with the hostile token swap/migration marketing, lack of communication, Zion account voting SRs in, Ned keeping all this a secret, and weeks of time passing, the witnesses implemented an easy to reverse soft fork. I, OF COURSE, would NEVER support any malicious witnesses that went "rogue" to freeze user funds. I have never voted for a malicious witness and I won't start today.

Regardless of the thoughts here, we can agree there was no ill intent. We simply wanted to inform you of what you purchased and see how you would react. From there we can either fork if we disagree and move on or work together if the plan sounds good. At least we wouldn't be blindsided. So if users want to "fork" out your stake, that would create a new chain and we would have Steem and the new chain. I would not support anyone forcibly taking anything away from you nor anyone else. From the VERY beginning, we wanted to know your intent. This is all voluntary.

Getting exchanges to vote was the worse thing you could have done and I hope you understand it is best to communicate directly with us asap when you have concerns.

With all of this said, of course, I would not support any witness with ill intent, meaning to cause harm to our blockchain.

Once you remove the puppets, and you do what you say you're going to do in that open letter, I believe there is a shot at keeping the community here. Any funny business and it will lead to a fork and split the chain. I believe a fork is inevitable at this point, but I will never give up on STEEM, and I will always vote for community elected witnesses here. If there comes a day you retake the entire network and force us on tron, I will consider it game over and would move on at that point. But as long as we have community elected witnesses that have even a remote shot at getting in, I will stay here fighting the entire time. We just want our home decentralized, we don't want 1 person to make all the rules. So if there is going to be a fork, and you're publically promising to do the right thing, it puts us back at the same place we were with Ned.

I really dislike Ned. I don't really dislike you. I really disliked a lot of what you said and did, but I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt with the rough start. Regardless it does not matter what I think, STEEM is here, if you stand down and release our chain, let's at least see what happens from there.

This post was originally a response to Justins post here: https://steempeak.com/steem/@theycallmedan/q6vb16

Material On History Of NinjaMine:

The Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake (SINMS) is said to consist of approximately 74 million STEEM tokens by those privy to the terms of the sale. Some of these tokens are liquid but most of them are powered up in @steem, @steemit, and @misterdelegation accounts. The sum of STEEM Power in these accounts alone is currently about 60 million SP. They also have almost 5 million liquid STEEM total. The rest of the total amount of STEEM is presumed to sit on exchange accounts.

With the 65 million STEEM and STEEM Power that is held between @steem, @steemit, and @misterdelegation As of writing a hostile attack by one party of the witness voting pool can be carried out. The top-ranked Steem witness have about 45.4 million SP of Steem user stake approval. If used, the 65 million SP of known SINMS can be used to attempt to vote the witnesses of one single party into the top 20 witnesses and thereby disrupt the consensus of the community.

References - Steemit Inc Discussing Use of SINMS

• https://steem.com/2017roadmap.pdf -
  Section 3. Steemit inc. “We plan to decentralize the @steemit account stake”
  Section Decentralizing Stake

52 mins
“it's (the ninja mined stake) completely dedicated towards getting better and decentralizing over time any object that comes into existence I just centralized and its birth moment and over time to centralize this and we are at the very beginning of scheming over time it will decentralize so if there are issues with it today you know decentralization is a subjective and sliding scale hopefully it gets to the point where Steemit doesn't matter or Dan and I don't matter and you know that's could be years away I don't know but there's still a lot of growth to be had a lot of development to be done and it's fully in our objective to make sure that that happens”

Min: 33:24
Ned says that the Stemit holding is reserved for developing the ecosystem

Min:27:19
Ned says that the Stemit holding is reserved for developing the ecosystem

24mins - 28mins Ned talks about the mining, the steem INC got and how they would use it to decentralize the network.
44 mins - “not voting” “reserved to develop eco system”

48:30 seconds talks about stake + 49:16 seconds, we have no interest in controlling the entire blockchain and we want to distribute that power to others asap “others” could mean anyone. But still.

16:15 seconds (asked about stake) + 17:53, “my company mined a bunch and now we are using it to grow the eco system”

• https://cointelegraph.com/news/steemit-managing-director-on-acquisition-by-tron-exclusive
  "Powell explained that the Steemit Inc. ninja-mined stake is intended to help with further support and financial developments of the Steemit blockchain."

Code Development for SINMS Use Restrictions

Steemit inc code implementation of features to temporarily freeze stake in the circumstances that occurred after the acquisition:

• https://github.com/steemit/steem/releases/tag/v0.14.1
  Section – Decline voting rights

• https://github.com/steemit/steem/issues/324
  Thread from dan larimer about implementing the mechanisms used to temporarily freeze the stake for these