Hive is not truly decentralized. It is a semi decentralized but that's necessary for the scalability requirements.
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Hive is not truly decentralized. It is a semi decentralized but that's necessary for the scalability requirements.
Decentralizations means you don't need to ask one's permission to build apps, communities and other projects on the chain. Anyone can build apps on Hive, use all the user data, entire social graph, objects, attention bids available on the chain. Permissionless is the fundamental requirement for rapid innovation.
In terms of distribution of HIVE ownership, it is also rather decentralized. 30% of HIVE is now owned by 35 accounts. In the world of blockchains, this is very much decentralized.
Lol, it only takes 15 people to change that in Hive. That's why I am calling it semi decentralized.
Ok, so you are talking about the DPOS itself and the 20 top witnesses (and 15 of them can implement a hard fork). Well, this is a long discussion with lots of good arguments on both sides.
But what I want to focus on, is that true decentralization in that respect (implementing code updates) comes at a huge cost to innovation. We are nowhere close (blockchain base code) to the final version. We are still heavily experimenting. We solved many attack vectors, but we still need SMTs and a bunch of other things.
Once you'll have a blockchain version with a consensus that you would like to freeze for longer, sure, extend the list of witnesses to 200, reduce number of simultaneous witness votes and your are done. It will be super hard to introduce the next upgrade (change rules) after that.