RE: The #ivoted initiative
It's perfect. I had some notions of what a fork is, but you explained it really well.
OK, so that's not impossible at all, it's just the technical problem of having 20 nodes up and operational and the "human" problem of having enough persons that would migrate their "business" on the new-steem.
But nothing would restrain them from using the 2 steems at the same time if they wanted to cover their backs, so it's more a question of support and promotion of such an operation.
That's nice to know, even if, as you said, hopefully it need never come to that.
I also think that what you propose is the way to go (gradual weighting), stop the SP being the absolute center of the ecosystem (or at least partially diminish its importance - by taking the number of upvotes into account too (hybrid of SP and one-person-one-vote) for classic upvote, and for witness voting going to a full one-person-one-vote system), and if it's not done by the main steem, it's just a question of time before steem forks or dies. As you said, it's really exposed to competition.
Yeah once a team puts together the modified code, just the threat of a fork may smarten them up. My plan is to bring this up with the Devcoin Admins. My position is HR Admin with them. It is one of the original alt coins looking for rebranding. We have a witness node running under @devcoin. You can find our mandate at:
http://devcoin.org
P.S. Yes folks could use both versions just like folks can have both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash wallets. The winner will be where most of the users go and they should go were they are earning the best rewards. Yet, again, my hope would be to find a solution without a real fork.