"Maybe not that pure."
Nothing but stake determines whose votes for witnesses prevail. I am unable to conceive of a more purely plutocratic method of governance, but that doesn't mean much because I am not very politically competent.
I am here too. Hive has all the structural components of a voluntarist government, and more. All that is preventing Hive from becoming an entirely voluntarist government is that more - the plutocratic control of witnesses, DV's, and the lack of political will. Curation rewards are unnecessary, but that is less about governance than content quality and ROI being more predictable and easy for substantial stakes to attain via HBD savings.
I'm not holding my breath for these changes. In fact I bloviate far too often recommending them instead, but hope springs eternal. It remains possible that BT, Smooth, GTG, and the rest can adopt these changes any time they want and usher in the future of freedom.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such fundamental changes. I always say that Hive is imperfect, but that doesn't mean it's not better than a lot of alternatives where you rely on a single company for everything.
If we are not relying on stake then what is the alternative?
We have a mix of witnesses and some really disagree with others. That seems healthy to me.
Healthy disagreement is fine. It won't matter when a big enough shark shows us, as Sun Yuchen did, again what pure plutocracy is.
Human society has myriad values, and clearly economics is very important. However, finance isn't the same thing as economic. Money isn't wealth. A lot of things we can buy with money are wealth, and some of them are life itself, but that money is just a mechanism to facilitate commerce, and isn't wealth itself. This entire aspect of society is poorly understood, as is obvious by the extraordinary dysfunctionality of the global economy, and the many economic substructures that contribute to it, right down to our personal finances.
There is a lot very wrong with financialization, and no one both rational and honest denies that.
A great many values people have far exceed the worth of money to them. Mike Tyson said that his promoter, Don King, would sell his mother for a dollar. Clearly Tyson correctly observed that was not a rational thing to do, and almost no one would enslave their dear mother for such a paltry sum. Some of us wouldn't do it for any price at all, in fact. Our loved ones, our food, air, and water, and much else, is far more valuable than mere money, and the stake-weighting mechanism is an attempt to use money as a metric by which all these values are incorporated. However, some psychopaths just don't have the ability to even conceive of other people as human beings with rights and value like themselves, but only see objects they can manipulate to gain wealth they want. When such psychopaths have high IQ and gain fortunes, woe betide the people that are subject to their rule.
Several of the people I have talked to on Hive with substantial stake deeply discount other values, and don't much care about people, society, or things besides their personal wealth and power. This is predictable, because people that only value themselves and their wealth will act on that value system accordingly and ignore everything but gaining wealth. Financial wealth is not society. People are society. Financial wealth is not the only value people have, and restricting political power to financial wealth is going to favor people that care only about money, while deprecating all other human values, such as mothers, love, and affection that are utterly fundamental to society.
If Hive is to be a society of people, we are going to have to interject those other values into governance of Hive, because failing to do so will favor psychopaths that actually have no other values than their own wealth and power. Even if none of the oligarchy of Hive are currently psychopaths, which I cannot ascertain by any stretch of the imagination, eventually their other values besides wealth and power will leave them unable to outcompete psychopaths that have no other values and have more financial power. We need other metrics of value than money, or money is going to be the only value Hive has. I am confident that AI is more competent to amass Hive tokens than most people, and eventually Hive will become little more than bots competing for the rewards pool.
We need to prevent that, or be resigned to eventually abandoning Hive as incapable of human society and being nothing more than a game played by psychopaths running bots.
I am not The Guru to correctly balance the values of human society, code up a governance mechanism, and forcibly impose it on Hive. Those are things we are going to have to discuss and hopefully come to agreement about, manage to get coded, and convince whales that is what is necessary - or abandon Hive they have the stake to control regardless of our whinging - until it collapses or is taken from them by someone with more money, as was Steem.
Your comments are longer than my posts :)
You may guess that I am not purely driven by money and there are people on Hive who just want to pay the bills rather than worry about getting rich. Even the big players may be driven by other things as they could make an easier buck elsewhere. Maybe it's about power, but ruling over this tiny community is not going to be that satisfying. I've met quite a few of them and made up my own mind.
I'd hope it's not just bots here, but things are changing rapidly. I'll do what I think is best and that's not always to my gain.
I think defences are in place to reduce the chances of another hostile takeover, but you just never know what will happen. I'm along for the ride.