The entire witness model seems to be premised on the assumption that their only point of general agreement would be to keep the chain running, and that otherwise they'd be fractious and disagreeable towards each other. But the reality seems to be that it's very easy to get blocs of witnesses that are so chummy with each other that they are happy to conspire behind closed doors.

It seems like we have a lack of checks and balances, and few structures that work against large stakeholders having a very high influence. It would be nice if people would start some brainstorming about whether there might be structural solutions to the problems that have been made clear by the latest crises. Even if they don't get implemented it could be a useful intellectual exercise. Part of the problem is that it may be impossible to design a system that's resistant to monkeywrenching by large stakeholders. Enforcement mechanisms in social systems can only work to deal with rare outliers, they can't bear the load on their own, voluntary compliance with norms is essential. But a lot of stakeholders seem to have little interest in being "civic minded". It's not clear to me that you can build a functioning system if you don't have that.