Steem was 'taken over' because Steemit Inc (a centralised company) had access to a huge pre-mine of tokens.
With Steem's delegated proof-of-stake governance, this pre-mine essentially gave Stemmit Inc total control over governance.
So when Steemit Inc saw Justin Sun's $$ signs flashing in front of their eyes, they sold the company along with the controlling stake of pre-mined STEEM tokens.
Justin Sun now had total control of the chain by using this stake to vote his own 20 witnesses in.
But the community said no thanks, forked the chain and made Steemit Inc's pre-mine into the Hive DAO to fund development.
This took that massive stake out of play when it comes to governance on Hive and added an extra layer of security via token distribution.
I'll let you do some digging into the actual numbers, but no single account currently holds more than something like 5% of the total HIVE supply.
This means that if someone wanted to take control of governance via accumulating enough stake to vote for 20 witnesses of their own (like Sun did to Steem), they would have to buy HIVE off the market.
The amount of HIVE required would see the price of HIVE pushed to ridiculous levels and still there's no guarantee they would be able to accumulate enough stake to take control.
After what happened to Sun, the risks are too high for any sane billionaire to even try pissing away their money and time to take control of the Hive blockchain.
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I guess in the end it was kind of a good thing because we ended up with something much better.
I don't know if things would naturally evolve to what Hive is now but we have something really good going on
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta