Does not need whales to function, ever.
Yes and no. I sold a large part of the stake I once had, and then bought more using outside investment in the past couple of years. The current value of post rewards paid out is about $30 million per year. Without people buying in, with an inflationary system where people earn rewards that are often sold to cash out, the value of HIVE (and reward payouts) would crash, and no one would be happy.
Yes it is conceivably possible, without whales, to have a large number of small investors, say a million new investors per year each putting in $30 each, but I don't see that Hive or Steem has ever been successful in attracting that level of participation.
Would you be open to sell more? In your view on who is still a whale, what does Hive look like in 5 years?
I want to see a ton of smaller accounts with power using thier votes instead of 1 person with a lot of stake.
Vitalik has a great critique on DPOS and how POS is way better. I'm in the POS camp mostly, ethereum POS will be a huge step towards system wide decentralization at the whale or minnow level
I will probably sell again at some point. Right now I feel it is massively undevalued.
In any case, there is plenty of HIVE and HBD (which can be converted into HIVE) being sold from inflation/rewards every day. There is no shortage of HIVE to buy for new would-be stakeholders.