There is also a trade off between number of nodes securing the network and cost to the network. Especially as we end up having to use more and more powerful servers to run our witnesses. How would these sub delegates get paid? Wouldn't there be an incentive for witnesses to just run multiple witnesses from the same node and pretend they had different individuals running them? Perhaps if they sub witnesses were paid from the elected witnesses pay. Then it could be considered a service the witness provides.
I'm of the opinion that ten witnesses is too few. 101 might be enough. 1000 would be better. How much are we willing to pay for security though, and how much is enough security?
1000 is too much to elect, so if you want 1000, it would have to be done by owning a certain amount of coins with voting removed entirely. That's why I made this post, it's the only way to scale up delegate count and still have voting, otherwise you would just use a specified resource number to be a node in the first place. Due to it's crap distribution, I've heard people claim some guy named "Otoh" or something runs 500 Darkcoin nodes himself, which is basically a giant sybil attack.
In summary, here are the choices
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1) A specific number of coins required to run a node and it's entirely a free lance system with no voting. If distribution is bad, you have tons of sybil nodes running from one actor, but there's really no such thing as "good" distribution in currency. No matter what real world currency or altcoin you look at, the sybil nodes would likely always be a problem.
2) Voting for a set number of nodes, which would in my opinion, mostly evolve into a system where delegates can only be voted in by not being anonymous in the long run and being some kind of public person, business, NGO, or whatever. It doesn't really matter if they're Kanye West or the Red Cross, just as long as people know they aren't a sybil node. The downfall is that you can't expect people to vote for a billion candidates so it's hard to scale redundancy past a certain number, hence my solution in this post.
3) The top 101 account balances that decide to run as delegates are automatically elected since they have the most to lose by the system failing. Besides people claiming it would be an aristocracy, you also have the problem of sybil nodes like option #1.
Overall, option #2 seems to work the best for scaling up to global reserve currency. Each nation state can be well represented in that manner instead of just an aristocracy from one country, or possibly forever having a sybil problem like Darkcoin in the other option. Once the system scaled large enough, the biggest nations would eventually demand a seat at the delegate table or they would boycott the system. It would definitely work as a distributed system in that case.
The number of witnesses in 2.0 is scalable and is set by voters. So if it is determined that 101 is not enough and we need more, this can be achieved.
Yes, I know that, but like I said, 101 is already a large number to deal with, so going any further would require either my system above or RDPOS. I haven't thoroughly analyzed RDPOS yet, but it seems like it might evolve into some kind of party platform like republicans vs democrats, but who knows. If RDPOS isn't a flop, the two systems could even be combined.