Terrific research. I've seen similar numbers in other articles, and they all point to the same obvious conclusion - EOS is broken (as are most DPoS chains). Cartels/plutocracies in decentralized networks is the worst of all worlds. I've criticized DPoS enough over the years, so I'll stop right here.
PS: Centralized exchanges and subsequent turnkey staking solutions will always exist, and will arguably continue to grow as more of the mainstream starts adopting crypto. All blockchains must account for this eventuality. If your system is not resilient to this potential attack vector, then it's existentially flawed and must be replaced with a better mechanism.
Thank you, I appreciate that. I was worried about losing people in the weeds. Yes, I had questioned some more experienced Steemians a few years back about what would happen if a competitor like Facebook would simply purchase a super-majority stake in Steem or any DPOS.
One of the answers I got was "Steem would activate their full stake to defend the chain" or the blockchain would simply fork as that feature which ensures decentralizations. Well, at the time I couldn't have predicted that a blockchain company would be the one to actually hijack the blockchain using the "ninja mined stake". I always assumed it would be an outside force. Yet, after all the drama a fork finally did happen in reaction to the threat, so maybe it's a positive take away from this situation.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Unfortunately, tribalism and bias is rampant in this space. DPoS fanboys will see the whole drama around Hive/Steem as a victory for DPoS, but anyone else with any objectivity would see it as a catastrophic failure. Some would argue that Hive is more decentralized now, and it is, but what happens if Facebook (or Justin Sun) simply acquires a super-majority stake on Hive now? There's no longer Steemit Inc's stake to defend against anything. Participation is still low, and it's not all that difficult to obtain an influential majority, whether by hook or by crook (bribes and collusion). Not to mention, some of the smaller DPoS chains have completely failed and become effectively centralized a long time ago.
It's simply a bad system with an endless can of worms. I can understand why security and decentralization needed to be compromised to achieve time-to-market on scalability, but today, there are effective Layer 2 scaling solutions available, with Ethereum 2.0 and Cardano (among other so-called "3rd generation blockchains") having proposed better mechanisms for the future. Yes, they are still unproven, but it's really cool to see attackers being slashed even attempting funny business on the Ethereum 2.0 testnet. All eyes are on Ethereum 2.0's mainnet PoS release later this year, if it works as intended, it's game over for DPoS.
The real shame is that DPoS chains failed to leverage this time-to-market advantage on scalability. Today, all DPoS chains combined have negligible economic activity compared to bitcoin or ethereum networks. It's a clear signal that the market will not compromise on security and decentralization.