This Hive Power Up Day comes at the right time... There have been a debate regarding one of the DHF proposals. And others, but less visible. Not the first debate on this subject, and not the last one either, for sure.
HIVE's current supply is roughly 441m of which 179m are staked, as we can see from the blockchain data:
For some reason, @arcange doesn't publish his daily financial and social reports for Hive since the unfortunate incident he was target to in February.
At the last report from February, he calculated certain interesting things (as always). This is the distribution of HP per account level:
Note the last column which stands for HP whales... The values are in MVEST, but instead of calculating how much that means in HP, I'll use the percentage he listed at the bottom and make the assumption for the easiness of calculation that the HP levels remained constant since then.
48.25% of 179m is 86.36m HP. That was how much HP whales had together.
You also note the gray areas at the top? Those are inactive accounts (that hadn't made a single transaction on-chain in the past 30 days back in January).
What percentage of whales were inactive at the time of the report?
46478 / (46478+98197) = 46478 / 144675 = 32.12%
That means 67.88% were active, or 58.62m HP.
But... this isn't the best picture to look at. This is:
This chart above takes into consideration all the delegations in or out of every account.
How many MVEST did whales have without delegations? 144675 MVEST, of which only 98197 MVEST were active.
How many MVEST did they have when delegations are accounted for? 157595 MVEST, all active! Or 51.63% of the entire HP staked, meaning (at this time) 92.41m HP.
92.41m HP > 58.62m, that's for sure. And that happens because whales who are active are truly active, and people with lower stakes delegate HP to them (that includes various big projects).
What this chart doesn't say is how this type of behavior reflects on governance. I'd say in this case whales are even more interested in influencing the outcome of votes, while small users either don't participate or have proxies set (which basically is delegation for governance).
We can see from the last chart the whales domination is pretty high. But the previous chart shows less dominant whales when they don't have at their disposal delegations of users and we account for the inactive whales.
Either way, if we get back to governance for a bit, currently the Return Proposal is voted by around 31m HP. That's 17.3% of the total HP.
I feel that's an ok percentage. Whales aside, if all active orcas (from February, since that's the report I look at) vote on a proposal (any proposal), they can pass it. Same if all dolphins and all minnows. I didn't even include red fish in either categories.
But we know such involvement is... unlikely. But then, don't say it's up for the whales, because the situation is not absurd, particularly since whales' votes are divided on most issues.