Instead of doing the right thing to secure the assets, the witnesses are whimpering and writing open letters ... standing in line to be sacrificed like sheep. They had free infrastructure and development from the STINC, which is why we ended up with witnesses posting about movies and games and travel instead of development and risk management protocols. They enjoyed the status quo, and no one took us seriously when we said that the voting mechanism for witnesses should be revisited and changed.
The community, in my opinion, bears a huge part of the responsibility for what's going on right now. People have embraced the culture of profiteering and destroyed all chances of true decentralization by supporting the wrong people.
All of this could have been easily avoided ... but what can you do, we have an apple polisher in each corner.
While every word of that is true, we have not yet destroyed that opportunity. We have failed to fully take advantage of it, but @justinsunsteemit's benevolence yet allows that opportunity to linger. As I point out, that is a time limited opportunity.
There's no point in dwelling on past failures and pointing fingers. It's highly likely that witnesses that have failed in the past to well prosecute their responsibility will prove to not be able to meet this challenge, and will be replaced. This is an existential threat to their profitable futures and them as can will do.
I reckon that most of the extant consensus witnesses are highly competent to rise to this challenge. @yabapmatt, @timcliff, @aggroed, @ausbitbank, @gtg and the rest are all extremely intelligent and have proved their competence time and again. I must apologize to those I have failed to mention, and should include many other witnesses as well as current consensus witnesses as provably deserving of our confidence in exigent circumstances, but in truth I have simply proxied my witness votes to @krnel and remain functionally ignorant of dynamics of witness modalities.
While we have yet to deploy our common authority well to grow Steem by optimizing retention, I expect this is not due to incompetence entirely. Decentralized social media, cryptocurrency, and particularly their confluence vis a vis Steem, are novel and largely untested technologies. This engenders an expected level of nescience that is not ignorance, and the last few years has certainly enabled Steem's best to become the absolutely most competent folks to manage Steem governance. I expect @justinsunsteemit realizes this and hopes to well benefit from that expertise available nowhere else.
Too long @ned's benign lead has lulled our best into complacency and driven them to take advantage of his lack of predatory self interest by maximizing their ROI at the cost of growth of Steem and optimizing user retention. I am not convinced presently this was any failure on @ned's part, as it enabled time to learn how to govern a decentralized social media platform that will benefit us growing forward (pun intended).
We now are at this crossroads that we have not been at before, and the bridge before us will burn that connection to legacy centralized financial mechanisms we must leave behind us. No one has ever gone down this road before, and I am confident we are the best to first explore it due to our experience with this path to date.
It will be fascinating to observe what our best accomplish as we absorb the lambent brilliance of Sun, who is certainly intent on fueling our growth and fruition to the best of his ability.
Thanks!