RE: Democratizing Steem!
Following that logic, Facebook is not centralized either. There is one shareholder who has mayor stake in the company and which pretty much acts in "the best interest" of the company because of that. So, why do we need cryptocurrencies. Can't we just trust Paypal and Facebook? They are acting in the best interest of their companies too. They're kind decentralized as well. Got a lot of people from all over the world holding their stocks. Let's let Paypal put their money on the blockchain and let them handle the permissioned ledger and it's going to be alright.
The reason I'm in blockchain is exactly to not have this situation. On Steem there was recently a situation where some Witnesses thought about forking the chain, and Steemit Inc said they could elect just the 20 witnesses themselves in that moment.
There is the possibility of that happening, and they said they would do that. Is that decentralization or does it just kinda seem like it.
And of course, as long as they got 30 votes to cast, they could just do that, with 10 votes, especially on the short term, that is much more difficult.
I'm not saying that huge stake holders shouldn't be able to have a big influence. And I'm not denying that this makes sense in the context of game theory. Nonetheless, on Steem this influence is essentially to big, which is a big risk for the chain. So reducing this to 10 votes, would improve the situation while still maintaining the central elements of PoS. (And no, I don't want 1 vote, I want 10).
It's not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination:
No infrastructure is compromised by any stakeholder, and no stakeholder could compromise it by playing the game of voting for witnesses, which is largely a popularity contest and has absolutely no basis in reality as a point of failure, and what they would need for that to happen is for witness to go along with them, which again is countered by common sense, as compromising the network will not gain them anything, and even if the large stakeholder compromises the network by voting their own self as top witnesses they would still have to get the rest of the stakeholders to go along with it, and that's not feasible, as by that point they would have went against the witnesses and the majority of large stakeholders if not the entirety.
The whole thing is bogus: there's absolutely no problem, as that article points out when it removed both pumpkin and freedom's stake in witnesses standing, which I'm sure was never their intention, they probably wanted to fan the fears that you're trying to as well: toooooooo much stake.
Yeah, too big, the point is that no such thing exist (risk) but even if it would, it basically says to people "you can invest only this much or you're nerfed", which is essentially counter to the very notion of holding stake for almost everyone: to accumulate ever more influence, and ultimately you're trying to make changes that are completely counter to the large stakeholders, and if you don't trust them to safeguard their investment which incidentally means to not compromise the network it doesn't make any sense to trust a buch of people who have monumentally less stake than them to do the same. Then there's the obvious implications of dissuading stake concentration, and making abuse harder to track since now there's 3 accounts instead of 1, or 30, which is why the native option to vote makes sense at 30, as that is the number of influential witnesses responsible for adapting new changes, and trying to mitigate people's influence over it is essentially square dab in the middle of the road to hell (stake splitting) being paved with good intentions.