Hmm.. How to give this a proper response.
First: My actual thought was that downvotes on Hive are rare. I mean really rare at least when you are a little fish like I am :) On typical social media I'm quite certain that my posts would draw a lot of downvotes because Hive Learners asks for viewpoints no touchy subjects.
Indeed I would say that downvotes are so rare that when I do see them I take them very seriously. I have heard that sometimes people throw a small downvote into a mix to increase rewards but I have little knowledge on how exactly that would work.
However, I was more thinking along the lines of what is a MAJOR player decided to get onto HIVE and dump huge coin into the ecosystem. If a billionaire wanted to downvote you on Hive and got serious about it? I would never see another payout and eventually my posts would be invisible.
but they would still be there
and that is the cool thing about Hive. Even billionaires can't make you vanish. Well, perhaps if they make 20 nodes and had enough HP to make sure all of them were top witnesses and decided to use that power to split the blockchain....
..... but realistically once its posted its there :)
Thanks for the eyes, really appreciate it.
They would have to have planned this for ages, and hold most of the liquid hive tokens on exchanges to then power those up to do so. Technically they could then start downvoting people at random but downvote mana is only 25% of upvote mana, so unless they want it to cost them a lot of curation rewards they'd only have 1/4th of the strenght of counterers.
In the events that they'd still wanna downvote with all their mana it could cause some issues yeah, it depends how they'd go about it. This is a weird example however because why would someone buy up so much hive just to make this place "worse" which would affect their own "investment". In the most malicious scenarios that they wouldn't care if their millions of $ in hive goes to 0, there's probably changes that could occur where we reduce the 25% downvote mana and many whales and stakeholders band together with the help of some bots to counter his downvotes so everyone would be back on equal footing and only the counters would receive less curation rewards.
About your last example, that actually happened on the legacy chain. It was however not without the help of exchanges that justin sun managed to overthrow governance. We the community were beating him at his game by voting up real witnesses even though he had just purchased ~70m steempower from steemit and was buying millions from exchanges. He had to go so far as to trick exchanges into powering up customers funds to take control over governance again which was illegal in so many different ways but having connections helped him i suppose. Then they also went ahead and stole 20+m steem from accounts they thought were helping hive being created, which a lawsuit occurred over and was handed back to their rightful owners. Since then we've implemented certain actions to prepare ourselves in case such events were to be attempted again, such as the delayed gov power when you power up new hive, it takes 30 days for those to take effect in witness/proposal weight.
And in the worst case scenario that we'd "lose" that fight we would just fork again and receive new coins while not airdropping the attacker any of the new coins while also having hive we'd then convert to the new coins - as happened with steem.
Not sure if you've read about what happened back then, it's hollywood level script. :D I can recommend the article by decrypt called hostile takeover steem vs tron (if you google that you should find it, if you haven't read, very worth it).
:) I have a basic idea of what happened when STEEM became HIVE. Funny to think I used to have a STEEM account way way back within just a few months of launch but after a couple posts I walked away because it was too...odd. Really wish I could remember what my username was so I could reread and remember what I said :)
As for a new takeover I think that unlikely. I smile when I think of President Trump starting Truth Social. If he had of just pulled in a bunch of money into Hive and made his own Tribe he would be censor resistant from day one. Then I smile when I think he couldn't make downvotes go away and couldn't delete any posts he regretted later...so maybe Truth Social is a better place for him to be :)