... but yet again they have invested the HIVE ...
Well, the biggest stakes ultimately stem from early mining and bidbot use, and with that starting advantage it was rather easy to increase it over time (even if both has stopped since quite a while now).
I still have some images like this from these 'good, old' days:
only three accounts there are still powered up so quite a weak point to make imo
Not at all, if they are still (since 2016!) the biggest stakeholders nowadays that says a lot - and the list is not complete. There are even more early miners and former bidbot owners among the top stakeholders of nowadays.
Not even half of top25 from what I believe mined the coin from early days, not that I even think that matters much any more. My point is many of the ones on your list are long gone and many new ones in the top have bought their stake with anyone having the same opportunities even to do so today.
To be honest, I think even the ones you marked are quite a lot considering the time span of more than eight years.
Then we could argue about who for example "darthknight" actually is (there was this discussion about why he used the same Binance account memo blocktrades did, but well ...)? And how to evaluate the exchange blocktrades.com?
Furthermore, there is my personal 'favourite' ex-bidbot owner and former farmers like ranchorelaxo and trafalgar (did you ever check the disgusting STEEM trending page which he completely dominates)?
Sure, most of the accounts in my list have fortunately left HIVE (which doesn't make them less rich).
I understand what you wanted to say, but I would not agree that these early mining wouldn't contribute until today to a comparable high centralization of power. It is not only that it made these users rich these days but also allowed them to increase their stakes from that starting advantage.
I respect users like theycallmedan or azircon who really bought their stakes.
Yeah it is a good point about the early miners, but then again they laid the foundation to STEEM (Later to become HIVE), and it could very well be that their influence on our amazing platform is what has gotten us so far.
Then again I'm a very neutral character overall and I agree with both sides, early miners have a somewhat unfair advantage over the ones who bought their stakes later and that there are not too many of early miners still left to the point of it not being too massive of a problem.
I agree with both sides ...
A good way, not to make any enemies (I sometimes wished to be that clever, too, hehe). :-)
I say "good night" to you, as well now!
There's many others who bought their stake but that doesn't mean that early miners are any more invalid than buyers today. As you say those that sold probably did better so why would we list those who stayed with the platform as "unfair" early miners. We can't escape the distribution at the time and how it was changed over time but it's been nearly 10 years of author rewards constantly diluting these whales down along with a price that's mostly been bad.
In a perfect world there wouldn't have been any POW mining, no ninja-mine by ned and dan and no change to the inflation method, but complaining about what has happened in the past when price actions have made it quite void by now is a little pointless. Hive was down to just 15 cents a few weeks ago while people who've mined our coin early on lost opportunity to maybe mine ETH sub $10 or other coins. People who came to our blockchain late have also had many, many opportunities to buy in at very low prices for most of its existence so what's the use to complain about it?
When it comes to those that participated in bid botting then sure that was also quite unfair inflation for a certain amount of time but that's the price it takes to attempt to perfect an innovative idea as proof of brain I guess and as you prove here with your comments today people won't forget who participated and who didn't or tried to avoid it. I'd personally rather focus on rewarding those people and new ones than constantly find a reason to bring history up and complain about it. No offense.
... "unfair" early miners ...
Maybe - before I finally go to sleep :-) - I should make clear that I don't blame the early miners.
If I had been aware of that possibility I might have done the same.
I just think it is not favorable for the HIVE distribution of nowadays.
I personally don't think it matters much anymore when earning and buying hive is so easy/cheap these days.
If that bugs you a lot there's always other tokens u can invest in with better launches, many of them here on hive directly. ^^