Yeah I get what you’re saying, every chain has its own issues. Monero isn’t perfect, as a miner since 2018, believe me, I get it. The difference is consensus comes from work, not stake weight or a handful of whales that basically run the chain. Yes, 51% of the hashrate was hit and an 18 block reorg took place, but miners stepped up pretty quick to stop it. At least with PoW you can see the attack coming, and it’s not just a matter of a few big wallets deciding how things go.
Hive showed with the Steem takeover that stake based governance is extremely fragile. That fight only worked because a bunch of dormant accounts woke up and voted. That’s not something you can count on happening every time. The top witnesses and a few whales basically run the show and can shut people down with downvotes or push things through if they want. Not to mention, they are really the only ones that run RPC nodes that allow access to the blockchain. There are only a small handful of full nodes out there, and most of them run on the same infrastructure, so if Privex ever goes down (major central point of failure for Hive), the chain is FUBAR.
With Monero, if someone wants to attack, they have to bring the hashpower. It’s open and anyone with a CPU can contribute, not just the people holding the most tokens which is basically what Hive is as far as consensus is concerned. PoW is not a popularity contest like DPoS is. That’s why I don’t rate Hive as highly decentralized. I like Hive for the social aspect and the decentralized database, but it’s not the same level of security and openness as a PoW chain.
To mitigate that you either implement more lanes for specific hardware (not relying only on randomx) or you put a “checkpoint” mechanism like Delayed Proof of Work.
The Steem takeover took place due to the ninjamined stake, so it was not a random whale with a huge stake that took control, in a fair DPoS scenario (no initial premine/ninjamine stake) it would have probably never happened.
I was around for all of that, I remember, and no, it wouldn't have happened without the pre-mine. But the issue is still that there is too much concentration with the top whales, and in a proof of stake ecosystem, that is nothing but centralization and creating a bottle neck for things to happen. To few people having too much power.
And yes, as much as I love the idea of the decentralization that CPU mining brings, there are reasons why most other chains have gone to ASICs. The latest BS with Qubic and the selfish mining does absolutely show the need for something to happen. It's why I have shifted from building a new Ryzen machine for XMR to getting another DOGE/LTC miner.
Something we could say though is that the STEEM initial distribution came from proof of work (we could argue fishy mining bug and the few participants but anyway). The ninjamine was something around 80% at the beginning while at the time of the attack way down to 30%, the nature of this system is that with time more and more stake goes in the hands of new accounts.
Of course then you have people just selling right away all the rewards etc but we can’t really force users to stay vested just to have a perfect DPoS system to show off.
Other DPoS and PoS systems have way bigger problems than Hive as there’s no way to redirect inflation to new users joining like we have here and I admit I would not put a dime in them.
As for Monero, it had a mining bug too coming from Bytecoin that lasted I believe 2/3 weeks before they fixed it and we don’t really know due to its privacy how many coins people who exploited the bug could get.
So yeah in conclusion, nothing is perfect, but Hive works pretty well compared to other DPoS systems where I totally agree with your arguments.