The decision to raise the interest on HBD to 20% is transferring wealth from the the 99% to the 1%. Gosh, what a revolutionary idea.
I have to strongly disagree with this assessment. There is no transfer of wealth. HBD interest is not taking out of anybody's pocket to pay the payments. It is just a feature blockchain offers to make this stablecoin attractive.
20k active losers are not losing anything. Active users, passive users, and not yet users have an opportunity to participate in HBD economics. Question is who is willing to risk their money. While investing in HBD is a low risk investment with decent returns, holding HBD means shorting Hive. Those who hold HBD instead of Hive or HP will miss out on even higher returns if Hive starts going up in price. HBD is pegged to $1. Hive has no limits of how high it can go.
Of course HBD interests don't come from nowhere. Somebody needs to pay for them. Hive stakeholders are the ones who are paying for HBD interest payments, just like they pay for everything else like content rewards, witness rewards, etc.
All of the Hive inflation comes out of stakeholders' pockets. While funds are not directly taken from their wallets, printing more Hive and HBD dilutes their original stakes, and they end up having less shares of the network than they did before.
Now, this can be a good strategy if one believes in the future of the network and all the features network offers will eventually end up making underlying Hive coins appreciate in value. That is how investors will get rewarded.
That's why DPoS system, allows stakeholders to decide what is the good path for Hive blockchain network. If stakeholders didn't like the idea they could have easily voted out the top witnesses who chose to signal 20% APR. The opposite happened. Which means stakeholders like the idea, at least for now.
Being an active user doesn't entitle anybody for anything. But it can also be rewarding. It is an open network. People can participate as they choose. Some like to blog, some like to play games, some like to curate, and other just like to invest.
Again, there is no transfer of wealth. At least not the way you described. :)