I have a suggestion @justinw ...
Can we please limit the witness votes to 5-10 per account? It makes no sense for everyone to have 30 votes when basically the top 20 witnesses decide things. That means that if someone gets enough stake they can vote in all the top 20 witnesses themselves, which is basically what we have happening right now with just a couple of the largest whales determining who the top witnesses are...
That is anything but decentralized and a risk to the long term survival of this place.
That's an interesting idea, you should talk to the witnesses about it. In general, I think we are in favor of at least getting this discussion started as something to maybe be implemented in a future hardfork. If someone makes a great post about this, we'd be happy to feature it.
The problem is that some of the current witnesses may be against it as it may directly impact their 'earnings' and a seat at the Top 20 table...
That is part of the problem with this system, the foxes are watching the hen house.
But this is something we absolutely need to change for this place to be even remotely decentralized. As it stands right now we have 2 stake holders basically deciding 19 of top 20 witnesses... that has to change.
I think the best way to address this problem is to bring it out into the open - if they are against this change, get them to say it (and why they are against it) on a public featured post.
Ok, I will do that. Does it require a HF to make this change?
Yes, it would - and the solution might not be quite as simple as one would think. It would require some discussion as to what the best way to implement it would be. The issue that would need a creative, safe, and fair solution would be how to remove existing votes, and which ones to remove.
We would have to reset all votes and then people would have to go back and re-vote for those they want. That would actually be a good thing as there are some dormant votes on there that likely don't need to be. The more I think about this, the more I think something in the 5 vote range would be ideal.
But yes, we would need to make sure the chain continues running while the unvote/re-voting process takes place... for that perhaps we just keep the same top 20 in there for the first 24-48 hours until there has been some time for votes to be recast and a new top 20 set?