Hive is a blockchain that is different from most others. In my opinion, that probably not everybody shares, Hive gets better the more decentralised it is. In this post I will try to explain why and why you should do everything possible to increase this decentralisation.
Decentralisation can be defined in many ways so I won't try to propose here some definition that I found somewhere on the internet. For me decentralisation is everything that goes against centralisation, or the concentration of a processus or power in the hands of only a few people.
When people talk about a decentralised blockchain they often think about the infrastructure aspect. How is the data spread over the world? How resilient is it to attacks? How many people control it? On Hive we have 25 Witnesses and a certain number of back up witnesses that make sure that the blockchain continues working. The infrastructure is pretty decentralised but I'm not really a specialist in this respect and I don't know whether the decentralisation of the infrastructure could be improved.
Who decides how a blockchain should evolve? Who decides on the changes in the code? Who creates the code for the next fork? This is actually pretty important and again this is often not really taken into consideration when speaking about decentralisation. Some chains can't really evolve because they are hard coded. Other chains have a decision processus or a DAO where people can vote on the process.
This is an aspect that is often not enough taken into consideration when speaking about decentralisation. It is how the tokens are distributed among the users. How many people hold a very significant stake of the token? How many people hold tokens? This matters actually quite a lot on Hive because the hive token in it's powered up form gives a lot of power on the chain. If the token distribution is centralised, it means that few people have a lot of power and the big majority has little power at all.
For me this is the most important factor that can be influenced by us and it can also lead to better decentralisation of all the other aspects. I'm sure I'm missing other aspects but what I want to draw your attention to here is that there are many aspects of decentralisation and they really matter to each of us.
The more decentralised a system is, the less power it gives to individuals
Hive is special because in adition to a proof of stake mechanisme, we also have a proof of brain mechanisme that favourises decentralisation.
With the proof of stake mechanisme your stake can only grow when you already own a certain stake. It's a kind of interest that you get for holding your stake. The only way to grow your influence on a POS chain is to buy in.
On Hive, it is actually possible to grow your stake thanks to your work. By producing content you can earn stake. This is quite unique and with every post that gets some value we are actually enforcing decentralisation. The reward pot is distributed to many different authors. At the same time, stake holders earn through the curation rewards. Which kind of makes everybody involved happy.
On hive, the more hive power is concentrated on one account or on one project, the more this account or project has power. This account can distribute a big part of the reward pool. It can define who is a witness. It can define who gets the support of the DHO. The more Hive is concentrated, the fewer people decide about everything and define who gets rewarded.
The more decentralised Hive becomes, the more it becomes democratic and resilient:
If everybody delegates their hive power to only 3-4 curation projects, it will reduce the spread of votes. If we had a much bigger number of independent curation projects, more votes would be cast and more people would get rewarded. Let's say that every curation project has 3 curators (pure estimation). Each of these curators can curate 10 posts per day. If we have 4 curation projects, only 120 posts get upvoted by these projects. If we had 40 curation projects, then 1200 posts would get upvoted and the tokens would be spread more widely.
With the present structure the top 20 stake holders on hive can define more or less among themselves all the top 25 witnesses of hive. They can vote up to 30 times and therefore with their consequent power, they define who is in and who is out. If there were 10 times more whales, this would be totally different and we might have a totally different structure when it comes to who are in the top 25. This also matters when it comes to how the chain evolves. It's the witnesses that define which code will be included in the next hard fork.
At the moment, almost no project can get funded without the support of the top stake holders. They more or less decide among themselves which project should be supported and which project should not. If we had more dolphins and orcas they could make sure that projects get funded even without the support of the few whales.
A word regarding the top stake holders on Hive: Maybe you get now the feeling that the whales are exploiting the blockchain. They are actually not. We are lucky to have Whales that look after this blockchain and act in it's best interest. However, we shouldn't simply rely on the fact that it will always be like that. We have the chance to make hive better and more resilient simply by working towards a more decentralised token distribution.
There are many small things that you can do to improve decentralisation on hive which in the long term will actually help you and help Hive.
Hive is pretty decentralised but it can definitely become much better in this respect if we all step up and take some power into our hands. We can define the future of this blockchain!
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