Is Hive decentralized and who governs it?

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(Edited)

Une version en français de ce post est disponible - ici

Although they claim that their governance is decentralized, the majority of blockchains find themselves being directed by a handful of whales because of how significant their cumulative weight is.

Where we come from

This was the case of the Steem blockchain which has never succeeded in attracting enough smaller investors, and whose "ninja-mining" liability (an operation which consists of its founders to allocate themselves a significant number of tokens at the launch of a blockchain project) weighted heavily on its governance.

This is still the case and we can even say that this situation has now worsened:

To date, almost 56% of the Steem Power has now concentrated in the hands of 22 whales accounts, which gives them absolute decision-making power over the evolution of the blockchain. Considering it requires a bit more than 50% to effectively control the blockchain, this number can be reduced to the top 11 whales (by order of SP).

Add to this that the 4 most powerful accounts are controlled by Justin Sun, who therefore own 42.87% of the available SP, this will give you an idea of how "decentralized" the Steem blockchain database is.

Even by uniting all of them, other users would not be able to counterbalance such power.

Where we moved to

When we forked from Steem to Hive, we removed that "Sword of Damocles" hanging over us that were these ninja-mined tokens. This completely redistributed the cards and generated a better balance of power:

Today, the group of whales has 31 accounts but now only hold 35.74% of the Hive Power.

The 2,196 accounts that make up the orcas and dolphins groups weigh more than the whales with their cumulated 48.89% of Hive Power

These whales no more control the blockchain and the middle class can now confidently influence its own future!

Is Hive really decentralized?

Despite many possible criticisms of the use of decentralized terminology with regard to Hive, I think we have made a huge leap in this direction.

We demonstrated that we had a mobilizable and mobilized community when we fought against the installation of sockpuppet witnesses by Justin Sun.

It is this same community that is still active on Hive and, thanks to the increased power at its disposal, can today manage its destiny more freely by using its voting rights.

By voting for the witnesses who ensure the security of the blockchain, by supporting the witnesses who propose new development directions or relay proposals from the community that correspond to your opinions, you can influence the governance of the Hive ecosystem.

And today more than ever, this influence is no longer centralized in the hands of only a few individuals.

You have a voice, use it!

Do you think Hive is not decentralized enough?
Do you think there is still room for improvement?

I'm here to listen. Share your thoughts!



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Today, the group of whales has 31 accounts but now only hold 35.74% of the Hive Power.
The 2,196 accounts that make up the orcas and dolphins groups weigh more than the whales with their cumulated 48.89% of Hive Power

These whales no more control the blockchain and the middle class can now confidently influence its own future!

You could also say that if the whales own enough (50% or something) orca accounts, then they control the blockchain. 31 people.

If I can work that out in 5 mins while reading your post, I'm sure people cleverer than me can see the ease of how this could be achieved, and how - with anon sock puppets accounts, control is relatively easy.

(I'm only posting this to point out that naivety and happy clappy wishful thinking doesn't count for squat outside of the hive ecosystem. It's the biggest weakness in the steem/hive setup since it's inception, and the one perspective that's berated - and attacked- when bursting the bubble)

I hope that you're correct in your positive outlook.
History and experience tells me differently ,unfortunately.
I hope I'm incorrect.

I've shared my thoughts - no need to downvote me. lol

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts @lucylin.
I agree with you that some whales could have additional (weighty) account(s). This is also something that was previously possible on Steem.
So, all other things being equal, hopefully we are still in a better situation.

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I suppose we can just trust human nature to continue to be what it is, and in the meantime actively create a system of autonomous self governance. That being said, Hive may not be the final evolution of this community, but it is a step in the right direction.

It is unrealistic to expect whales to be altruistic all the time. The rest of the users must hold the major stakeholders accountable by taking on more individual responsibility.

This blockchain and its evolution is a grand experiment in human nature and self governance. This is one thing that thrills me about being involved.

It's an amazing experiment.

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Well its not ideal, but totally agreed that we made a giant leap forward decentralization.

I'm very curious about the overall blockchain governance topic and I'm reading some papers on the topic atm.

One of the things that keeps being mentioned is account reputations, etc. Like stake alone is not enough for the governance but some form of account reputation (weighted stake). Will try to make some summarized post on the topic soon.

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I can't wait to see what you discovered in your readings.
IMHO, account's reputation is not governance-related. It's just a social indicator.
This being said, I agree with you that the current system is flawed and should be replaced.

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(Edited)

There is always a room for improvement.

For example many Hivers don't take witness voting even seriously and don't vote at all. Some don't even know it exists. Or they are not voting for any proposals, that's also bad.

This way a lot of the things HIVE blockhain offers is still in hands of a very small minority that know about this stuff.

There should also be a witness voting decay.

So how to convince people to vote? I myself was thinking of creating a community witness that would share it's rewards. If you would vote for this witness and also 29 others, you would share the rewards or something like that. It's in the making. I will make a post about it later to know opinions of others.

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Thank you for your feedback @eirik

many Hivers don't take witness voting...

While I agree with you that the lack of involvement in witnesses and proposals vote is sad, I believe this is more a "user education" than a "blockchain and its rules" issue.
It takes time for people to deep dive into all the blockchain mechanisms and some are not even aware of their favorite (d)app is running on top of a blockchain, which can also be considered a good thing.

There should also be a witness voting decay.

This is being currently discussed.

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People should only vote for witnesses they trust. There's absolutely no need to use all 30 votes.

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True. No need to use all 30, but even 1 is better than 0.

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One possibility would be to allow people to stack their witness votes.
Many people don't even know 30 witnesses, why they cannot f.e. add for 10 witnesses they know the 30 votes, 3 for everybody. This would also cut down the influence of the whales, as in the moment you have no chance to overvote a whale cause he has 30-times more power than you, but if you could stack your votes it would be in another way at least if the whale want to determine 20 or 30 witnesses (clear you need also high Hivepower, but f.e. in the moment if you have 50% of the hivepower of a whale - every vote has double power than yours, if you could stack f.e. three votes with your 10 votes you had 50% more power than the whale you voted for 30 witnesses).

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This sounds interesting.

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Do we have richlist on Hive like on Steem? So anyone can verify this data of the holder the largest power to the least holder?

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Yes: https://hivebuzz.me/ranking (sort by HP)

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Does anyone here know if there is a way to check exactly what actions make a reputation of an individual user go up or down? Like a reputation log?

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You can read this post
Although it was written for Steem, it is still relevant for Hive.

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(Edited)

Thanks, I had a read. I suppose I'm just curious why I went from 69 to 67 about three weeks ago and had not received any downvotes from anyone. Possibly an adjustment in the system. Anyways, I'm not judging my life worth by it, just curious.

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Well that is one side of (de)centralisation. Isnt that there is still the witnesses (top 20) that are still top 20? Or 10? But that is still one side of the medal... how many witnesses and servers are running at the same provider? What if that provider is taken over them down by goverment or goes bankrupt? I have the feeling that 90%of all the servers is runner at one organisation. Yes they do their job good... they deliver witnesses for 40? Dollar a month they have the knowhow. But.... still 1 company rules them all. That's why I juse another company and still 3 weeks busy with installing mira on that server. I think this time it will go through replay (now 3? Or 4 days busy with replaying again and at 50%) I'm using contabo second ssd vps package. I don't say the other company doesn't do their job but talking about centralisation is also talking about the servers the blockchain runs on.

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I have the feeling that 90%of all the servers is runner at one organisation

Sorry to say but your" feeling" might be all wrong. Nodes are run all over the world, in different countries, with different provides.
I personally run 4 nodes in 3 different countries, 4 different locations and 3 different providers. And I know a lot of my fellow witnesses doing the same.

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Do you think Hive is not decentralized enough?

No

Do you think there is still room for improvement?

Yes there is.

Decentralization is a process, not a destination. Things are moving in the proper direction which is important. It might be slow but it is heading that way. Each month, we see the Whales power drop and other categories improve.

We are also seeing more nodes added and the blockchain development spread among different people.

Plus, we now have people acquiring wealth using the H-E tokens meaning, if they wanted, they could convert some to HP.

We came a long way in three years in terms of the token distribution. I look forward to seeing where we will be in another two years.

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"Despite many possible criticisms of the use of decentralized terminology with regard to Hive, I think we have made a huge leap in this direction."

I absolutely agree.

Thanks!

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We think that from Steemit to Hive we have done a quantum leap in the right direction of decentralization.

we-the-people is a witness that try to propose a new point of view about how really
decentralize the governance of Hive first using Dpoll to ask users what do they think about what to do.

The fact is that, also here in Hive, a very few people, that de facto are a closed club of whales, have too much power.
The smallest is this club, the easier is to repeat the bad experience that we all face in Steemit.

What we can do?

  • better distribute producer rewards (more to small, less to the first 20)
  • reduce the number of witness that a user can vote (less that 20!)
  • balance number of votes and power of voter creating witness rank
  • eliminate downvotes
  • ask people what to do using pools or in any other way
  • create a Proof of Activity that ranks users based on how much they produce value for Hive (the more you post and/or you vote etc. the more you go up in the rank) and use this rank to balance the VP

These are the first things to do, in our opinion.

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(Edited)

Thank you for your feedback.

Although dpool is an interesting tool, it is not "the perfect tool" that can lead to good governance
We all know that survey questions can be guided and do not allow users to express their opinions in a nuanced way.

I agree with you that the witness reward scale should be reviewed.
About the number of witness votes and voting power, I invite you to read this interesting analysis from @raycoms

Eliminate downvotes

Can you elaborate on why you want downvotes removed?

create a Proof of Activity ranks users based on how much they produce value for Hive

Can you tell us how to quantify "how much they produce value for Hive"?
We already have a ranking of users based on their activity and other criteria.
Number of posts, comments, votes, ... each of these values can be easily manipulated. It's then more PoB (Proof of Bot) than PoA. So I'm not sure it's a good idea to rebalance VP on these.

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I agree that Dpoll is far from being perfect, but is just something to start with.
When you create a poll a user can always write in the comment everything he wants.
We can implement something better or just ask Dpoll to do some work on it, we-the-people have done some polls and we think that the results are interesting, even if the number of answers are very low.

In my opinion the first action about witness votes are not allow a single user to decide all the top 20 witness, a minimal way is to downsize votes below 20, better, I think 10.
Yes, you can split your power in many users, it's a little bit more complex, but you can do it, but not in an hour, it takes some time.
I think that a balancing of VP and number of users can be the best but not perfect solution approach.
I think that as far as one person can have multiple account all we can do is mitigate the problem but not solve.

Downvote is the greater power in the hand of whales, until there are downvotes no one can have free to speech, that's all.
It is so simple just to not vote a post, no reason to have also e downvote.

We have reputation but is computed in a very strange way, in any case what we think is completely different, because reputation can only go up, in a normal situation.

What we propose is a dynamic value that rank a user in a window of time, i.e. the famous 7 days.
You can be very active this week and no more the next, your rank changes, and reflect what you do in the last seven days (or can be in the last month).
Can be manipulated? Yes, we are back to the question, if we can use automated systems, bot, multiple account and so on everything can be manipulated, but not so easily and not for a long time.

Active user are who let all of us make money and make sense to Hive in general, so activity has a great value, also for whales, if no one post will be impossible to vote and do a curation.

We think that this point is not so clear to all whales.

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Downvotes have nothing to do with freedom of speech! Downvotes are about reward pool allocation.
Remove it and you will get tons of abusers who will deprive the legit authors of their deserved payout.
My opinion is you are tackling the problem from the wrong side.

...reputation can only go up, in a normal situation.

Tell me about your reputation as a human, if you screw up with your friends, your boss, your family,... Will your reputation go up?
But maybe we should first agree on a definition of "a normal situation".

I do not know of any good example where reputation (i.e. trust) is linked to the level of activity, especially in a limited amount of time.
If this is your only criteria, my bots will always have a better reputation than me, at all times, because they are much more inexhaustible, patient and persevering than me.

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I think that whales have no idea about how downvotes is an hammer in wrong hands.
If you remember your blacklist recent episode you have to agree that the perception of downvote bad power over people is very high.
Downvote are a bad solution for a real problem.
Let's try to find a better solution.
We think that just do not vote a post is all you need to stop plagiarism and other bad thinks.
If you are a little account and post plagiarized content and have 0 rewards, you will stop very soon.
Downvote can be used to silence, intimidate, fear this is what could happen, or, this is what the small accounts feels can happen.

We are non speaking about reputation, we are speaking about Proof of Activity, a value that allow to determine, in a block of time, how much you contribute to the community.
Reputation is about you are a good guy or a bad guy.
PoA is about how much active you are in a period of time, you can be a good guy doing nothing at all.
How to understand if you use a posting bot?
This is a good question, and is a general problem on Hive and the same can be asked about reputation and any aspect of Hive, until you let people use bots and multiple account I think that this problem can be hardly solved, but we can try to mitigate in many ways.
i.e you can create two types of users, if you want you can have a verified account, that have some privileges or an anonymous account, like now.

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I think of downvotes like this...

1.) someone is breaking into a store to steal money that someone else earned. The store owner is inside and begins shooting. He may or may not kill (Lower to negative rep) the abuser. But it serves as a reminder of consequences.

2.) while an offender is breaking into the store, the community rises up and neutralizes their offender.

And lastly:
2.) just as a weapon can be used to defend, a bad person can use it to harass. Someone with 40k HP can destroy people's accounts with the click of a button. Someone with 15k HP can take the account of someone with 500HP to negative rep for any reason.

The last is a bad situation, obviously. Have people done it? Yes. But is it common, no. So why kneejerk because it happened a few times in a few years?

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If you does NOT vote for him, he can NOT stole at all, is very simple.

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@we-the-people that’s not at all what happens and you know it.

It makes me wonder if you have been caught doing something you shouldn’t. After all, we don’t defend the rapist from punishment with “if women would just sew themselves shut...”

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@we-the-people here is even evidence of #3

Doesn’t mean I’m going to change my mind on the subject. We need it to get rid of those who rape the reward pool.

Ask yourself why this person would object to this comment...
2A77ED72-4C9B-43CE-8C5C-29953C0DA6E5.png

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(Edited)

@we-the-people here to prove #3 is @worldcapture

Because I spoke in favor of someone trying to hide her sins from Hive-Watchers, she gave life to “the wicked flee when none pursueth” and for all her shame couldn’t recognize someone saying her account wasn’t a managed account, and called me racist, and then I reported another account (a friend of hers) to buildawhale for skipping the plagiarism blacklist and bragging to me about it, and here we are where she comes to downvote everything I post because she assumes that I cannot afford to drop $500 in leased HP and fight back.

While rare that it is abused this way, it doesn’t mean that downvoting is a bad thing. It just means that she is a bad person and everyone she tricks into joining her is ignorant.

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Wait, what? Hahahaha what are you even saying here?

You are a disgusting, racist, Islamophobic piece of dirt, that's why I flag you. And I will continue to flag you until you are gone from this platform. I will never accept any kind of racism.

And now get lost!

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You said that’s where you found me lol

It’s ironic that the one who assumed that I was being racist simply because I suggested she has poor reading comprehension skills is calling someone else racist. Did you not judge me and assume I am racist because we are of different skin tones?

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I don't even know what this post or previous conversation is about. All I do is flag everything you post or comment because you are disgusting piece of shit.

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I obviously value anything a vote farmer and friend to plagiarists has to say.

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Please tell me the significance of your relationship with Tron?

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i dont agree with the second and fourth point. downvoting is a necessary tool to stop people from profiting from illegal activities. less votes will cause people to only select a few top witnesses, giving small witnesses like your self no chance.

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I’m wondering.. I got censored on Steemit. My whole blog deleted. Some users funds have been stolen... can’t this happen on Hive as well? The witnesses are in control right? So what if?...

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There's a little app I'd love to see: something like a questionnaire which all Hivians can answer (especially witnesses) and then gives you an indication of which witnesses might match your kind of feelings.

I would put in there various questions on attitudes toward the future of Hive, development areas and all the stuff that gets debated in way too many obscure threads and off site for most people to ever get around to seeing.

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I think this app already exists: the Hive blockchain and its many user interfaces.

This could be achieved by creating a dedicated community or using an existing one.
Have your questions posted there and wait for witnesses and users to answer and debate.

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it's definitely better. The most important thing for me is "stability"

Now what i mean by this is that i don't have to worry each week about any ned,justin or "insert a name" and their decisions. So now i only expect good things to happen each day and not the uncertainty of whether or not i will lose everything in here.

the room for improvement is vast, we need to gain new members and make hive known. We also make the current members stay by supporting them with both votes and engagement

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it is better but still not good .

you want to decentralize it air drop the stincs stake to people. for example bring every account one level up excluding the whales . now if your 31% 48% is correct this proposal should fly. but you will find out that this proposal would not even get attention ..... why because it is still centralized.

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There could be other reasons why such a proposal would not get support. One of them being the fact that some do not agree with it.

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I think that Hive is not decentralized enough, cause in the end you control the whole blockchain if you have 50% + 0.001 HP - why this is enough to determine 100% of the Top-30-witnesses ?

Really decentralized would mean in my opinion that a person or group who hold 5% of the HP can have one witness in the Top-20.

I wrote a post in Hive government:

https://hive.blog/hive-111111/@udow/next-hf24-witnessvotes-how-about-accumulating-instead-of-disadvantageing-new-investors-qc4wpu

Maybe you can share your view about his ?

You wrote that 31 accounts hold 35.74% of Hivepower, what would be interesting for me would be the question how many (of the next) accounts you must add to this 31 to reach 50% of Hivepower ?

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I think there are still a little less minnow and red fish accounts, Onboarding new Users would be a solution. But how to keep them on the blockchain?

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Hive is a correction creation set in place to checkmate and possibly expose the politics that run on the steem block chain,am new here and am learning fast. This was not only interesting, but very educative. The corrective facilities put in place by the hive-ians have truly given me a say that I will utilize wisely.
I hope to build up relationship with other hive-ians to harness our views and make hive outstandingly the best decentralized blockchain.

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Recientemente he notado varias cuentas con un gran contenido de hp y nisiquiera han publicado 1 post, por q lo hacen? Q beneficio les da tener tal poder si nisiquiera lo usan?

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Puede haber muchas razones para tener una cuenta con muchos HP y no usarla para publicar publicaciones:
Puede ser una cuenta de depósito para asegurar sus fondos,
Puede ser una cuenta funcional, que realiza otras operaciones,
Y muchas otras razones.

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I have walked through steemit, whaleshares, now I am in HIVE hoping that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Steemit's nightmare was to see how a publication of a photo of a cat was worth $ 100 and that large publications only had a percentage of 0.10 cents and that is saying a lot.

I know that each person does what they want with their money and sees who they should support, but it is sad to see how many users leave their work of great quality and do not receive support, I have 3 publications and I hope in the future to receive that opportunity from the community, I am also investing in the platform and increasing my voting power to grow here, I know that by investing I will be securing my future here.

Knowing exactly if HIVE is Decentralized or CENTRALIZED is difficult to know, since I do not know what thoughts are in the hearts of those whales that have great power, the only thing I hope is that they know how to use it for the good of the community and the platform.

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... we removed that "Sword of Damocles" hanging over us that were these ninja-mined tokens.

A more realistic way to put it would be that the "Sword of Damocles" has been moved into the slush fund known, ironically, as the Decentralized Hive Fund.

It is ironic to have decentralised in its naming as it is administered through stake based voting with the Return Proposal ((#0) of @gtg, which raises the bar on what the community can endorse on their own without the V.22.2 Cabal's approval. And so it becomes a slush fund for those approved by the V.22.2 Cabal.

The only difference between the pre-forked STEEM and HIVE is that the V.22.2 Cabal has removed their threat on their power to token grind freely by the Ninja Stake, which is now safely stored on HIVE in a slush fund under their control. The fork creating the new chain did not even deal with something as fundamental as witness vote retention which is a huge tell to me as to the motivation of the fork.

In my opinion the trust and governance of both the STEEM and HIVE blockchains are broken beyond repair.

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