Currently in order to vote in any witnesses small stake has to overcome the full weight of all stake voting for the 20+ witnesses acceptable to the majority stake, so something like >50%.
If votes have to be split up then in a minority attack situation, the majority splits its votes across 20+ "good guys" and the minority need only achieve 1/20 (5%) of the majority voting power to vote in one malicious "bad guy" witness (not necessarily all that bad, but strictly speaking undesirable) and 7/21 (33%) to vote in enough to break BFT.
It might be good to resplit the governance and block production roles as was the case in Bitshares, each with slightly different rules. The governance roles might favor broader consensus while the block production roles favor tighter chain security. But I haven't thought this through sufficiently; it could open up other attacks or undesirable outcomes.
There are probably other undesirable effects to different voting systems apart from security too. If voting for another witness splits your votes then up-and-coming witnesses will have a much harder time getting votes at all Most voters will choose to either support one of the top 20 or maybe 21 or 22 trying to push them in. "Wasting votes" on #56 won't happen.
Hmm, can one bad witness harm the chain?
I see what you mean about that concentrating votes on very many fewer witnesses.
Looks like we just need JS to work with us rather than against us.
What do you see as a priority to improve about the chain?
What we have seems to be working as well as can be expected.
When do we go into coast mode on economics?
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.
What do you mean by elections twice per year?
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?
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.
It works very much like quoting @smooth
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?