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Discussed this in some other comments. Whilst it's true that an investor group led by Justin Sun owns Poloniex, I wouldn't say it doesn't mean anything. It does, they will swap the existing STEEM tokens to the new TRC STEEM token. Whether the other exchanges follow suit remains to be seen. In the end, the market will decide, but be rest assured as currently planned there's absolutely a split to be decided.

There are hardly any existing STEEM tokens on Poloniex because they delisted it a while back. Even then, it was barely used (the delisting was entirely reasonable on low-volume grounds).

Other, more important, exchanges may very well follow suit, but I would agree that Poloniex itself doesn't mean anything here.

Poloniex has actually been staging a bit of a comeback under the new management. But fair enough, as mentioned before, we'll have to wait and see what other exchanges do. As many have pointed out, Binance / CZ is closely allied with Tron / Sun. If Binance supports the swap, that'll pretty much be the confirmation we need.

yeah for sure. It is funny even with the chatter about witnesses forking out the Stinc stake, that is pretty much irrelevant given the plan to issue new Steem tokens on Tron network. Whether or not Stinc stake is forked out of the old chain has nothing at all to do with Tron's ability to issue tokens on their own chain. You are right that the only important thing is if the exchanges go along with the token swap, which in the long run it is hard to see how they would do otherwise given the resources that Tron has vs. the resources that any Steem Classic chain would have. We will see how decentralized Steem is in the coming weeks. Probably not very decentralized is my bet, I can't really see a Steem Classic (or what have you) succeeding on its own in any meaningful sense.

Exactly, the old Steemit Inc stake doesn't really matter. If Tron has exchanges on their side, a majority of stakeholders are likely to jump ship to the new Steem on Tron. The swap on Poloniex sets an important precedent here. It's basically a $1.7 billion network versus a bunch of randos, the odds are heavily stacked in Tron's favour. Obviously, Tron will never agree to status quo, they want to recoup their investment, so a migration to Tron is inevitable. The best outcome for current witnesses will be negotiating a truce and a more gradual transition.

PS: For a Steem Classic, that's where they'll need to fork out Steemit Inc's stake, otherwise Tron could take control of both networks.

The proposed SegWit2x bitcoin hardfork is relevant history here. A majority of centralized entities like exchanges and businesses initially supported the 2x hardfork. However, in the end the "bunch of randos" won out as the 2x hardfork was abandoned.

In general with blockchains, drastic changes are hard. Whoever wants to make a drastic change faces an uphill battle IMO. And especially if the majority of users support the status quo, I think forcing them onto a new system will fail.