RE: In the Beginning, There Was DPoS
The most important thing to defend against a hostile takeover is to guarantee overlap.
Let's assume the extreme of only 1 vote.
Assuming the community has 200kmvests to distribute, in the optimal case each of the top 20 witnesses gets 10kmvests.
However, that would be an optimal case, we know that a lot of votes will go to witnesses in the top 100 ranks and votes will be distributed unevenly.
Most likely the top 5 witnesses would have around 20kmvests and the bottom 5 more around 2-5mvests
Now anyone with some kmvests could distribute this to 4 accounts and could easily come in and elect 4 witnesses to block a hardfork.
Even worse, depending on the distribution, since there is no overlap, the person might even be able to vote in 10-11 witnesses.
So, currently with 30 votes, the community had to organize and stop voting for the 30-100 witnesses and assign their votes to the top 30 to combat the overtaking.
With infinite witness votes people could vote everyone they agree with and not just the top 30 they agree the most with.
Good point, but without being forced to vote, how can you guarantee the overlap even with infinite witness votes.
The second biggest problem besides "not enough overlap" was that most people did not use all their votes or had not voted at all. Especially some of the smaller accounts just learned recently that it is important to vote for witnesses. Ask anybody of those who didn't know that voting is important if they know what a voting proxy is and you will see that most of them have never heard about it.
Yeah, but I think that can be solved by thing I pointed out.
On top of that, it could probably be a bit more prominent in the UI and when you go to your wallet it shows in red "No witnesses voted - vote here" and in yellow "10/30 witnesses voted - complete here" or in yellow "3 inactive witnesses voted - update here".