Hive Token Unit! Yeah that makes more sense to me since the rewards are split 50/50 by default

I'm probably one of very few left that were here when that hit the common knowledge of the crowd

Well I'm happy you stuck around and I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk to you. I'm sure it hasn't been easy at times

This would be valid if the one paying the interest wasn't taking it from the reward pool.
The reward pool is better used to encourage 'good' posting, imo.
When financing a business, taking from a commons is bad pr, iyam.

Yeah that's fair. Totally different things. My narrow-minded take...
"What's the worst that can happen?"

I pushed back on curie when they were still using ned's posting key, because delegation hadn't been coded yet, for this very reason, they centralize who gets rewards.
It might have had something to do with them saying my content was 'too controversial' and sticking to that by never voting my content.

"Progress is not possible without deviation from the norm"
-Not me

I was mistakenly voted, once or twice, but only by newb curators.
I presume they have been admonished to not to do that, again.

LOL

Cubdefi.com and the diesel pools on the tribaldex.com are the place for no effort returns.
Those were only recently made available, but seem to be working just fine.
My returns are in line with what was promised.
If you don't have a dswap.trade bot, I highly recommend it.

I'll check these out, thank you!

Hbd in savings are paying 10%.

Got a bit of that going, but is it true that it only pays out when you make a transaction to or from that account? Pretty sure I read that somewhere... That's not really a problem though, just a detail

In reality, our whales have shown restraint on reaping the pool.

That's great and I'll take your word for it

I thought of a few more questions, if that's okay

Does the reward pool grow as the network grows? Like, as more accounts are created, or in step with inflation? The fact that the system has made it this far suggests it does, but having a look on Hiveblocks a couple of times lately, the rewards pool has actually decreased a little to 808,021 HIVE since the last time I looked

Didn't get a screenshot but I swear it was slightly higher maybe 8 weeks ago. Around the ~820,000 mark

And over what time period is this figure? 7 days? 24 hours? 3 seconds?

Who is Ned?

So the 15 HTU limit you speak of would be a maximum limit on the value of a vote? Or the maximum that one post can claim from the rewards pool?

And finally,

As you say, there was a time before delegations were coded into the blockchain. So, during that earlier time in the chain's history, was Steemit a Proof of Stake chain instead of a Delegated Proof of Stake chain?

And finally finally,

_(sorry)

Is there any way to code out the possibility of this centralising tendency without altering the DPOS nature of the chain? Or do we abandon DPOS completely and "evolve" to a better way? Is that even possible? Doable? What is the ideal goal in your view?

There's at least one benefit to DPOS I can think of: delegating to newbies so they don't run out of RCs too quickly. Are there any others?

Is it a cooperative, social convention that you're after? If everyone was suitably enlightened, no-one would want to delegate their stake to others and the problem would be solved voluntarily?

Cheers for your time, this reply is getting ridiculously long...