Only if they had enough stake, but it would require MORE stake for them to control the entire top 20 witnesses by limiting the votes per account to 5 than it does currently.
For example, an 8 million steem account splitting stake into 4 accounts now only gives them 2 million per account to vote with, a number that is much easier to match by other voters on other candidates, than matching the current 8 million total, like there is now.
Overall I am not doubting or claiming that the largest stake holders should not have significant influence, but when we have 2 of the largest stake holders basically deciding all of the top 20 witnesses (who are in charge of dictating the direction of the entire steem ecosystem) we need to adjust the model.
That's simply not true because other accounts would also have fewer votes and end up spreading their votes more thinly. The overall vote weight needed to reach the top 20 would decline by about a factor of 6 (assuming most of the stake deploys 30 votes and would deploy 5 given your proposal, which is close to correct, if not 100% accurate), which means high stakeholders with a split of 1/4 would, in immediate terms, have an easier time getting their preferred candidates in.
Of course, 'immediate terms' is never the correct analysis anyway (and your earlier point about other changes not having real papers and proofs is true in most cases–although the curve change does have some–but they all still have and have had extensive, if somewhat informal, analysis and discussion that goes beyond the first level analysis of assuming that nothing else changes and considers at least reasonable suppositions about how behavior might change), but you see the basic idea.
And I flat out disagree this is the case. What we actually have is:
a) witnesses voted by at least one of those stakeholders who are not in the top 20
b) witnesses voted by one of the top two who who still wouldn't be in the top 20 (in a static model) even if the other top-two also voted for them
c) witnesses not voted by at least one the top two, who are in the top 20
d) not a single top 20 slot accessible by a combination of the two largest stakeholders alone
e) at least one top 20 witness not voted by either of the top two stakeholders
f) at least one other top 20 witness who would still be there (in a static model) without any top-two votes.
g) etc.
The voting results are determined by a combination of votes from the largest stakeholders as well as the others. According to (d), which has always been the case AFAIK, without a lot of votes from other stakeholders, the top two stakeholders can not even come close to electing even a single witness at all, much less all witnesses. Yes, the largest have a lot of influence, but they are not 'dictating' anything. That's a combination of conspiracy theory, misunderstanding how voting works, and/or trolling.
You are confusing 'most top witnesses have a vote from a top stakeholder' with 'top witnesses are decided by top stakeholders'. These may seem close enough for rhetorical purposes but in terms of how voting actually works they are very different. It would actually be odd and probably dysfunctional if most top witnesses didn't have the support of most large stakeholders, including the largest.
Their two votes alone get someone very close to the number 20 spot by themselves and I think that many of those other votes are only there because they already received a vote from a top stakeholder. Impossible to prove yes, but intuitively seems very likely. In very general terms it is plain to see that under the current system we could have one massive account selecting all 20 witnesses. Dropping vote limits from 30 down to 5 would make that less likely which should be our goal.
On top of that we should probably have some kind of vote decay as well, where a vote expires after a year or so, that way we don't have dead votes/dead accounts keeping people in that really have no business being there.
That is another aspect that needs exploring.
No they don't. The total is about 28 billion and it takes 59 billion to get to #20 (and #20 is pretty vulnerable too, if other stakeholders don't like a #20, then votes get changed and they are easily pushed out).
Only Steemit itself is close. We should try to get more participation so that is no longer the case, but in any case as Steemit continues to sell off 800K every month it will soon stop being the case anyway.
All top witnesses need votes from many stakeholders in order to get voted in, not just two.
It could just as easily be argued in the other direction. Big stakeholders generally don't go fishing around for the #153 witness to vote. More typical is that backup witnesses start getting votes from the biggest stakeholders and sometimes eventually get voted into the top 20, after they have already climbed up the ladder with smaller votes. And yes there have been numerous top 20 witnesses who have done this. One second, let me make a quick count...roughly 11-12 of the current top witnesses got there by climbing up the ranks before they got votes from the biggest stakeholders. That's my informal assessment/recollection and may be off by a bit in either direction, but not so far off.
For me the main reason why the witness votes should be reduced is the aspect of decentralization. Only already based on the theoretic possibility of one stakeholder (steemit inc for example) being able to vote all top 20 witnesses. I think the limit should be decreased to a number where the practical possibility of this is very low.
Yes exactly.
Reducing the vote number doesn't really do this, because the total vote weight applying to the elected witnesses (i.e. #20 threshold) would certainly decline by a lot. It then becomes easier all else being equal for one large stakeholder to elect some witnesses even if not all of them, and (depending on the numbers) may or may not actually be harder to elect all of them (using multiple accounts)
It isn't great that the votes needed to get into the top 20 is currently a bit on the low side (IMO) but this is mostly a function of so much of the supply being held on exchanges as as well as a certain amount of non-voting (apart from steemit itself). Though even the current low number is much too high for any non-steemit stakeholder to choose witnesses unilaterally.
But we are not talking about "electing some of the witnesses". Sure they could get a few of their people in, but they wouldn't be able to get all 20 in like is possible (and easier than a model with 5 votes) right now.
It isn't really clear it is possible to vote in 20 witnesses now (only steemit's stake is close, and may or may not quite be there, I'm not sure), and IMO the best solution to that would be try to increase the vote weight on the top 20. One way to do that is to increase the vote limit even more.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It becomes easier to elect a smaller amount of witnesses for 1 large stakeholder. The less votes we have, the easier it should become to select a small number but more difficult to elect a large number.
Well, it is certainly complicated (I had another reply written but in fleshing out the different scenarios it got very complex and I gave up).
And I'm not sure that an attacker electing a 'smaller' number of witnesses is good either (can cause significant damage even with a minority, in fact according to BFT the threshold of malicious witnesses that can destroy the system is 33%).
The ideal number you want a minority stakeholder to be able to unilaterally elect is certainly zero, which is what approval voting strives for (assuring that all elected witnesses are 'acceptable' to the largest portion of the stake).
Of course that is an ideal and all real systems are likely to fail to live up to that ideal at some thresholds and under real conditions, but I think the one we have is pretty good. I would still like to see the vote limit increased or removed, which would further increase the vote weight totals (even a modest increase would keep steemit out more definitively; right now it is very close) and give us stronger protection on the backup list which is another vulnerability in a sense (even a relatively small stakeholder can promote witnesses from the backup list, which can be a type of long-term attack)
BTW, I'm not sure why you disagreed with my earlier reply which said this:
That's the same thing you are saying, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, practically a good max threshold you'd want to allow would be either the classical n=3f+1, allowing each stakeholder to elect max f replicas (Where we got our max n given by 20). But that usually applies more in the case of the classical BFT protocols (PBFT and alike), doesn't it?. Doesn't Steem follow the classical 51% threshold we see in most PoS and PoW?
I disagreed with the point of:
Since, with less votes they should be able to elect even less.
I do get the point with the coverage though, and I think it is a good idea to have no limit at all where votes could aggregate much more, which would make it practically impossible to elect any top witness for a single stakeholder. At the same time this could motivate big stake holders to vote a large quantity of capable witnesses (to increase this coverage) which would also lead to a denser field (making the witness election process more interesting - leading in practice also to the situation I was wanting to achieve).
But in this context I think either you got a small amount of votes to avoid the big influence of a single stakeholder, or you have a fairly large amount of votes to achieve this high level of coverage.
I would have to do the math behind it, but I feel 20 would be the worst possible threshold, and 30 also not being very great.
I don't think there has ever been a real proof, and I vaguely recall some reasonable argument it was actually 33%. But I may be misremembering or wrong.
If you have further analysis I'm interested to see it. In my view 30 being well over 20 is probably somewhat okay because it allows coverage to all acceptable primaries (which should tend to overlap a lot among reasonable stakeholders) as well as some backups. But without a stronger argument than that, confidence can't be too high. If we could gain significantly by increasing 30 to say 50, I don't think the downsides would be that serious and we should consider it.