By design, no one can take over the chain. The likelihood of that happening is close to 0. STEEM is safer then BTC.... That being said, the biggest danger is in misuse of stake by large investors like freedom, though i believe even him/her doesnt want STEEM to fail.
Im not a fan of relying on STEEMIT.INC for protection. What i would like to see is @ned giving up a chunk of the ninja mined STEEM to a top 20 witness run account for development.
Not running away with the STEEM leaving us wondering if it might get dumped on a exchange.
Really? I might be ignorant, but couldnt the majority of witnesses collude to approve changes.to the code that benefits them? There are.only 20 + 1 witnesses. Since the freedom account is practically electing them, it seems rather easy to take over this chain. I asked a question about steem being 51% attacked on musing but no one responded yet. This seems like a good time to get an answer.
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Steem is extremely vulnerable to this, and in fact one could argue has already been taken over by one single investor (@freedom/@pumpkin) since that vote is a de facto requirement for top 20 witness status. Perhaps a change to make the max # of witness votes per account 10, instead of 30, would make it a lot safer. To control all 20 top witnesses would take twice as much stake as current setup, where a single account with enough SP can in fact elect the top THIRTY witnesses
That could work. Seems like the easiest way to not allow one account to elect all the important witnesses.
Not sure if it will not have "go arounds" @kenanqhd . What then holds the "boss" to not create secondary acount "freedom2", move half of his stake to his twin/clone, and elect the first 10 witness with "freedom" and the other 10 with "freedom2" ?
Big potention to reduce the power of boss is in reducing his dominance. By encouraging more orcas and dolphins to make their votes for witnesses. How many of them do now? 7%? 15% ? (I've seen some post on this subj)
Make the participance from all of us in witness vote 5x times higher, and the danger from one single dominating boss goes down 5x times. Or even more.
Beat this.
P.S..
As smth towards such risk reduction I see the "dophin council" initiative by @kabir88. Check his blog.