Shoutout to @tarazkp for noticing I hit 50K a while back, but 50k does not make one officially an orca, unfortunately.

Technically, to get the 100M vesting shares it looks like you have to have around 51,300 Hive powered up.

Embarrassingly enough, I still don't fully know how vesting shares work. I really thought I was getting a handle on it, but then when we forked to Hive I noticed that way less coins were powered up. I assumed incorrectly that the amount of vesting shares given per coin would go up significantly because there is a lot less competition for said shares. I guess vesting shares and coins are more closely linked than I was originally led to believe.

In the end all that really matters is the reward pool and how much of the pool one has control over. Only 144M Hive is powered up right now, so I control at least 0.035% of the reward pool and the same is true for witness voting. Another way of saying this is that I control 1 share of 2800 total shares on Hive. If Hive was perfectly distributed at this level, only 2800 people could own coins. Pretty crazy, especially considering how ultimately undistributed the network actually is.

https://hivebuzz.me/ranking

The reality of the situation tells a much different tale.

I'm now ranked #351 by Hive Power.

There are some familiar names here:

• @solarwarrior
• @followbtcnews
• @drakos
• @troglodactyl

@troglodactyl is a super interesting one because I remember that account being one of the first big accounts to upvote me way back in the day during 2018. Steem was worth so much more back then, so I stared with envy at these accounts that were worth so much, realizing that I would never have that much stake. I never even thought I would become a dolphin. Pretty crazy how fast the tides turn.

DPOS

I've been having some conversations lately and have been seeing some ideas being thrown around that involve messing with distribution, yet again.

The value of DPOS is that it scales better. We only have to allocate 10% of our inflation to secure the blockchain. The other 90% can be used for whatever. We used to allocate that 90% for the stakeholders to decide. Now we have the Decentralized Hive Fund that siphons out another 10% for development.

I'd like to point out that I'm on record (immutable blockchain) as being fervently against HF21.

• Convergent Linear Curve
• Separate Downvote Pool
• Economic Incentive Proposal (SPS/DHF)
• 50/50 curation/author rewards (down from 75/25)

It sometimes feels like the witnesses and the elite here keep pushing to give themselves more power. What a surprise. I viewed the SPS as a way for the top witnesses to simply funnel more money into their own pockets. I viewed the convergent curve as another way to simply fuck over the poor and cut their votes in half. I view forced curation as a completely backwards mechanic that is enforced on the backend to justify the broken frontends (trending tabs). Adding a separate downvote pool in my mind was a huge risk and a giant asset just appearing out of nowhere. I'm still surprised no one sells downvotes for pennies on the dollar.

However...

I'm glad that we tested all these things, because now that they've been in the wild for a bit I'm starting to warm up to the downvote pool and the dev fund. The convergent curve and curation are still garbage, and I hope one day I'll be able to prove it with the services I create here.

Why is curation bad?

https://peakd.com/busy/@edicted/war-on-curation Essentially curation is a broken, easily gamed system that rewards those who use bots and chain analysis. The entire process is centered around curation, meaning to get posts viewed. However, the process of getting posts viewed is entirely dependent on the rules of the associated frontend. It's hard to see the difference here, because currently all our frontends work exactly the same (higher payout, higher visibility). Curation will make less sense once we have other metrics besides payout that determine the visibility of posts (reputation system). It will also make a lot less sense when we have other proof-of-brain activities on Hive; ones that don't require the curation mechanic or perhaps are even incompatible with it.

If you think blogging is going to be the only job Hive offers in 10 years you're sorely mistaken.

I know! Let's eliminate the reward pool!

This idea is floating around and it is 100% a power play by the witnesses to control all the inflation on the platform. The entire advantage of DPOS is that you don't have to spend all your inflation on securing the network. Some witnesses are now telling us: "Lets spend 100% of inflation on securing the network."

I'm not going to name names: you know who you are.

This is a greedy power play.

Don't let them fool you. They're using logic like:

• We can move post rewards to another token.
• Too much selling pressure is being put on Hive.

Hive inflation is high and that indeed does put selling pressure on the network. However, when every stake holder controls 90% (now 80%) of all the inflation on the network, it doesn't matter if your coins are getting diluted, because you can simply upvote yourself and curb that dilution with your own powers of inflation. Some witnesses here seem to want to take that power away from us. It's one of the coolest parts about Hive and this idea to nullify the reward pool should not be considered under any circumstances.

Convergent Curve

The convergent curve is a prime example of this trickery. It makes it so a user with a large stake receives no penalty to their upvote, while someone with less stake or support will only receive half of the rewards.

Another effect of the convergent curve is that it tends to centralize the reward pool to less posts. This means that it is easier to fight abuse without the use of a bot... but at what cost? Is that really necessary when we already have free downvotes to deal with abuse?

In addition, it has no effect on accounts with enough stake to avoid the curve. If we want to fight abuse, we should be doing it from the top down, not from the bottom up. It's not the users with low stake that are taking advantage of the reward pool. At least not the ones we need to be worried about.

Conclusion

I have many unpopular opinions, but hopefully time is on my side. I hope as time goes on my logic on these issues becomes more clear so that I have a strong history of discussing the dynamics involved.

I know I'm suffering from unit bias from this whole Orca achievement, but I don't care. I will never power down from this level. In fact, I wish Hive had a permanent vesting option (something that I have suggested multiple times now) so I could prove that 51k of my stake from this account will never hit the exchanges ever again.

Kudos to me!

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