"This can sometimes happen with small businesses with no real assets, but there are laws against it."
What "laws" are those? There are no laws against a company shutting down in order to escape some liability that it may have. It happens every day!
"Large exchanges with licences and huge asset bases can't practically do this."
Perhaps not! But do you realize just how low the chances are of ever winning such a lawsuit against a giant company like Binance? Do you know how many lawsuits are on the books against companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other such giants? Such companies have teams of lawyers who can make sure that cases are never heard before the plaintiffs either go broke, give up, or just die.
Exactly.
Steem (the company) has the power in this situation, I can't be the only one to notice the power struggle with the witnesses that ended with a whole pile of staff 'resigning' a few days later. If nothing else, that shows that the owners have the real power in this dynamic.
People love to go with the Steem is not steemit is not dapps. Except that without the company, the rest just falls apart, it might still exist on servers, just minus everything that gives it value stripped away (overly simplistic, I realize).
There was a bit of a mixup; In general cryptos can operate in a decentralized way, they aren't connected to anything like with Steem, where value is at least in part derived from interaction with the platform.
That could be a nitpicking distinction.
The reality of the way blockchains are operating now is far closer to the operation of a ponzi scheme than anything else (regardless of steem), consider, anyone could create a block chain. They convince others to invest, which gives the blockchain SOME value, and the increase in value only comes in from increasing people being convinced to invest so that they gain value in the coin from future investors. Whether that be investment of time, machinery or funding into the crypto 'markets'.