The earliest large investors knew, there are very few of them, and that is who is defended here.
The people that took a chance with 100's of btc to get us here, 4 years later.
They couldn't be sure they would get a viable chain and worked to ensure steem could work at all.

Many of them have that money back in multiples.
Such is crapitalism, and investing.

What was saved here was the author's ability to decide to invest their time into steem.

If 4 years of our lives can be sold by Ned, what are we doing here?
I know many of us would not be here knowing that everything we did only profited stinc.
If Ned wanted it that way, he shouldn't have let us twist his arm into open sourcing the code.
He did have to be reminded.
This is the fruit of that arrangement.
Ned is trying to welch on his deals, and the investors didn't let him because code is law.

Can we know tron will fail?
No.
Do we know that we were promised a free open source platform that pays us to record our lives on it?
Yes.
Is that demonstrated by this fork?
Absolutely.

I'd say this is the best the chain has looked since I got here in '16.
Maybe we could flag some more price abusers, but it takes time to build that narrative.
That would be a good use of stinc stake, iyam.