It's a great piece that provides good background for folks not intimately familiar with Steem/Hive, but there's a bit of fantasy that shouldn't be left uncorrected for stakeholders here.
Hive is not at all immune to this exact attack, and is probably being attacked in this way right now. Sun is really stupid, and that's why this attack was even detectable.
An attacker able to tie their shoes without assistance would have dispersed their stake into myriad accounts, purchased consensus witnesses accounts, or gradually elevated witnesses into the consensus using the distributed stake weight of the myriad attacking accounts, and seized total control without the fanfare.
All it takes to control Hive right now is money, and that shit is pulled out of thin air by central banks - and I am confident their ilk want to destroy every example of free speech that exists, Hive amongst them. Even if a more sophisticated and gradual acquisition of stake isn't ongoing now, it's but a matter of time until one is.
All it takes is money and patience to surreptitiously gather enough Hive tokens to gain control of the consensus, and the enemies of free speech conjure money out of thin air. There's no way pure DPoS can avoid this vulnerability. The economic disruption ongoing IRL has been the occasion of $T's being produced in the last month, during what appears to be a global imposition of totalitarian tyranny by banksters. Massive censorship is being undertaken on every media vector, including social media platforms, and Hive isn't going to remain unscathed. The few $M's it would cost is literally a rounding error to the central banks.
Once that attack gains consensus, it can instantly eliminate the possiblity of being challenged with code Sun is just realizing could exist.
Your money @acidyo, and all non-attacker stake, could simply be eliminated, rendered non-voting, or taken, with a well considered soft fork, instantly. Code is infinitely mutable, and all it takes to run new code is consensus, and all it takes to get control of consensus is money and patience on Hive.
@theycallmedan is completely wrong that this was a demonstration of DPoS strength. We bailed on Steem, abandoned the field to the enemy, and while we did prevail (meaning we still exist and are able to control censorship on Hive) over the stupidest attack imaginable, we can't actually do that repeatedly.
Hive has a lot fewer users than Steem did. Every time we have to fork to escape that will happen. Attrition will eventually destroy the community, and it is substantially diminished today.
Unless we prevent money alone from effecting governance, Hive will eventually be centralized, because money is trivially deployed beyond the market cap of Hive by parties intent on censorship. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have spent millions, maybe billions, in lost revenue and goodwill at least, to censor their platforms. A couple million to shut us up will eventually get done.
We have a temporary reprieve in which we can add something that only community members in good standing possess besides tokens to be necessary to governance, and I don't think we have long.
Has anyone approached you with cash and an NDA yet?
@theycallmedan notes Stinc came at him with an offer. If such offers don't start coming from more sophisticated players I'll be shocked. Folks simply do not grasp that free speech availed Hive atm is more valuable than any sum of money.
What if Goldman Sachs did a bit of lending to the USG and finagled up a $B and offered it to you for your account? It literally would cost them nothing (in fact they'd collect interest and profit) to make your wildest financial dreams come true - and then you'd see how vulnerable Hive is to mere financial control
Without uncensored media, how do any of us prepare for the kinds of pogroms the Bolsheviks, Stalinists, and Mao undertook in the 20th Century? Do you really think the banksters seizing global power don't actually want to reduce population like they repeatedly say they do in UN Agendas, the environmental movements, and all globalist propaganda?
Free speech is inconceivably more valuable than money today. $B would do you no good in your forced quarantine, or when Bill Gates shoots you up with a 'vaccine' that alters the DNA in your brain.
Presently Hive is a sitting duck for banksters, and they're making moves to censor everyone in the world, conjuring $T's out of thin air to subject all national governments to their control, instituting mandatory vaccinations managed by Bill Gates, putting everyone in the world under house arrest, and establishing military checkpoints everywhere people want to travel.
This isn't happening just by coincidence. Hive is pretty small in the scheme of things, but they'll get to us eventually. Pure DPoS is controlled by the most trivial commodity that exists to banksters: money. Fucking carrots would be vastly more difficult for them to use to attack Hive with. If we picked consensus witnesses by piling up carrots, banks would have to work to get the damn carrots.
DPoS cannot be secure against enemies that can create money at will.