And if he splits this up, it's not worth it.
Why not? He still controls as much stake in proportion to everyone else as before. Xmv is the whole point, that doesn't magically shrink in influence because they can only vote 10x with it. The orcas that you want to be able to compete with those votes will also only have 10 votes, and they won't be worth any more than before or his any less. It doesn't change anything because he can give out as much of the pie by splitting it up and stacking slices, so that 10 slices will equal to a whole pie, or 30, as before. Being able to natively distribute xmv 30 times or 10 times won't change his influence at all, he can simply split it up and it will still not be any less than the hypothesized orcas and dolphins stakes, because obviously the proportion of his stake to everyone else has not changed.
It is really easy.
Right now, his 30 votes, can basically vote all the top 30 witnesses => Very strong influence!!!
If he only has 10 votes, he can only vote the top 10 witnesses => 50% of the top 20, much better.
If he splits it into 2x10 votes, each of these votes is worth only half. (Yes it is still worth a lot, but only worth half than what it'd be if he hadn't split it)
So, if the orcas and dolphins don't split their stack, each of their vote is worth more now after the change (because they didn't split their stack).
His overall influence compared to others is the same, but his influence on the top 20 is now smaller, either because he can only define the top 10, or because his vote will only be x/2 compared to the people who don't split their stack.
Okay, let's take an example, an easy one.
Let' s suppose user A has 120mv, and user B has 61mv.
Let's say, there are only user A and user B in the network.
In the situation of 30 witness votes: User A will define ALL 30 top witnesses. And user B has no say at all. User B can only change the order of the top 30, but can't vote his own candidate into the top 30.
In the situation of 10 witness votes:
Two Situations:
User A will either define ALL top 10 witnesses (if he doesn't split his stake) and User B votes the remaining 10.
User A splits his stake to vote ALL top 20 witnesses. But now, user B doesn't split his stake and now has enough stake to vote his 10 people in the top 10.
(61 > 60)
Of course, people will always try to maximize the system. But the entire point of this system is to make sure, that the top stake holders don't have as much influence on the top 20 witnesses.
Especially since witnesses 1-20 have the power to make all the decisions in relation to hard forks etc.
With >= 20 votes, pumpkin has an enormous influence in this. If we reduce this to <= 10, this helps a lot.
I'm not talking about saving the world, but I'm talking about decentralizing the election. And reducing the number of votes, certainly does that.
And I agree, this can be further reduced, to 5,3,1. But I think 10 is a good number. 10 allows people to select a number of witnesses which represent them well and they think represent Steem well while not giving anyone enough power to have such a huge influence in selecting ALL top 20 witnesses basically alone.
Yeah, exactly, the intend is to centralize the system. Definitely. That's what Blockchain is about. Allowing huge stakeholders to control all the witnesses, that's not absolutely the reason why DPoS is so widely criticized. I don't want one person one vote, I want 10 votes. I stated that pretty clearly.
And no, I don't think it will result in splitting up stake. I don't think Pumpkin would split up his stake for this, nor do I think blocktrades would.