Steemit Inc told everyone they could mine Steem, but barely said much more than that. They gave advice here and there but basically didn't tell anyone much about it. They also didn't really want the whole world mining, but they went through mining to make it legal to do an ICO without doing an ICO. So, the people that could mine this thing were a handful of devs that were Steemit employees.
Steemit, employees, and a handful of other miners were mining the coin. Mining it turned out produced an assload of stake. More than posting even with random $40k makeup tutorial posts getting out there. In order to mine you had to have a lot of different accounts. So, the mining accounts were all over the place. Steemit was the heaviest miner, but after they gather up 70% of the minable steem stake they quit mining and let a handful of other devs catch up and take it. Eventually, they stopped the mining altogether.
Basically they took the opportunity to gain stake to fund the development of steem, turned out later that wasn't exactly the case when Justin sun was using it frivolously.
Ninja-mined I believe is a term used to say they mined it in hiding like ninjas.
HIVE is a hard fork of Steem without the Justin Sun stake holder frivolously using ninja-mined stake to vote his own witnesses, in turn, centralizing steem.
Hive is truly a decentralized fork of steem.
HIVE frontends, https://hive.blog - https://peakd.com - https://3speak.online
For more info on HIVE: Hive - The Blockchain for Web 3.0
Join the HIVE Quora Space: The Hive
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