As you may or may not know, we currently have about 164 active witnesses recognized on HIVE network. However, there is a problem. The problem is that almost half of these 164 witnesses do not even run version 0.23.0 - No I am not talking about people who recently started being a witness and hasn't produced a block yet. I am talking about people who are missing blocks every now and then, resulting in thousands of blocks missed per day. I am talking about these fake active witnesses burying legit witnesses down on the list.
Almost half of that 164 active witnesses are running old hardforks. There are witnesses running HF22, HF21 and even HF20 or older! It's crazy at this point. If a witness is not updating their node in accordance with the consensus, I believe their witness should be disabled so that they don't get scheduled for the block producing at all.
My proposal:
Vote decaying for witnesses is a double-edged sword. While some people might think it is okay to remove all the votes every now and then or marking voter accounts as inactive unless they do X or Y on the network it might backfire. The reason for this is some community members may view this as "Top 20 Witnesses forcibly removing votes from smaller witnesses." or something along those lines.
As a middle ground, rather than decaying the votes for the witnesses, the witnesses themselves should be decayed and lose their witness status on the network if they miss blocks for 14 days consecutively. and do not update their price feed.
I believe this would increase the stability and health of the overall network.
Another thing I want to touch on is an idea @raycoms presented. We all know that there are more than 30 witnesses around. Even if you agree with all of them, you can only vote for maximum 30. This means either you won't be able to vote for a witness you agree with or throwing another witness you vote under the buss, unapproving them to approve the first witness. @raycoms, in his post here (please do read it) explains one of the solutions for this would be infinite witness voting. Rather than voting for 30 witnesses, a user should be able to vote for infinite number of witnesses. I agree.
I just wanted to put this post on chain to receive feedback and see what other witnesses think.
Thank you. Looking forward to hearing from everyone.
post scriptum
Remember voting for witnesses is important. I would appreciate if you could vote for me.
Use Peakd's voting page by clicking here.
Use Hivesigner by clicking here.
Thank you!