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RE: Steem Witnesses - Weighted votes based on ranking
Yep, I get that. And I read your post which was again well detailed.
The downsides that I see from reducing the number of witness votes are ones which you have also mentioned:
- Even if a single entity cannot control 17 witnesses, it can still control 4, which is enough to block hardforks. Thus the community still can't have its own governance.
- Splitting the chain into two becomes that much more likely. It will be much more difficult to get the 20 consensus witnesses to run the same software version if anyone can own a witness spot or two with some amount of investment. It seems to me that achieving agreement will be really hard.
- The community is at a disadvantage because it has to organize as well as a single entity organizes itself in order to counteract it, but it can't be that well organized because it's a decentralized body. The more complexity, the more at a disadvantage the community is.
On a positive note, Steem is becoming less susceptible to centralization as newly created Steem is getting distributed to more users. It is also difficult to buy a sufficient amount of Steem from exchanges to have a strong influence on the blockchain. The only way to do it is to buy large accounts such as the Steemit accounts. Even these accounts hold a considerably smaller proportion of stake compared to what they held a few years ago.