RE: Why free downvotes are a good and necessary part of STEEM
So a company owned by two or more people is decentralized?
A company is a single entity of its own. It can be shut down, steem can't.
And there is no way for anyone outside of that entity to have influence on the owners (except for the state). Steem witnesses influence is decided on in a decentralized way, not by appointing themselves.
The only thing you could criticize there is that some shareholders have a bigger saying than others, depending on the size of their stake. But that's 1) unavoidable in a p2p network and 2) understandable, because they have the most to lose when the platform develops in a direction they don't see as desirable.
If one pool has > 51%, would people still trust Bitcoin? With Steem being in the hands of 21 witnesses, no one complains, weird.
Why weird? As you say, it's 21 (actually it's a lot more), not one.
anyone can be the next president.
Anyone, but not everyone. Nothing holds you back from becoming a witness today.
You claimed to personally know people buying so many Steem suddenly.
Yes, people. Not one single person. One of them went from close to 0 to half-whale, but that's the best I can offer so far.
My question was how many did this before the hardfork?
i suggest you, to read something about the "ninja mining" of steem.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.60
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1410943.240
if you use the stake as only parameter to measure vote weight, the ("initial") distribution has to be faire
perhaps mind changing for you:
source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07310.pdf
for me this was kind of mind changing. i dont like dpos anymore
I don't need to read on this, and it won't change my mind, as I was there nearly from the start ;) Which is a proof that it was not as "ninja" as some people like to make it seem. Yes, there were only a few people interested in getting into it, and I do agree with the distribution being one of the big problems we had. It's been improved on a lot though, there are many big holders who got in later.
It's still hard to get into/stay in the top witnesses without massive whale support, and especially one miner account has an unproportionately high say in who's up there. It needs more time and more people interested in investing significantly to fix these issues.