Whether it's theory or practice, how are 20 well-connected witnesses voted in by larger stakeholders (i.e. locked in/many legacy) truly decentralized? I'd imagine that the pressure for these witnesses to follow the wishes of the board members to keep their positions is immense, which steers the chain in the direction of the few. Given your discussion on small caps being primed for gamification on token price, I tend to wonder how much of the stake locking in these made witnesses was from the Steem premine, after the 1:1 fork.
After Steem was taken over because of Ned's action (a single-point of failure), how has Hive truly taken steps to mitigate this from happening again? It takes one hedge fund to obliterate the Hive Power scales and break up the witnesses/control, which would be a huge risk if they're malicious like Justin was.
While Web 3.0 and immutability is critical, is this chain truly a no-brainer when it's fairly easy to deploy real capital and destroy the system -- or is another fork the safety net? Maybe I've missed safeguards that have been implemented since then, but it seems that Hive Power (and associated HP politics) control more than we like to admit.
Well connected in the fact they have to come together to agree on pushing updates. With that said, I don't think you could put the top 20 in the same room for an hour without a fight breaking out. There are several polar opinions, and geographically speaking, I think our witnesses are a pretty diverse group.
When comparing Hive to perfect censorship resistance, you see a ton of gaps. If you compare Hive to the current censorship resistance among other platforms, it's far advanced. Without the STEEM premine, Justin Sun would not have been able to take over the chain. To buy 30-40% of an organic token off the market, the supply would go insane. Imagine someone trying to buy 30% of all the Bitcoin in existence; it sas cheap at one point; why didnt anyone? The moment you try, the price flies away from you at an infinite rate. There is a threshold with supply and demand, and wanting a controlling stake of 30%+ destroys the supply side to the point it becomes impossible to do.
We have put in place a month's wait to use HP. Had we had this during the hostile takeover, we could have blocked exchange voting due to seeing it coming from a mile away.
The key point is no one person on Hive has a controlling stake, as far as to say no small grou[ has a controlling stake. You can see this in the proposal system, if the community wants something funded bad enough, without the top 5 stakeholders voting on it, it is still props that get past the returned proposal.
While not perfect, we are getting better and learning more. And of course, the community fork is the fail-safe, but that's after someone buys up most of the supply, making every single hiver incredibly rich in the process.
Thanks for the thorough reply here.