Where do we stand?

Retrospectively, although I still think they are valid points, I find my post from yesterday not timed very well.

I trust by now everyone has got a wind of @ned's shocking update.

^Source

I don't think it's time for despair, reckless actions, or even for calling out to community support. That's an emotional response to a situation that requires cool heads.

Let's just take a step back (while keeping doing what we are doing), and really understand the problem and all the predictable consequences, then let's work on solving it.

First things first. Besides the announcement itself, Ned made additional remarks in the comments section of his post. If you weren't very meticulous, you might've missed some of them, so for your convenience I extracted the comments that may give some hints or information as to what's to come.

In reply to

Sell ads, Ned.

comment by @prydefoltz, Ned replied:

All options are on the table. Thanks for your support.

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In reply of this comment of @ats-david, Ned replied (bold mine):

I'm sorry you feel this way.

Your small team of developers and a few servers doesn’t cost tens of millions of dollars per year.

Our team does in fact cost many millions of dollars per year, even after these layoffs.

Infrastructure costs line towards $2MM USD per year. This is the most expensive website per visitor to run through the top 1000 Websites, if not much lower, by infrastructure costs.

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In reply to the question which was on everyone's minds for sure

that begs the question....how does this effect the target date for SMT’s in 2019?

asked by @jongolson, Ned replied:

Focusing on cost reductions will affect the target date. We don't know how at this point.

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In response to the very good question

What's the worst case scenario here just for clarification? Steemit development stops? Steemit.com is no longer accessible? The entire Steem blockchain grinds to a halt?

by @midlet, Ned answered:

Steem as blockchain would continue if Steemit.com dissapeared. However, the full and robust on-chain social experience would be likely to disappear from the ecosystem, at least temporarily. Steemit.com is supported by an expensive system of Full Nodes that we run primarily to support steemit.com that has the fortunate consequence of supporting the existence of many other social apps. Most Steem social application's companies don't appear positioned to bear these costs or scale up without this system of free to use Full Nodes.

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I imagine things are not smooth right now at Steemit Inc.'s headquarters. This kind of massive layoffs leave scars and highly disturbed processes.

Let's give them some time to sort things out, but they and - following the good practice of transparency in recent time - we should know how each project (first and foremost SMTs, but also Hivemind / Communities, Oracles etc.) and potential threats to the availability of the steemit full nodes will be affected by this situation.

In the back-end, I think witnesses+Steemit (?) should try to find alternative backup scenarios that could be set in motion if Steemit Inc. would provide going forward a limited support in various areas, or if they would be totally out of the picture. I'm not wishing for either scenarios to be implemented, but I believe pragmatically they need to be on the table and available on a decentralized blockchain, if needed.

Giving the amounts Ned is talking about, finding backup solutions would be very complicated, without a transition period from Steemit, and even then the costs would be much higher than anyone in the ecosystem but Steemit can afford, even split among many.

The good news yesterday was the transparency and that Steemit didn't do business "as usual" until they went completely bankrupt, or at least I hope not. The only good news.

Ned mentioned the extreme market conditions in the crypto world as being the reason why they couldn't afford to go forward without the layoffs. Coincidentally, there is a big move upwards in the crypto markets today. I still think it's temporary and bitcoin will test the support around 3k (a little below). I might be wrong, of course.