Exactly, this was basically my thought while adding it. Imagining a long-standing proposal that was active for a year and has an additional 3 years left, an inactive account with 2M HP is voting for it and causing the DHF to fund it. The person/organization whose being funded turns malicious and does not do whatever their proposal promises and basically reaps the rewards off of the DHF by doing nothing.
Currently, with the Return Proposal, it might not cause an issue but I believe it is a nice precaution. I am sure, as @blocktrades said, this could even potentially increase the responses and exposure a proposal might get as users would regularly check the proposals to ensure their value at the time.
1 - Verifying proposal's value at the time of vote renewal. The user decides whether it is worth funding the project anymore.
2 - Being able to discover new proposals by checking the active proposals, leading to better discoverability for DHF in general.
3 - Preventing any potential inactive whale account causing problems.
Of course, if anyone has a better idea to implement a similar thing for proposals, that can be considered. All thoughts are welcome.
This is something that indeed regularly comes up for discussion and you're right, between ghost accounts and stale witness servers there is clearly a problem that leads to a status quo situation when it should not.
As for putting forward possible attacks that this would generate, it might be time to think about a system where at the time of the vote a percentage (non-cumulative) is specified as for the votes of a post.
Let me explain, let's take for example an account with 100 million VPs, he votes for a first witness or proposal up to 10%, then he has 90 million VPs left for his other votes and so on.
In this way it's impossible, even if you spread your Hive over several accounts, to return to a situation like the one we experienced at the time of the Justin coup d'état.
By recording the percentage and not the value as his account increases the values are recalculated accordingly. Compared to the current operation this just adds an additional calculation condition and value to store. As a result, it considerably reduces the risk of successful attacks on the super majority or the forcing of a multitude of proposals from the same source.
As @rishi556 I'm more of a minimum 1-year supporter but I also know that it's extremely hard to get people to vote. I'm convinced that if we could calculate the participation rate (I mean from normal users such as bloggers) of both witnesses and proposals, we would be shocked.
In order for this to work, it would be necessary that support be provided by accounts whose voice carries and is not drowned in the blockchain by organizing, for example, an annual debriefing/voting week for both the proposals and the witnesses. Even there, I'm not convinced that the impact is significant, in almost 3 years of presence I have only seen movement for the witnesses when it was necessary to counter the puppets and for the proposal system only at its implementation (again, I mean normal users such as bloggers).
Yes I know I'm boring with my normal users but they are the Yang of investors 🤣
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