Decentralized means there is no single point of authority. This is given. The definition doesn't say anything about everyone having exactly the same say. By your definition Bitcoin isn't decentralized, as the biggest miners could change the protocol and everyone else's more would be running on a fork.
Everyone can run a node, everyone can be a witness. Like with every other coin, getting to produce a big amount of blocks requires a big investment.
And people don't become whales over night, or in a month. How many new whales have been created in the months before? That measure is useless.
And for the last part, there are rewards on medium for successful authors.
So a company owned by two or more people is decentralized?
If one pool has > 51%, would people still trust Bitcoin? With Steem being in the hands of 21 witnesses, no one complains, weird.
No one is allowed to complain about politics because anyone can be the next president.
You are going to be a whale within minutens when buying a huge load of Steem.
Why are you asking me? You claimed to personally know people buying so many Steem suddenly.
A company is a single entity of its own. It can be shut down, steem can't.
And there is no way for anyone outside of that entity to have influence on the owners (except for the state). Steem witnesses influence is decided on in a decentralized way, not by appointing themselves.
The only thing you could criticize there is that some shareholders have a bigger saying than others, depending on the size of their stake. But that's 1) unavoidable in a p2p network and 2) understandable, because they have the most to lose when the platform develops in a direction they don't see as desirable.
Why weird? As you say, it's 21 (actually it's a lot more), not one.
Anyone, but not everyone. Nothing holds you back from becoming a witness today.
Yes, people. Not one single person. One of them went from close to 0 to half-whale, but that's the best I can offer so far.
My question was how many did this before the hardfork?
i suggest you, to read something about the "ninja mining" of steem.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.60 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.240
if you use the stake as only parameter to measure vote weight, the ("initial") distribution has to be faire
perhaps mind changing for you:
source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07310.pdf
for me this was kind of mind changing. i dont like dpos anymore
I don't need to read on this, and it won't change my mind, as I was there nearly from the start ;) Which is a proof that it was not as "ninja" as some people like to make it seem. Yes, there were only a few people interested in getting into it, and I do agree with the distribution being one of the big problems we had. It's been improved on a lot though, there are many big holders who got in later.
It's still hard to get into/stay in the top witnesses without massive whale support, and especially one miner account has an unproportionately high say in who's up there. It needs more time and more people interested in investing significantly to fix these issues.