Thanks for the thought provoking article, and thanks for the mention in a comment.

I think HIVE is similar to company shares when it comes to the way that large stake/share holders have larger vote power in governance in electing witnesses here and board members in companies.

I'm not sure that the number of HIVE compares well to the number of shares in a company. Share quantity more directly affects share price in companies I think, because the price is somewhat based on earnings per share, which usually stays in a certain range for a certain kind of company. On HIVE, we don't produce any income like a normal business does, so no earnings in the normal sense. HIVE price, like most (all?) crypto is just a matter of what someone else will pay for tokens someone wants to sell. There are some advantages in having more HIVE, like governance, higher votes and higher share of inflation. But HIVE is also like a collectable too. People just want to have a lot of them for the sake of having a lot of them!

The DHF can probably be tuned up a bit. Regular progress reports should be mandatory. People need to know what they are getting for their support of a proposal. That's a small change, but maybe a good place to start.

As for the main question on why HIVE is the way it is, we can go back and read Dan's early posts to understand why he created this the way he did. He thought people would all vote only for quality posts which would then be near the top of the feed, and people would see that this place had quality content and want to be a part of it. People joining would create a demand to be part of the system which some of these new people could be more involved in if they bought the token (for up voting and witness voting). More people buying the token would raise the token price, which is the ultimate incentive for the people currently holding the tokens to use them to vote for quality posts only. This kind of worked but mostly didn't, at least partly if not mostly due to pre-mines leading to an unfair launch.

But that's history now. It happened 9 years ago. You could earn tokens at the very start but you couldn't even sell them for the first several months! Then on the Fourth of July 2016, you could actually sell your tokens on exchanges. People realized this was Real, and people flooded in to blog for crypto cash. The price went to $4 a token and the token was number 3 on CoinMarketCap. A few days later, that was all over and down we went. Until the 2018 altcoin bull when it went past $6. Now we wait for the late 2025 / early 2026 pump and hope it is equal to or better than the November 2021 one!

Anyway, another ramble. Not Investment Advice. I'm nobody's financial advisor except my own. Have a nice day! :)