Oh yeah I forgot about blocktrades. The only way to take care of the ninja mine would be to hardfork it out of the supply. I am pretty sure that Ned would have taken action against it (just like Justin Sun did). I don't think that they were in a position to be succesfull (at some point steemit had 80% of the coins so trying to push them out would have been futile). Blaming the current blockproducers for not taking action back then ignores the fact that they are different people (excluding blocktrades, abit was out of the top 20 for a long time).

Except for a few exceptions most of the early miners cashed out after the power down period was changed (from 2 years to 13 weeks) on December of 2016 and they turned off their nodes. Only after new witnesses started to be in the top 20 did we start to see pushback against steemit which eventually resulted in the current situation.

Also blaming the witnesses for the price decline ignores the fact that they were not in charge of development. Their main purpose is to produce blocks and to protect the chain.

The drop to 7 cents was the result of almost all of the early adopters selling (miners, bloggers, steemit, etc) and the drop from 8.00 to 0.10 had more to do with all crypto falling 90%+ from the ATH. Even BTC dropped 85%+ in value from 2017 to Dec of 2018. So putting the blame on steemit and the witnesses for that is superficial (although the lack of development on the part of steemit inc did play a role but it wasn't the main reason).

If I knew what I know now I would have sold all my steem on January of 2018 but I don't blame anyone but myself for not taking action in time. I am not going to make that mistake again and I will sell all my crypto sometime in 2021 (if I am still alive).