Hello, Justin. 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 ineviable 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.