Nobody else could ninjamine besides Steemit Inc.
Imagine the following scenario:
You're taking part in a car race. There is going to be a reward, but there is no knowledge about how much you can win. You participate anyway.
The person who organized the event & gives out the reward, is also driving in the race.
Once the race started, you seem to be in a good spot. You're not the first, but also not the last. The owner of the race though, has this incredibly maxed out car, probably worth a million dollars.
Suddenly, the owners car stops. You're not sure what happened, but you continue to drive anyway.
However, there is a message being broadcasted about the race having to be restarted. You're furious. How can this be? You suspect that the owner decided to restart it. You decide to drop out of the race as you're not sure whether there will actually be a reward at the end.
Seemingly, quite a lot of people had similar thoughts as you and the race lost a lot of participants. You think to yourself, that the owner of the race has it even easier now, since there are less people participating.
In the end, you decide to never take part in races from this owner again.
This, basically, is the story of the ninjamine.
Now, I ask you: if another person participated in the race and finished it, is there a difference between the owner of the race & that participant?
What I don't get is how these early miners are somehow entitled to some share of the blockchain before it ever became anything worth mentioning, am I missing something? I mean, Steemit coded the thing and one could easily assume that how they "roll-out" their token is completely up to them.
If people had issues with how they handled it back then, surely they had every freedom to opt out of any kind of investment into it. And if people entered into this later on, being aware of this "ninja mine", then, well, they knew what they were getting themselves into, take some eff'n responsibility. And if you invested without being aware, well, try to learn the lesson of thorough due diligence.
The "b.b. but they gave us a verbal agreement that they'd x,y, z with their ninja mined stake..." as the reason to stick with it from the beginning comes across as a sucker being suckered, at best. Unfortunately for the rest of us small fries on this blockchain, you're a bunch of entitled suckers, who're probably going to bring even more negative attention to the blockchain as a whole, if not outright legal action against the most integral nodes of this network.
I hope my gut is wrong on this one, but I really feel like this action started a fire that will have this whole thing burning down in flames. I knew from the beginning that the odds were high that the collective greed of higher SP holders would ultimately kill this blockchain, but I never envisioned it happening this way.
^ THIS.