Hi @rycharde ! Nice to see your input about this. I hope your proposal will be funded and that some real discussion about this will happen.
Just thinking out loud here, for the long term solution, why not make an hybrid of the UN's Security Council and the Athenian's sortition (selection by lot) ?
Some more details :
- There will only be a TOP 4, each of them will have veto right on any possible fork (hard and/or soft, but i think at least on hard). This way, if you manage to get one witness on that TOP 4, you can be sure no hard fork will ever happen that you don't agree with (from the POV of a big stake holder / or the community as a whole, or even a certain portion of that community). For this part, keep the stake system, but limit witnesses' votes slots to 4 and weigh each vote (if you vote for only 1 : 100% of your SP, for 2 : 50% of your SP, ..., for 4 : 25% of your SP). This way it's easy for either side to get one witness in that TOP 4 and make sure there is no "hostile" hard fork. This is for the UN's Security Council part.
- For the rest, increase the number of consensus witnesses (X - like 100 or so). Block rewards will be distributed equally among these X witnesses. There will be selected by lot every week (or any other period of time, must be long enough but not too long) and will be the consensus witnesses for that period. In the code, you can put some criteria (witness server must be on independent hardware - maybe you can do that by IP -, it must not have missed more than Y blocks in the last Z days, the account must be at least W weeks old, and so on...). After that, the rules for soft/hard forking stay the same (only the number of witnesses agreeing changes and of course the possibility to veto). This way you ensure that if someone wants to seize control, he has to run an awful lot of servers during a long period of time and manage to block community to vote 1 witness in the TOP 4.
Just had this idea 10 minutes ago, didn't put too much thought into it.