One of the most interesting revelations from the stream was that Ned owned 51% of Steemit Inc, and he sold all of his stake to Justin / Tron. It's very surprising that he revealed such a detail! So, despite the "collaboration", "partnership" type jargon, it's pretty obvious that Justin has controlling interest over Steemit Inc.
Haven't followed the witness meetings or whatever, but yeah, not surprised. As I mentioned in my post, all smart witnesses should be considering a fork right about now.
Tron will not care about their fork. they will not have SteemIt Inc, which we are mostly dependant on.
They will have no funding, no marketing, no exchanges...
I mean it could be fun, but it will not impact Tron.
Yeah, definitely. All witnesses combined are not even a fraction as powerful or influential as Justin. In fact, outside of Blocktrades, I can't think of any that have any lasting entrepreneurial experience in the industry. Still, for witnesses, they are probably going to lose their jobs eventually anyway*, so might as well try and get their own thing going instead.
*As of now, the long term plan still seems to be Steem merging with Tron, and Justin already has a cabal of witnesses (superdelegates, same thing) set up there. Of course, there could be compromises found, such as keep Steem as a Layer 2 or sidechain for Tron etc. We shall see how things play out over the coming months/years.