Whether it's theory or practice, how are 20 well-connected witnesses voted in by larger stakeholders (i.e. locked in/many legacy) truly decentralized? I'd imagine that the pressure for these witnesses to follow the wishes of the board members to keep their positions is immense, which steers the chain in the direction of the few. Given your discussion on small caps being primed for gamification on token price, I tend to wonder how much of the stake locking in these made witnesses was from the Steem premine, after the 1:1 fork.

After Steem was taken over because of Ned's action (a single-point of failure), how has Hive truly taken steps to mitigate this from happening again? It takes one hedge fund to obliterate the Hive Power scales and break up the witnesses/control, which would be a huge risk if they're malicious like Justin was.

While Web 3.0 and immutability is critical, is this chain truly a no-brainer when it's fairly easy to deploy real capital and destroy the system -- or is another fork the safety net? Maybe I've missed safeguards that have been implemented since then, but it seems that Hive Power (and associated HP politics) control more than we like to admit.