Contrary to what I have heard from others I do not believe that most of the witnesses are just out for personal gain.
Perhaps a better way to put it is that many consensus witnesses and certain larger whales wish to see the status quo remain as it is. That is, lots of token grinding at the top and crumbs sprinkled to those below.
One good example of retaining the status quo is that the original HIVE fork did not deal with something as simple as witness vote retention. A new witness has to win enough support to surpass Jerry "Can Suck His Own Cock" Banfield (who holds the 91st witness slot as of this writing) on their way to consensus witness. Such inactive witnesses keep up and coming active witnesses off of the top 100 list and invisible to most users; which intentionally or not promotes the status quo. Why not a list of all active witnesses? Just sayin'.
In fact there were no new technological developments in the original HIVE fork. The main purpose seemed to be more administrative. Things like moving STINC's stake to the SPS slush fund guarded by @gtg's Return Proposal (#0) which raises the bar on what the community can endorse on their own without the V.22.2 Cabal's approval. Of course the Cabal have enough stake to pass their own initiatives like the afterthought of a $30k tip to everyone's Sweetheart.
We are in agrement that most witnesses are not out for personal gain. They are likely paying for their server(s) out of their own pocket. Love of the community keeps them blinded to the fact they are being taken as chumps by those token grinding at the top and wanting things to stay that way.
If you think that the Community can simply vote them out and that HIVE's great decentralisation has given us that ability, then let's have a look how things stand even with the STINC stake hidden out of any accounts in the SPS slush fund ...
I've been in discussions about this with @blocktrades a couple of weeks ago and the witnesses and developers are going to look in to a "witness vote decay" system (after this latest HF24 that's coming up). The idea here is that the power of your witness vote will decay over a period of 9 months if you don't change or update your witness votes. Hopefully this will start putting the inactive and stale witnesses down and out.
I suggested that it should really be based on when that witness was last active rather than the votes that are given to them.
The discussion is still ongoing as to the best system but join the "Hive Governance" community and put your ideas forward to discuss this.
Personally, I think education on the witnesses and voting is paramount and something often overlooked. Will be writing a post or two about how governance works on Hive in the future but as @steevc replied, Dolphins and Orcas combined can have a say as well - looking at your chart, there's 65% of the total HP that isn't in whales hands so things are changing, it will take time.
Particularly if the massive STINC ninja mined stake, in the SPS slush fund, finds its way into that 35% creating the same ninja stake problem with a different chain.
Nice to hear it is at least part of the conversation. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah there's quite the loot there! Wonder how much an upvote from that account would be worth considering it's growing by a substantial amount each day with the 10% right?
I think most witnesses are smart enough to know what goes on. They need to call out those who just exploit the system. Orcas and dolphins hold a lot of HP between them.
Witness votes should fade over time if not renewed.
Of course there is the fear of retribution if you call people out.