"I am not convinced Whales would even need to communicate to be able to appear to coordinate."

It's certainly possible, but the more they care about their capital - the better investors they are - the more likely they are to discuss managing it. They may not have formal meetings run according to Robert's rules of order, but they don't need to do that to discuss how they can work together to succeed at managing their mutual investments well. They certainly do interact on chain, and I have read many of them refer to discussions they've had elsewhere. There used to be a Slack, and may still be, although the details escape me, and I never gave it much thought because I'd never participate in it, in which whales did talk about things amongst themselves. I'm pretty sure they do, if today only in dribs and drabs between a few here and a few there, discuss Hive management.

BT doesn't just craft the code extemporaneously, but certainly discusses what his work is aiming at with the consensus witnesses and substantial stakeholders, and HF28 is entirely aimed at improving their management abilities and the facility with which they can do it. It's clear there aren't walls of silence between them, and if there were I think Hive would be a lot worse off.

"...the whales having complete control over witnesses is basically a function of a stake weighted chain."

Yep. A plutocracy, where them with the most at stake decide how things run.

"If Whales do not manage the chain well, the price of HIVE will naturally go down...That is where we are at today."

Very true. Part of the problem is that the governors of Hive also have personal interests, and while there are lots of ways in which those interests overlap, they are very different in very substantial ways. It isn't always in the best interests of corporate stockholders for the company they partly own to succeed. Bain Capital Partners' business model is to gain control of stock companies and then destroy them profitably. KKR operated similarly, may still for all I know. I'm not saying whales are destroying Hive for profit, but demonstrating that it is factually the case that sometimes the interests of stakeholders and the company they have stake in are very different. If BT or others have conspired to defraud the DHF through Valueplan, then their interests are diametrically opposed to those of the platform and the rest of the users. As I said, there are credible allegations of theft by fraud made against Valueplan I confronted Valueplan principals about and they absolutely refused to provide receipts to disprove that fraud had occurred. I was also libeled and terribly abused for having the temerity to question whether money was just magically being properly managed without any accounting for it whatsoever, which I found more suspicious than just refusing to disprove the fraud had occurred by providing receipts.

Anyway, it's demonstrable that the interests of individuals managing an enterprise aren't necessarily aligned with the interests of the enterprise, nor other managers of that enterprise, and can even be diamtrically opposed. That makes the following statement partly true at best.

"... if people want HIVE to succeed then people should want whales to do what is in their best interest."

"...who could ever be honest..."

I haven't had any reason to even suspect anything you've told me isn't forthright. The values I've seen you demonstrate since we've met have been exactly the values you've expressed. I may be naive (you think?) but I far more highly value trust than money. I've had money and property that I lost because I trusted the untrustworthy. We can only be betrayed by people we trust. So, I don't have any reason to distrust you or doubt what you say. So far it's all conformed to observed events.

I don't care if someone gave you your stake or if you scrimped and saved your wages as a McD's burger flipper to gain it. Either way it's fully yours, and either way you seem very sincere in managing it to benefit Hive and it's community - even, as you have pointed out, when that doesn't bring you the largest ROI you could be achieving. To me that shows you have higher values than mere money, while you also demonstrate prudential interest in your stake as well. Seems pretty honest to me.

I have met people like Mike Tyson described Don King to be, willing to sell their mothers for a dollar. You're not that guy. While I could be wrong, it would take a lot to convince me I had misjudged you. Although, to be fair, I have been robbed and cheated by people I trusted before, so gaining my trust may not be that high of a hurdle.

"...if whales owned 90% of the staked HIVE I would assume they would get 90% of the rewards."

There are various reasons that gaining rewards relative to stake isn't simply proportional. Everyone manages their stake differently, because they think their management will be better. My understanding is that DV's facilitate stakeholders with >50% of the stake to capture >90% of the rewards by returning rewards curators have allocated to a particular creator back to the pool, where whales get a crack at extracting it again. There are mathematical formulae you can employ to show that someone with even a slight advantage can benefit disproportionately, and exercising that advantage repeatedly adds up to far more benefit over time than if they have just one opportunity to apply their advantage. But, the playing field also isn't level. Holozor showed that curators get most of the value of posts on Hive. DV's may be part of why. He's the guy to ask instead of me regarding the specifics, and I bet he'd be happy to share what he knows, why he knows it, and where he learned it. He seems like a very nice person too.

Christmas was great, but by New Years I had the flu and I'm just getting back up on my hind legs. Still, every day above dirt is a good day. I hope your celebrations were great and you really had a good time in good company sharing good food.