(TLDR at the bottom)

I have no idea if any of this is genuine or if you really even care what we have to say on this matter, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and give you some honest feedback on this situation and where we go from here.

Anything you ask for or want to see happen at the moment feels like you are doing so from a place of holding our chain hostage. Anything the witnesses or community ask for likely feels like we're trying to hold your funds hostage. We need to find a way to prevent this from being a zero-sum game.

Let's say we give you the benefit of the doubt, we accept that you were misled on this investment and we can all accept and understand that you reacted defensively to protect what in your mind is "your stake." Let's also assume that no one here wants to rob you or hurt you and many of us would have been completely fine without any of this ever happening.

My strong suggestion to see deescalation is to remove these witness accounts that you made and remove the Poloniex votes and power down that account. We want to deescalate this situation and have a conversation, but I think you need to understand our perspective to why that hardfork 22.2 was put into place.

Our understanding and expectations of the Steemit Inc stake was obviously very different from yours. We all want to see this chain develop and grow. Immediately after the deal became public we were seeing Tweets about token swaps and merging our chain into Tron. That is an unacceptable outcome for most people in the STEEM community.

We gave no consent for Ned or Steemit Inc to make this deal. Purchasing a company that has repeatedly said the stake they hold was not to be used for blockchain governance and was mined exclusively for developing the platform means that our expectations of that company and stake transferred to you.

We all want a win-win situation here. If you want to win any kind of trust from this community you need to stand down on influencing our governance and do the thing that Ned and Steemit Inc never did and actually communicate with us and start SHOWING us that you want to be here and make things happen instead of just TALKING about it like many people felt they always did.

I think you should also understand that at this point, fighting over the fork like this, the best case scenario I see for you winning is you end up with a shell of chain that has no value. The community will fork and carry on without you if you can't SHOW us some kind of reason to get behind you and have faith that you want to do good things here and not just make some quick money.

To recap and sum things up:

• The only path forward where there's any chance of a win-win situation requires you to get rid of those witnesses that you created and stop the exchanges from influencing our governance.
• From there it's on you to communicate with us and show us that you mean what you say and are willing to listen to what we have to say and not just force your ideas on us.
• I can assure you that no matter how heated things got and how bad all of this may have looked, having passionate people that care about this blockchain and are willing to fight for it is a good thing and many of them will be willing to work towards making this place better with you if you can show us that you are willing to work together and have some faith in us.