"DPoS is digital feudalism.
It's the antithesis of how BTC was designed to function."

Yes i realized this right away. Which would explain my lack of success in dpos. It's not accidental it's intentional. I also think it's why Dan Larimer and Ned Scott walked away as they felt it had a limited time. I think it's also why it's a constant struggle to rank as a higher cryptocurrency.

Yes as you mention to make the system work. The oligarchy, plutocracy and or neofeudalist have to protect the system. Do they really want a well distributed crypto. Well as it's an influence model.. an influence game so to speak. Then the idea is probably more commoditized on more influence or influence over" is a type of currency in itself for this particular group of people.

So the only way you could actually have a success in a model like this. The crypto itself would need to function more like stable currency. A successful currency can equal freedom. To the untrained eye this can easily go over peoples heads. As and asset or speculative device you're just going to have a system governed by money. A repeat pretty much of what we got already. That's not going to be appealing to people and most people will stay away from such systems. Eventually the system will not function at all. Which is why i feel the only hope for hive at this point is tokens like bitcoin myk and bbd coin which functions on freemium services as a free token currency which in turn makes it more a stable coin at some point. It is through freemium services that you establish market stability. However that concept around here i know it goes over many heads as they don't understand economics.

Yes you're right this does disguise itself as a type of merit system through the articles and blogs. What is the value of the articles and blogs? Pretty much zero. Why? because most of the same articles and blogs are free on the internet and the knowledge is plentiful. So as a market it's no competitive pricing. So it can be any ridiculous unstable value. So their solution is then have people with the most money in the system and in a system with horrible distribution which is the opposite of decentralization get to pick and choose who gets what and why lol. So it's just a very chaotic system. This is why ultimately it can't work this way although they are hopeful the people at the top are. They would be they so far the benefactors. They don't understand they are pretty much the only benefactors and thus can't grow because masses of people will pick more opportunity for benefit over what their system allows.

People don't get to have this free market merit system which i'm assuming that's what they want as that's what decentralization and democracy really looks like in a governance model. True democracy and freedom in this particular type scenario could only be balanced by free cryptos like btcmyk and bbd coin. I see no other way out economically. Anyone who studies economics would understand that. They instead make it worse. They try to ignore it and move on burying their heads in the sand and hope it goes away lol. So it's unfortunate however it's centralization is what has caused people like Vitalik who has an economics degree as well alot of people don't know this. Vitalik understands this and this is why he condemns hive. So this is the part of the puzzle they either don't understand or don't care to.