There are several ways to look at how this all unfolded, and questions will all ways be there as to the why of it and the different spin people put on it. I am glad to see the almost finalization to this. I would have preferred this was not needed at all. That once the initial airdrop was done it was all over. Hive was not created to just be a mirror of steem, it was created because a few people felt it was needed and could be a violable option to a centralized steem block chain and return control to a decentralized state to continue on with the decentralized experiment.
No one is excluded from joining or participating on the Hive block chain. Had the individuals that made the split just ignored all the outcry of unfair and ended it at that one air drop, then we may have been a lot closer to correcting the Issue that led to the split. The Witness selection and retention system.
Much of what you say is true. If you were excluded, and you were not a part of some grand conspiracy to centralize the blockchain, would you want to continue with Hive? Bear in mind, that you were just excluded from the airdrop, and that exclusion was based on failing to unvote. Do you think the existing witnesses will be likely to evolve the blockchain in such a way where witness votes decay? They'd be imposing upon themselves an uncertain future and signing up for a lot of extra work with regards to campaigning.
I read the Hive post about the split. I understood it. I am not a crypto person and I had delegated my witness voting to another individual. I checked with that person to ensure they were not voting Sun's witnesses. To me it was a simple and easy thing to understand.
Now even if I did not understand it, I would still have been fine with not being air dropped. It was My Responsibility to understand it if I wanted to participate and receive the air drop.
I may have started a power down a little bit sooner than I did if I did not receive the air drop, and then learned how to convert that steem into hive to power up and participate in the Hive block chain.
This is what I am hoping for on the Hive Block Chain, a reworking of the Witness Selection/Retention system. I am hoping that this will be the very first fix that comes in after the final split HF 24. It is also part of the reason I am not doing a full power down on Steem, if Hive is going to end up like steem with a centralized governing body, then I will have to re-evaluate what option I want to participate in.
There are currently witnesses that are keeping people informed of their intents, there are people that are not witnesses that are thinking of becoming one so that they can have a say in changes. If a witness does not want to engage with the people, if they do not want to lobby with the people, if they do not want to put the time in to let the people know what they are doing/thinking then they may find they are no longer a witness. Once again it falls on the People to accept responsibility for their own actions and choices made.
The Vote Decay is a thing that really needs to be done. Witness are not the Dictators of Hive, they are not the Judge, Jury, and Executioners of Hive Governance, they are an elected body. I hope like hell that one comment/post I saw does not happen and that is people wanting to be witnesses forming into a two party political system. Talk about stagnation as a chain we would have that with a political system.
At the time that you read that, if you had voted for Sun's socks or a proxy who voted for his socks, it would have been too late, and you would have gotten excluded from the airdrop based on the arbitrary metrics. It wasn't if you vote for Sun, we're going to fuck you. It was, fuck you, you voted for Sun. And most of those people, especially the proxied votes, may have voted months before Sun arrived on the scene. Let me see if I can dig up the GitHub that shows the metrics.
It will be interesting to see if witnesses impose vote decay
on themselves. My guess is that they won't desire to do that.