"...those stakes were no longer ninja-minded."
This is true. The Steem community has been, as @starkerz noted recently, quite naive, lulled into trust by @ned's lack of pecuniary intent and avarice. This is a trustless platform, or should be. The founder's stake has continuously been claimed as solely intended for use by development initiatives, and this verbal (written) allegation has sufficed to preclude concerns of it being deployed to centralize governance of Steem.
However, that threat has always existed, mostly due to the 30x multiplication of the influence of substantial hodlings of stake over the witnesses. It is this mechanism that made of the founder's stake a centralizing threat. As long as the substantial stakeholders could trust @ned not to use that stake, their influence on governance was dramatically increased, and they clearly benefited from this.
This temporary solution but points to the need a decentralized trustless platform has to prevent concentration of influence on governance through code that enables some stake to wield more influence than other stake. Eliminating the 30x multiplication of the influence of substantial stake on governance eliminates any threat of @justinsunsteemit, or heirs, beneficiaries, or assigns to exercise instant governance of Steem. It also makes all Steem equally influential, from large or small stakeholders, in witness elections.
1 Steem = 1 witness vote is the fair and equitable way to solve the problem temporarily mitigated by this soft fork, as well as the undue influence that has heretofore inured to large stakeholders over the majority of the community.
I think other measures like significantly decreasing amount of witness votes an account can cast would produce better results and further decentralize the chain.
Some users have tens of thousands of accounts. How much does limiting the number of witness votes they can cast per account affect them? Sock puppets will get around any limitation on witness votes per account, to greater or lesser degree depending on how limited witness votes are.
If you reduce the number of witness votes an account can cast to one, @justinsunsteemit can spread his stake to 20 accounts and replace the consensus witnesses at will.
Frankly, equity really demands 1 steem = 1 witness vote, and you can see how the present system is inequitable and centralizes governance now if you read this.
It would still be based on SP you have. Instead of having an ability to vote for 30 witnesses it would be less, maybe like 10. So that one stakeholder can’t decide who all consensus witnesses are.
I don't think you grasp that splitting your stake across multiple accounts causes the limitation on witness votes to be split across the accounts as well. It's true that it would reduce the amount of stake each account could vote with, but the ~75M Steem is still enough split 20 ways to be a deciding factor in consensus witness elections.
Consider this as well. If one stakeholder has 1M Steem each witness vote cast is for 1M Steem, meaning that stakeholder applies 30M Steem worth of influence on the witnesses. Another stakeholder has 10 Steem, and each vote for witness they cast is worth 10 Steem, meaning they deploy 300 Steem worth of influence on the witnesses. The difference in influence on governance between the two stakeholders is not 999,990 Steem, but 29,999,700 Steem. This is how the current witness election mechanism effects centralization of governance by multiplying the influence of substantial stakeholders 30x.
I reckon influence on the witnesses should be equitable, and 1 Steem = 1 witness vote increases decentralization of governance of the blockchain 30x from current conditions.
I think we are on the same page. We both want to see decreased amount of witnesses votes per account. Your idea is basically to lower to 1 vote per account, still based on Steem/SP you have. It makes sense. I like it. Not an easy task to convince the witnesses.
I find that nothing worth doing is ever easy.
No matter what rules you come up with someone with 150% as much stake as all the other voting stake put together is going to be overwhelmingly dominant to the point of breaking all hope of decentralization.
There are some limited mitigations possible, which carry security tradeoffs (since you are, in effect, deliberately enabling a minority which you can't know is "good" or "bad" in any instance) but they're partial at best.
you are not listening, reducing the amount of witnesses an account can vote would have no effect in this situation, Justin could just spread the 80 million steem in several accounts, do you understand this or do you need a further explanation?
For example limit the votes amount to 7. Now show me how you can spread 80mil sp to take over the chain. Consensus is 17, you need to split 80 mil into 3, which is 26.6 mil each and not enough to vote in all 17 consensus witnesses.
Aha, ok, you vote in a fraction of the 17 witnesses that are needed for consensus, say 12? Then how is consensus achieved without the approval of those 12 witnesses? ;)
When you know you can’t take over, you will probably stay away from witness business completely.
You spread your 7 votes from the 73 million SP across an overlapping mix of 17 witnesses, which is 30 million each. That's probably more than enough. Currently top witnesses get around 45 million but that is with everyone having 30 votes as well. If you drop the 30 to 7, then the other witnesses' vote totals will drop too. If we, probably conservatively, estimate that totals drop by half, then totals are down to 22 million, and 30 million is easily in control.
If somehow that isn't enough, which I doubt, then you buy a small amount of STEEM to net up the total, campaign and count on at least a few people always being easily swayed to anything or confused, and/or you offer a few people to pay for their votes. It won't be hard to get what you need, even if this means the rest of the stakeholders are voting, say, 90% against you.
No plausible voting rules are going to contain 71% of the active voting stake from taking control. It won't happen. (And if you could, it would greatly weaken the chain by allowing small minority, potentially attacker, stakes to exert greater influence).
Over the last 3 years, I have seen at least half of the top 10 witnesses staying well within top 10 and never dropping below. With lowering the vote amount, I think based on history, we can say most of the top 10 will remain to be the first preference for most voters.
While I agree that it is still possible for 73 mil stake to take over, it makes it more difficult, slow to execute without notice by others, and risky. Considering the risks 73 mil stake-holder would just stay away from voting altogether.
In the event of an attempt of taking over action by the same 73 mil stakeholder, there would be plenty of time for other stakeholders to consolidate their votes around the top 4-7 as a counter-measure to reject any hostile actions/forks.
This was my logic. But I don't know much. You are right. It wouldn't work.