I was awaiting this post appearing in my feed, but have corrected the problem. As usual when a problem occurs, it is pilot error. I have explained what I think people get the appearance that there is a cabal from elsewhere, so I won't repeat it here.

"...I am not sure why people think the Whales want most of the HIVE either. HIVE is more valuable the more distributed it is."

This is very true, and many people assume that that's all there is to the issue. It's more complex, for reasons I'll explain. Cash is king. When you have a choice between cash today and payments, the risk of something happening to the payment stream can make taking the cash the wise choice. Once you have the cash you can invest it for a return that exceeds the value of the payments, if you're a smart trader. But, the important thing is that you have the asset in hand, and there is zero risk of not receiving it, as there always is when you're holding a note.

Whales extract >90% of the rewards from the rewards pool. Arcange used to post statistics by which this could be ascertained, but the information he posts now does not include it. Holozor is clever enough to extract that information from the chain, and recently replied to a comment I made with a breakdown of how the rewards pool is spent, which reaffirmed this claim. Obviously people invest to gain a return, so the whales want to get a return on the investment they have in Hive. Good managers of investments want to get the best return on their investments they can.

As I explained on my comment about the cabal elsewhere, there are risks to whales of growing the platform. Currently the whales have a majority of stake, so they control the code the witnesses run by controlling who the witnesses are. That control is what enables them to maintain their extraction of the vast majority of the rewards pool. That return on their investment is almost risk free as long as they maintain a majority of stake and control the code. It's like cash in hand. Sun's takeover of Steem demonstrated that the risk of losing that majority was very high. There are a lot of very deep pockets IRL, much deeper than Sun's. While capital gains would be great, if they gained 10x or more on their stake but lost their majority and therefore lost control of governance, the new government could do anything, and even eradicate the value of their stake. In fact Sun did this to some of them when he took over Steem. His sole control of 17 consensus witnesses enabled him to do literally anything he wanted, and he froze accounts of former witnesses and whales he felt opposed him. A famous line I will always remember him for is 'Do you like me, or do you want to fuck me?' If he felt you were fucking him, he was going to fuck you first.

So, the least risky option for the current whales is to maintain a majority of stake, and the witnesses, and the code that creates the platform, reduce the risks of losing control of governance to the degree possible to them, and extract the maximum return on their investment possible - without killing the platform. Taking every last Hive token would kill the platform, so they don't want all the Hive. They have consistently taken >90% of it for ~9 years now, and Hive continues to have users that settle for the <10% of the rewards that are left for them to split.

"...if people are talking about Steem when they say cabal..."

Hive is literally Steem in terms of code, but the Founder's stake that Ned sold to Sun that enabled him to completely control Steem has been turned into the DHF on Hive, where it cannot vote for witnesses. I recall there is a 30 day waiting period before newly acqired stake can vote for witnesses on Hive, but these were the only differences between Steem and Hive when the fork occurred. There are today some subtle differences in their code, because of forks, but both Hive and Steem are pure plutocracies. I know less about Blurt, but I think Blurt may also be a pure plutocracy, where all it takes to completely control the platform is to have a majority of stake.

It is obvious that the ~36 whales that govern Hive do discuss their interests discreetly. I don't have such stake, so my interests aren't the same as theirs. They're not going to discuss these things with me (not because I haven't tried, though). Clearly I cannot know the content of the private conversations, but they do indeed govern Hive, have interests in common with one another, and all have common interests in maintaining the value of their investments. It is pretty inconceivable that they wouldn't speak about these things privately. They are very different people, and have differing manners, goals, and management styles. That is the case in every stock corporation in the world. Eventually no matter how they may disagree about Communism and Capitalism, Republicans and Democrats, or anything else, their prudential interests are largely aligned by their mutual Hive investments. Since that determines their return on their investments, they are able to largely agree. While the sinister connotation the word cabal has implies criminal acts, nothing I've mentioned so far has anything to do with crimes. It's just mutually agreeing to manage their investments to minimize risk and maximize return on their investments. To what extent they actually do or do not do this I cannot say, because they neither consult me nor include me in their considerations. However they technically meet the definition you provided of cabal, which is a group that have secret discussions regarding governance of an entity.

"That ninja mine..."

Technically only the Founder's stake is 'ninja' mined. However, it was true, and may still be, that the majority of tokens on the platfrom were originally mined. My understanding is that most of the whales mined their stakes in 2016 when Steem was just beginning. A couple of whales profited enough from bidbots to join the ranks, IIRC, and many of them have been consensus witnesses from the very beginning. None of them gained their stake from author rewards, and one of the ~36 accounts that hold the majority of stake on Hive purchased their stake with fiat or crypto, to my knowledge. I haven't looked at your wallet, so I don't know if you're in that group, and I don't know where you got your stake, although I think you mentioned buying in. They were hungry and crypto-savvy, enough to mine Steem when it advented, or to really profit from bidbots, and to become witnesses and capture a share of that 10% of the rewards pool, but they weren't investors so much as they were speculators, and the aversion to risk reflects the rudimentary investment rule that almost everyone understands: First, keep your investment capital.

None of them are stupid, some might even be approaching genius. All of them are smarter than I am. But they didn't agree on a way to protect governance from being taken over by more money than they have and enable Hive to grow and increase the value of it's token. They have remained content with their steady income stream from the rewards pool, and striven not to completely kill the platform, while suppressing growth enough to prevent distributing their stake - and losing control of governance.

Despite some of them are practically revolutionary radicals, and others merely avaricious speculators, they have all been able to agree on the code, that enables them to capture >90% of rewards from the pool, that is running. If they hadn't the witnesses wouldn't be running it.

"...Steem before downvotes..."

There was never such a time. DV's are an original feature of the platform.

"You can just look at activities on Peakd and look at people's wallet to see incoming and outgoing transactions and see who they are sending money to."

There are means of hiding transactions between Hive principals, in fact between anybody at all. You just do them off chain, in cash, or beaver pelts, or anything but Hive. Even so, with such a simple means of concealing transactions, many frauds have been discovered and alleged, as I have pointed out in my comments regarding the DHF, and particularly Valueplan.

Because there is nothing illegal (except my very late mention of fraud) at all about talking discreetly with peers about managing your investments, and they can both talk (and do anything shady) off chain, the statement 'You should be able to point to actual transactions today.' simply isn't necessarily the case. There are also whales with more than 10k socks today, and have been for years. Perhaps none of the whales doesn't have thousands of socks after years of capturing the lion's share of rewards. The enormous complexity that makes possible in moving stake about is a daunting accounting task to unravel, even if they don't transact off chain. Because there are a variety of means of transacting on Hive, providing curation, author, and witness rewards, delegations, loans, and straight payments, the second layer HE tokens, and etc., if there is anything illegal going on, it isn't as simple as just looking at my wallet.

Anyway, I'm not hoping to reduce your faith in Hive. I'm still here and just posted today, so I continue to work to make Hive succeed, albeit with less potential to impact it than you. I just seek to provide rational understanding of how the platform is governed and how a cabal isn't necessarily a criminal enterprise, by the definition you provided, despite having that connotation and many believing it is. It is to prevent criminal fraud from occurring that I have stopped voting for any proposals that do not commit to using GAAP (generally accepted accounting procedures, basically double entry bookkeeping) and continue to advocate everyone do the same, and all vote the Return Proposal exclusively until that happens. There have been credible allegations of theft by fraud made by folks that claim to be eyewitnesses to it, and I personally have confronted Valueplan principals about it, demanding they account for their disbursements of DHF funds. They flatly refused to ever provide receipts. Allowing Valueplan to take our money is begging for it to be stolen, IMHO. It's amateur hour, a joke, that we don't require beneficiaries of millions of HBD to account for their expenditures of it to this very day.

It strongly suggests that there is a cabal and it is probably doing things that are either illegal, or so unethical it could not continue were it known.

Thanks!