This makes me think it might be possible to predict a beneficial shuffle formation:
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/steem-witness-scheduling-algorithm
Especially this point:
After 21 witnesses have been selected, they are shuffled using the block time as a seed to a random number generator.
Yes that would be a major improvement. So you think it might be possible that if a libre witness is randomly assigned to spot 21 of 21, they could create a block that makes the below-20 witness mine first in the subsequent block?
Is there any protection to the other top 20 witnesses pretending the libre witness was offline and discarding those blocks?
I believe they are already "protected" otherwise that would cause a fork.
Oh wow. Great find. I can’t believe you were able to dig that up.