Hive is real, that's plainly obvious.

Honestly, I don't think any perspective is wrong on this. It really comes down to what you think the role of witnesses is.

From my perspective, the community voted witnesses forked in secret, but they did it on the communities behalf. They were elected officials who, arguably, were cheated out of their role. We can debate semantics, like whether a verbal contract of "The Steemit Inc. funds are only to be used to fund development, not vote" should have been taken as law or not, but this all comes down to ones philosophy.

Personally, I think the Hive team did what they honestly believe is in the best interest of the ecosystem. I believe dtube is also acting in what they believe is the best interest for the system. Justin Sun is the only actor here who I think has not acted in the interest of STEEM or the codebase/ecosystem STEEM represents.

You have my vote @dtube. Thank you for integrating HIVE into your platform so quickly, and thank you for choosing to be a witness and keep STEEM alive. Whether STEEM is decentralized or centralized depends on whether we can keep 4-5 genuine witnesses in the top 20. I would like for 16+ to be genuine, but 4-5 lets us know the chain itself will be kept alive without any funny business. From there, those 4-5 witnesses would get to choose which Steemit Inc. upgrades are worth keeping and keep them in line. If that can be achieved, there is hope for STEEM yet.