I don't have a fraction of the stake that was owned by Steemit and Ned
Sorry, that's not what I was trying to say there (or really compare you to Ned - that was just all bad, my apologies.)
My point was that you and your team are (afaik) doing the vast majority of the actual Hive (not L2/sidechain) development, correct?
If I'm not mistaken, there are currently 5 (out of 14) funded proposals that you aren't supporting, and 100% of the non-funded proposals you aren't supporting.
It looks like your vote is more than 50% of the return proposal's support as well.
The funded proposals have a high ~43M HP voting for them, and you vote with 15M.
That's more than a third of the peak (don't know what % of the total) HP that votes on proposals.
TCMD votes with a little over 5M (so he's down closer to 11% of the peak), and there's a few folks with 1-3 million.
Not trying to attack you specifically/personally, you just happen to have the biggest voting stake around for this stuff, and if we're talking about centralization of stake at the moment.
Obviously, just as in the case of witnesses, getting more people to vote with their stake (never mind staking more), and be more active about adjusting their votes, is one of the big changes that can be made.
We do the majority of the work on hived currently, but @howo also contributes. But that is mostly a meaningless metric, IMO. The major focus of our work on hived has been to move future develop primarily to layer 2, with layer 1 acting as efficient and secure base layer. In fact, the Blocktrades team members are already spending more time on layer 2 work now (e.g HAF and HAF-based apps) than they do on layer 1 work.
As a snapshot in time, that is correct, but I've supported several proposals that didn't get funded or lost funding. They just expired, as proposals tend to do if they don't get funded. If you looked at other voters on the proposals, I suspect you'll see statistics similar to mine.
But the total HP (148M currently) is a much more important number, not the current amount of active voters (at least to the extent that the HP isn't dead stake, and there is plenty of evidence that very little HP stake is dead).
Just because HP holders aren't voting currently, doesn't mean they can't start voting at any time they disagree with the current status of funded and unfunded proposals. That is a more realistic limit on my voting power and if I abused it, that is how it would be restrained.
Don't believe me? Then look at how much "non-voting" stake suddenly starting voting during the Justin Sun debacle on Steem.
When people are generally happy with the status quo, they often don't vote as much, because they don't have a strong opinion on many issues being voted on, and they trust the opinions of those who are more actively engaged and experienced on the topics being voted on. IMO, that's a very logical way to act: I leave decisions to others at my company who are more aware of the ins-and-outs of particular issues all the time.
But when voters become unhappy, then you see voters become more active (assuming voting isn't being suppressed artificially by threats of physical violence and/or imprisonment, as you see in some countries nowadays).
And the lesson of the Steem voting war brings home another point: the voting stake of importance is not just currently vested Hive. In the case of strong disagreement like we saw during the voting war, liquid stake matters too, because it can also be converted to voting stake in a relatively short time (30 days nowadays).
god damn...