"...with decentralization Hive is made resilient."
I completely agree. The corrolary is also true, that centralization on Hive reduces it's resilience, weakens it, and threatens it's very existence. That is a problem, because Hive is a pure Plutocracy, in which the size of one's bag determines one's power to govern, and nothing is more centralizable than money. In fact that is money's primary purpose, as legacy industry has depended on pools of capital to provide collective industrial manufacturing infrastructure upon which civil society has depended, and which enabled profit to increase the size of the bags investors possessed.
Steem proved that centralization of power is an existential threat to Hive, to the community upon which Hive depends, and Sun Yuchen showed that centralizing governance through centralizing stake on Hive can destroy the utility of Hive to the Hive community. I contend, and always have, that the real value of Hive is it's community, and the resistance to censorship that enables the community to confer, take each the others' counsel, and decide matters of consequence is of critical importance to the Hive community.
As a result of this understanding, I have long opposed opinion flagging, which demonstrably weakens the community by preventing forthright discussion of matters of consequence. Because of the plutocratic nature of Hive governance, nothing more valuable than money enables opinion flagging to censor the discussion of matters of import to the community, and this not only impacts the individuals censored, but the entire community, deprived of voices that would broaden it's discussion and avail understanding, steering discussion into a preferred narrative by substantial stakeholders.
Yesterday it was revealed that discussions have been ongoing regarding HBD interest, and decisions have been made that the community has not participated in that affect the entire community substantially. Since I disagree with the decision and have had no ability to provide reasons to those implementing that decision, because I do not swing a heavy bag on Hive, I am merely availed the power to vote with my feet. I assure you that this is not beneficial to the Hive community, and that availing the community of ample opportunity to participate in discussion of consequential matters is preferable to Hive than simply swinging a heavy bag in imposing plutocratic government.
We shall see how this works out, because Hive governors, the consensus witnesses, have no ability to restrict how the community votes with it's feet, and are limited to restricting how they participate in consequential discusssions and vote their stake. I appreciate your personal dedication to the power of decentralization to create maximally robust and competent civil society, and hope that dedication includes an aversion to centralization the demonstrably weakens and threatens Hive, by disempowering the community from forthright discussion and participation in governance.
Frankly, Hive is too centralized, and always has been. I doubt the current implementation of plutocratic power will significantly impact the community, but I am absolutely confident that some such will, and that potential reveals not only an existential threat to Hive, but blatantly reveals that the community can be better benefited through improved censorship resistance and decentralization of governance. As Hive has failed, and I fully expect Hive to continue to do so, to increase decentralization of governance, I will again reiterate that competition will arise that eventually provides a preferable governance model, and improved censorship resistance. Since I do not want Hive to fail, I counsel decentralizing governance, and increasing censorship resistance.
Thanks!
If we remove stake-based governance from discussion on decentralization we are still left with a copy of the chain on various servers all over the world and also on their backups which are often in other parts of the world. We know that, unrelated to the hostile takeover or any of that, that it is possible to snapshot the chain (as with it being possible to snapshot anything) and it's a ledger of sequence, meaning it's possible to cut the end off. Forking it is also possible and actually encouraged as its an open source project (forks are uncommon and difficult but if done right can be a non-crypto tool for exploration in development). The first thing that happened when I heard that Stinc was selling to JS was message my buddy tell him, be ready to fork. That was months prior to anything happening. The chain itself is now after all the advancements that BT's team has undertaken, particularly OBI, is second to none. It would've never reached this level if it wasn't for adversity.
Your reference to governance in relation to management of the chain is a different aspect of decentralization. With the HBD for instance, the more communication there is the better. There are people here on chain who are experts in financial strategy and its not necessarily the witnesses as our job is to be proficient in providing quality hardware and server management first and foremost. Everyone who has something to say should say it. It would be unwise and frankly stupid to disregard the advice of someone with a well-referenced argument with the weight of their education behind it. That weight is more important than the weight of a wallet and anyone with a large stake knows that financial management is not a joke. The self-censorship due to downvotes can be avoided even on chain; send an encrypted memo for instance if the message is to a specific person or small group. It is a known problem though, I'm not going to deny it, which stems from posts being all about pleasing the voter and if the voter is displeased then something is wrong. It's a challenge that has to be resolved via frontends, not via the protocol, however. This can turn into a long discussion on possible solutions which I don't want to waste your time getting into now.
I personally believe everything I wrote and I'm here and was here because of decentralization and the lack of functional censorship (I consider voting as superficial censorship) as no matter what happens, that information, whatever it is, is on the chain. It's not coming off, even with a chain like Steem with a broken protocol it's not possible to eradicate earlier records. I ran freedom of speech boards and platforms for many years and I closed down and eradicated all the backups when attacks on freedom of speech became the norm, over a decade ago now. I can't eradicate anything here and neither can anyone else as all that happens, as with the takeover, is the chain forks, it doesn't disappear. The entire purpose of centralization is to make truth disappear. Here, good luck.
What we need to improve on is inclusion and communication. No steps are going to be enough as there is no real measure of success. It's just cyclical improvement.
Eradicating the truth is just a means to control people. It is when the truth is known to people that it has value. The No Hiding theorem that states information cannot be lost to the universe, that if local evolution destroys information at a place it yet remains to the universe because of non-local copies that can be derived from it's impact on non-local events, only matters to us.
The truth only matters to people.