Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Hereunder some follow-ups
I'm not sure that Hive is any more difficult to read than the national governments of pretty much any state (this is before we get into extra-national organisations like the European Union and the United Nations).
Fair comment, and indeed we can see where this line of thinking leads: most national governments rule over stable polities - countries do not grow nor shrink to a significant extent, they are mostly stable entities. I compared in the past Steem (it was before Hive) with a virtual country and took as illustration Iceland. By being "as readable as a national government" what we can say is that this will not prevent Hive to staying stable. But if we want the strength of the national currency of Hiveland to increase in comparison with other national currencies such as the USD and the euro, then we need to increase as a country and an economy, we need to attract more "citizens" to Hiveland. That was my point: if we want to attract more people, we need to be more easily "readable":
- what do we stand for, what are our values?
- where we are headed, what is our vision?
Decentralisation and centralisation are framed here as either/or; an alternative framing might be that they are points along a continuum that includes collective leadership.
Indeed, that is for simplicity's sake. Vitalik's blog makes a multidimensional analysis of decentralization. It can be said that having a strong leader is close to 100% political centralization
In order to achieve that, thirty developers came together to work on and test the code prior to the hard fork; at the same time, other people were maintaining negotiations with Steem Inc and Justin Sun; still other people were enabling and facilitating town hall meetings, and there was the push to maintain the top twenty Steem community witnesses in opposition to the sock puppet witnesses financed by Justin Sun. I'm sure there were other things going on that I've either forgotten or didn't know about.
Indeed, that was a galvanizing moment, so emotionnally loaded that it achieved coordination among a large number of people. Very few other such moments happened since then. There are so many things to do to increase the number of citizens of Hiveland and the strength of Hive's economy! Yet they require coordination which is hard to come by when not faced with a clear and present danger like the Justin Sun takeover was. Basically, very little of comparable value has been achieved on Hive since then, because there's too much chaos and too little coordination