"What was ned saying about oracles?"

He made a presentation in Korea in which he explained a vision of Hive governance employing oracles to accurately differentiate people from AI/bots, 1a1v, and popular control of witnesses instead of stake weight controlling governance. It wasn't long after that before he gave up fighting the whales to decentralize and deplutocrify governance of Hive, sold to Sun and bugged out. Oracles are a key mechanism to make plutocratic governance unnecessary - and plutocrats hated it, and ned, with unbridled passion thereafter, mercilessly hounding, heckling, and hating him without reservation whatsoever.

It is the fact of plutocracy that renders Hive vulnerable to conquest by nothing more rare than more money, and the possession of the most money is the best indicator of sociopathy. It is that threat of hostile takeover that forces the extant plutocracy to suppress growth and discourage deep pockets from any interest in Hive. You may be technically right about increasing stake increasing the power of the plebs, but this simply isn't potential IRL. Money centralizes. That's largely the point of most aspects of the financial systems extant, to enable those with the most money to gain the most fastest. This all degrades social media, and more emphasizes asocial financial mechanisms to the limit of power of plutocrats. Hive's most import is social, not financial. People have values far more important than money, existentially important, free speech among them. Financialization almost reverses the import of values to governance, and free speech is a frequent primary target of plutocrats focused in increasing the centralization of wealth in their wallets.

Once Ned was identified as an enemy of plutocrat, his capacity to reform governance was ended. In fact, it never really was potential once plutocracy controlled the platform, because the plutocrats had the power to govern, which they would not relinquish. Faced with the choice of using the Founder's stake to seize that control, which Ned had promised not to do, or fail, Ned failed rather than become a tyrant to create a non-plutocratic governance mechanism and abdicate. Mistakes were made. I don't think Dan and Ned really grasped the potential of the platform they created to enable voluntarist governance and conquer the social media market, to actually challenge legacy polities for power, and simply sought a viable product they would benefit from, and they were extremely successful at that, which is why the platform was once #3 on capital markets for cryptocurrency. But a more profitable mechanism for whales to extract value from wasn't what the world needed, nor needs today. It's voluntarist governance, free speech, and decentralization, and the founders really didn't realize the platform's potential. They weren't revolutionaries, but speculators, so they made themselves money and left the free world in the hands of plutocrats, which is where we're at today.