Clearly the harm that can be caused by one witness is small, even negligible (a bit of chain instability, a potentially-harmful but generally-overruled vote on hard forks, etc.). But what about two witnesses? Three? Four? Where do you draw the line?
Clearly at every increment (starting with zero) where more and more witnesses can be installed with less stake, the chain is less secure.
Yeah, I see that, but would think the community would catch on and gang tackle them.
How do you feel about down votes for witnesses and dead man switches on votes?
Downvotes may have some merit, I haven't thought enough about it. On the surface I like downvotes as being somewhat less prone to vote buying, self-voting, etc. We see that clearly with vote payouts and some of the same issues apply to witnesses. That being said, overall there are various angles that all need to be considered in evaluating a voting system (fairness, representation, abuse- and corruption-resistance, security, etc.) and it isn't a trivial effort.
If by dead man switches you mean some sort of vote expiration/decay, then I agree with it, though the devil is in the details. IMO the most clearly supportable version would have votes from completely idle accounts decay or just removed after some period of time, say two years. Other versions are plausible too, but the tradeoffs are less clear.
So no elections twice a year?
Vote anytime in between, but all votes expire in March and Sep?
I guess that may be disruptive.
I'll be glad when changes are mostly cosmetic.
Well, if witness votes expired twice a year, witnesses would have reason to campaign all year long, because in <6 months they could be out.
It would light a fire under some of them, and focus parts of the community on conditions.
And favor active users.
Why we worry so excessively about the passive accounts is beyond me.
Play the game, eh?
Meh. If witness votes expire frequently then all large stakeholders will just automate renewing them. I know I would.
I'd be in favor of dropping votes from fully-inactive account though. It is a reasonable debate as to whether that means six months, 1 year, 2 years, etc. This wouldn't so much be about campaigning though, since those fully-inactive accounts are likely people who are gone. It would be about not having stale/absent stakeholders still exerting influence, and yes that would include some existing witnesses losing support, which they would have to gain from other voters, or permanently drop out.
I'm still liking an affirmative action to maintain witness votes.
Both voting and holding office.
This is a game, it needs to be played.
So, longer than coding a bot is worth, once or twice a year, for me.
This will give us a blockchain holiday to celebrate.
As for dead fish, for sure 2 years, and probably 1, imo.
It will have to hinge on the active key, too many autovoters on zombie accounts.
I guess golos decided that no use of the active key >6 months and you get powered down.
Scared me into changing my keys.
I should have done it when they split into .id and .io, I guess.
All hail that blond guy!
Yeah I heard about the golos power down thing. That has some merit, but kind of scary from a security point of view. It mean people leaving accounts idle are put at risk of having their coins swept if the key gets out. I think I would prefer to just stop votes.
dead man switches on votes?
You might be interested to know, Golos(Steem fork) has implemented the automatically started power down for accounts which did not used the active key for 6 month.
Why would they do that?
Dead man switches turn off legacy votes.
Active users should have priority, no.
Why would they do that?
It works very much like quoting @smooth
the most clearly supportable version would have votes from completely idle accounts decay or just removed after some period of time
It works very much like quoting,...
Lol,...
I guess it would be the same reason to nix witness votes.
I just powered it back up and changed the keys.
Now I can just power it back up.
Is there somewhere to turn golos into fiat, or monero?