The accounts are going down because most people are here to make money but the rewards are going down.

The solution to that is to more widely distribute Hive tokens to new and extant users that aren't getting them.

Whales want new investors to come in and bleed fresh money into the system they capture most of. Whales compensate for the inflation by increasing their capture and facility of ROI - but this is counterproductive to the platforms need to grow it's userbase, and that's why users and activity are declining, along with the price. Less market means less interest in the token, which means price going down. Gene is right. If the oligarchy captures 90% of the stake on the platform, the value of the token will go to zero, and so will the users.

Whales capturing more tokens is the opposite of the solution. It is what is killing Hive. They need to change course or find a new investment to mine, because they've dropped Hive to it's knees and it's about to collapse. They can profit more than by continually increasing their stake of a decreasingly valuable token by increasing the decentralization of stake, to attract and retain users, which will increase the market for the token and cause the price to rise, enabling their tokens to provide them capital gains that exceed inflation.

Were they able to release their death grip on governance this could happen. First I would recommend they insulate governance and witness election from plutocracy, because someone or group with more money could just come in and take over, and bleed all the value out of the system like Valueplan is trying to do RN. Enabling actual democracy of individual users to elect witnesses would work, as would other mechanisms, like reputation to contribute to vote weight. If they can do this then - and only then - will Hive survive.

The inevitable consequence of continually centralizing stake in an oligarchy is an absence of any other cohort with any stake at all, and the oligarchy ends up like the mythical dragon sleeping on a pile of gold coins that have no monetary value, because no one else has any so they have to use something else as money. It's not like other kinds of money are scarce either.