It was completely centralized, for a moment. In that moment, if he had been arrested or died or anything, say those witness were confiscated... and with enough stake imbalance, that would have screwed STEEM permanently. Even now, with a few in the way, we don't have our governance... and that's all due to one single point of failure. The real witnesses could have all quit on the same day and would have instantly been replaced with elected governance.
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Yeah, there was a single point of failure when he had a consensus majority in the top 20.
The system has this weakness and in theory, it was always possible to end up in this scenario. Although he played dirty by using Steemit stake to vote witnesses and getting exchanges on his side, he played by the rules. The exchanges also played dirty and maybe even broke their rules and others.
I don't think we can call a system truly decentralized if there is a scenario with a possible point of failure like this (the ability to centralize under 1).
I think this is why people were allowed to vote for more than 20 witnesses (there is talk about 1SP 1Vote, but it could lead to other problems). It would be fairly easy to get the 4 required to stop anything from happening. This would be an annoying block to development and create a situation much like real-world politics and what we are seeing right now. It's not a point of failure, but instead a stumbling block on progress. Do you want to change one thing? When now you gotta consider something completely unrelated or these people will block it.
Like I just said in another response, *there was only one chance to take over this blockchain, due to that Steemit stake existing, and someone pounced on the opportunity. It can't happen again the same way, unless Justin sells the same way he bought and hands over the reigns. The exchanges should be denied voting rights. Very simple and they'll all agree after seeing what happened here.
It all boils down to the cost of taking over. You can change it a million different ways. As long as it's out of reach to purchase those slots off the market, it won't happen again. That's just my opinion though.
Right now we are in a situation of gridlock. There are not enough witnesses on either side of the argument (proxy.token is causing this) to have a hard fork and change the rules.
Some people are trying to argue for a hard fork that will change the voting so it is very difficult to take over the chain entirely and do as you want with it. However, it will make gridlock easier where you can stop all changes until you get your way (this is what proxy.token is doing).
For example, right now you need 17/20 witnesses to have yourself a hard fork and 4/20 to get gridlock (prevent a hard fork). Each account gets 30 witness votes per 1 SP (you can do 30 witness votes and all have the same vote which is your total SP).
To attack the chain you would need to gather 51% of the votes to set up a guaranteed 20 witnesses. There is no way to stop an attack when this happens.
However, if we changed it to 1SP 1 vote, you would need 85% of the tokens to get 17 witness and have yourself a hard fork (less in theory because people don't always vote to stop it quick enough).
But you would only need 20% of SP to cause gridlock (4 witnesses to block any hard fork from happening).
As mentioned right now you need 51% to cause a hardfork or gridlock.
Bottom line dealing with gridlock (especially when everyone is excited about SMTs and communities changing Steem for the better), will be awful. Now we have to deal with dumb crap like removing downvotes and lowering power down time. Basically stuff unrelated to development. I'm worried this is going to become more common.
I'm very worried that this is where the current conversation between Jusin and the witnesses is headed. I'll try to explain it more clearly when I write my post on this issue of decentralization.