On the surface Hive Governance APPEARS to be very centralised...
@Blocktrades controls 10M Hive Power on his main account, and the @alpha account which controls 6M HIVE Power proxies to that, as does the @blocktrades.com account, so that's effectively one person control 16M HP.
And there isn't a single T20 Witness that doesn't have a @blocktrades vote, which doesn't exactly shout 'decentralisation'.
Moreover, the second largest account which votes for witnesses (*) - @smooth and all his a,b,c-f accounts that proxy to him only votes for 14 of the T20 Witnesses, which suggests that the second largest active witness voter commands significantly less power than the top holder - he's influential yes, but Trades has the power to negate a third of his choices - not surprising as Trades has around 3 times more power than Smooth.
There's also the fact that the combined governance power of these two accounts together is profound.... the first account which doesn't have either a Trades or a Smooth Vote is @aggroed - probably the best known face on Hive so probably commanding a significant amount of VP from ordinary users (NB this is conjecture) - but he's lagging a full 6M VP behind the next witness up from him.
I also worked out that with a @blocktrades vote, a witness only needs Votes from the next 35 Hive Power holders to break into the T20 VP threshold which is around 66M; without a Trades vote a witness would need to be voted for by all of the next Top 100, meaning it's 3 times as difficult to get into consensus without a Trades vote than with a Trades vote.
However if we take into account liquid Hive it's not quite that simple....
If we were to stop there in our analysis, then hands down Hive governance is highly centralised, but I don't think it's fair to stop there.
Blocktrades and to a lesser extent Smooth have simply chosen to stack and accumulate significantly more Hive than the average user, and there is A LOT of Hive floating around on the exchanges that is there for anyone to go and buy, power up and increase their governance stake.
And in the grand scheme of the wider crypto markets it wouldn't take that much of an investment to buy 20 Million Hive and make governance a little more decentralised....
According to HiveBlocks there are currently more than 200M Hive liquid, and all it takes is for 1/10th of that supply to be bought up by one investor or a collective and that would be sufficient for a new, or existing party to have REAL governance power on the Hive blockchain...
And there are around 165M Vested, some of that Liquid is in the DAO.
And with Hive at $0.50 that's only a $10 Million Vest, and compared to how much the largest Bitcoin or Eth Holders have, $10 million is nothing.
And with the Hive price bouncing around the $0.40 - $0.50 mark and potentially going lower with a bear market, and lord knows there are PLENTY of sellers out there, it wouldn't be that difficult to patiently accumulate several million over the next few months without spiking the price too much.
And then there's the non-active VP already in existence....
So the very top witnesses have almost 90M HP voting on them, if we exclude @freedom, then there's another 60M HP Vested but not voting on Witnesses - that alone is enough to almost bring a witness into consensus!
So Hive is Potentially a lot more decentralised than it appears...
I've got to say the state of play currently looks centralised, but you can hardly blame @blocktrades and @smooth for (1) Vesting in Hive and (2) Actively using their stake to vote for witnesses.
But it's not as if these larger accounts are stitching things up for themselves: the reason there isn't greater decentralisation is because the rest of us either are not prepared to buy more Hive or because some people who already have HP aren't using it!
So - anyone out there up for a $10M Vest in Hive...?
Maybe someone with more BTC on the exchanges than me can help out? I've only got enough for 29 Hive, which is a start, I guess.
(*) NB @freedom which is the largest account by Hive Power (most likely controlled by Dan or Ned, but this is conjecture) doesn't vote on Witnesses.