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.
That isn't at all what the entire point of the system is.
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.
It does not help a lot, it probably doesn't help anything at all, why would it anyway, you're asking for large stakeholders to split up their stake after all, like I said, why not limit it to one witness vote, it accomplishes exactly the same thing.
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.
Like that post I linked, it's hardly the case. I don't think we should encourage people to split their stake up, I think that this suggestion fixes absolutely nothing and I wish you good luck to get the large stakeholders to undermine their power because of notions that "they have absolute power" or anything to that effect, especially when it's neither the case nor was it ever intended for this to be one witness one vote (which is where you want this to end up), it was intended actually to give people with more stake exponentially more power, after all, if you don't trust the large stakeholders to safeguard their investment it makes no sense to trust a bunch of small stakeholders to do the same.
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.
Of course this is centralization, centralization is having very few people having a lot of power over the system.
If that is a large stakeholder via a consensus node (PoS), a large stakeholder voting "his kind" into power (DPoS) or a large mining pool (PoW). All of these things undermine the principle of decentralization.
And as I mentioned PoW, all types of blockchain have similar issues.
If you'd read the literature, you'd know that all these blockchains are heavily criticized for these points. Because all of these blockchain allege decentralization, but in practice it's more a buzzword than real decentralization. (Minings pools, monopolization, etc)
And as I said, I trust a big pool of large stakeholders -> Yes
I trust 1-2 stakeholders -> No.
It is called single point of failure.
And I don't trust a single point of failure, if its a stakeholder or not.
I see there is no real point discussing with someone who calls the others person arguments "horseshit". Same kind of people who doubt man made climate change or think the earth is flat. What do I care about scientists, I can read a few blogs about the topic myself and I know things very well then.
These people who do distributed system research for many years, they know nothing.
http://vukolic.com/iNetSec_2015.pdf For example talks about the issues of mining pools leading to centralization. Which got it mainly from here: https://www.infoq.com/articles/is-bitcoin-a-decentralized-currency/ which describe most mining pools as a threat and hope that more decentralized mining pools surge (Where you can apply the mining pool to big stakeholder issue 1:1 almost).
I can't find the paper atm which was talking about the monopoly problem.
http://www.coinfox.info/news/reviews/6417-proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-merits-and-disadvantages
Does summarize it pretty well though.
If there is a single stakeholder which MAY define all witnesses and then almost do whatever he wants with the chain. Then this is a major risk for the security of the chain. And thus it is not very well decentralized. I don't know what it so difficult to understand with this.
Imagine, someone from another Blockchain doing this to bring down Steem to value his own Blockchain or Steem fork. At the moment this would be even "relatively cheap".