RE: Who decides the witness ranks and what if we all had only 10 or 5 witness votes
I have simulated how the witness ranks and the VESTs distribution would look like with only up to 10 or 5 witness votes per account. The results have to be interpreted carefully, though. I have calculated the VESTs distribution as if every account only had their first 10 or 5 witness votes in place. This is a kind of random assumption, since I cannot know which votes all individual accounts would keep if they had to reduce the number from 30 to 10 or 5. Using the first 10 or 5 is an easy choice for a test run here, but at the same time also the best I can do in this regard.
You are right, there is no way of knowing which votes one would keep. But certainly there would be some restructuring of the top. The collateral part is it will affect backup witnesses as well, as @hungryharish remarked in his comment.
Yeah @gadrian. This can solved with expiry of witness votes or making people realize how much important the vote for the blockchain. Decreasing votes will kill the enthusiasm of low ranked witnesess who are in hope one day they will be in top.
About expiration of witness votes, that might be... problematic. Because this involves changes into the blockchain code that requires cycling through every vote for every witness and seeing if it expired or not. And doing that as a relatively regular interval. That imply higher resource demands (especially CPU) regularly. Which kinda goes against what MIRA is trying to do. At least that is as far as I understand it, without being a witness or knowing the insides of the Steem blockchain.
That's an excellent point. Hope what really is best in this issue will be decided. Whatever it is it's in hands of the witnesess to decide again.
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