On your 7 points:
the thief has agreed to arbitration because it's in the Constitution. Unless you take it out ... :-)
defence in depth. This works well if there are 3 day delayed stakeholded amounts or other defences. Use defence in depth. Make it your friend. Actually, many friends.
is wrong, total bunk. Yeah I understand that people might believe that, but people used to believe the earth was flat and the moon was made of cheese. Let's move on.
yes - but that's humanity and removing humans because we're corruptible means removing everyone.
Ask yourself this: is it easier/faster to corrupt the DPOS system or the Arbitration system? if your answer is the Arbitrators you are empirically wrong.
- compared to what? What's your definition of 'centralised' v. 'decentralised' ? Let's cut to the chase. ECAF is decentralised across N arbitrators. Each arbitrator takes on a case, essentially at random. So in order to reliably breach the ECAF system you have to (a) put a dodgy arb in place (b) make sure your dodgy arb takes on the case, and (c) deal with all the checks and balances that will stop a dodgy ruling.
In contrast, to breach BPs, you just have to trick one BP once to get a bad tx through. Guess which one happened already - twice.
Bunk. It scales much better than BPs, when funding arrives :-) What's scaling now slowly is volunteer ECAF with only 6 arbitrators. do the math... with funding, we'll move past 21 within a few months.
bunk. if you call someone 'police', they will act like police. It helps the argumentation to use the right words.
The BPs are (like) the police. The Arbitrators are (like) the courts. Literally, practically, and intentionally, the original judgement capability within DPOS has been taken away from the BPs, leaving them the policing or enforcement function, only.
Our versions of what's centralized and what's decentralized obviously differ greatly. Having more arbiters join ECAF won't make it more 'decentralized' if you think that, you're missing the point. More than the worry of corruption is the notion of having this body rule over us with powers (that can be ignored) to freeze accounts and reappropriate funds - thus having control over the immutability of the EOS blockchain. It's an oxymoron.
on the point of 'decentralisation' I just posted ECAF can be more decentralised than DPOS
Adding more employees to a centralized organization = more decentralization... Hmm...
I'm not sure I agree with the logic there. More chance for inconsistency of judgements... Certainly.
ECAF doesn't have the power to control users' accounts, but BPs have. ECAF can only propose transactions which are finally made by BPs.
This doesn't have anything to do with "breaking immutability", because it's still preserved. All transactions are recorded in the blockchain and nothing is removed. The blockchain is immutable.
It's about multisig: BPs have the right to create any kind of transactions from any account, so basically all accounts in EOS blockchain are multisig accounts which are controlled by the account owner and BPs. If ECAF is removed from the constitution, users have more to fear because ECAF is supposed to an independent institution in this multisig scheme. Without ECAF, there is nobody to tell BPs what kind of multisig transactions they can make with the users' accounts.
In theory, ECAF could effect the immutability of the blockchain.
No, this is not possible even in theory. If the immutability of a blockchain is broken, there is some serious bug in the software.
This is how it should go: Transaction is recorded on the blockchain. A dispute arises considering that particular transaction. An arbitrator looks at the case and makes a ruling (which is recorded on the blockchain). A new transaction based on that ruling is proposed to the network. BPs check that the proposed transaction comes from a real arbitrator, etc. and accept it to the blockchain.
All transaction are recorded immutably on the blockchain: original disputed transaction, arbitrator's ruling, and enforcement of the ruling by BPs. Nothing is removed from the blockchain, only new transactions are added to it. Just like a blockchain is supposed to work.
This is semantics. My fault for not explaining fully in the above reply.
If an ECAF arbiter incorrectly rules on a case and orders the reappropriation of funds to another party, then it effectively interferes with the immutability of the blockchain. Yes, the blockchain code isn’t reversed in any way, but the outcome – the result the person who thought they had sent an immutable transaction in the first place - is being modified (by the arbiter) after being created, therefore the intended result becomes mutable.
My point is that talking about immutability of a blockchain in this kind of case doesn't make sense. The technical immutability is preserved, and on the level of token amounts the concept of immutability doesn't apply because everything is done by the rules.
If an account is a multisig account, like every account is in EOS, then everyone who has the keys to the account has an ability to do transactions.
So rather than speaking about "immutability", we should be speaking how to make the system fair, transparent, etc. so that all parties can trust it.