There has been some past debate about whether delegates should fulfil more or less services, perhaps even being purely block-signers (as they were originally) and paying for other common services in some other form. Here I take a different tack. What if delegates as a collective group were completely freed from the requirements of block-signing and price-feeds? What I find compelling about this idea that there would be far richer competition for delegate slots, delegates could be voted on their specific contributions rather than a menagerie of tasks, and the block-signing and price-feed pools could be managed by more expert judges. But there may well be big flaws or weaknesses as well.
I've already suggested elsewhere the possibility that a much smaller group of delegates could be voted in as price feed arbiters, that coordinate an open pool of price feed submitters. This would remove price-feeds as a required delegate function. See
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15331.msg197641.html#msg197641Is it feasible that something similar be done for block-signing? This is not a proposed process, as I don't think I'm best placed at all to determine the best procedure, but as a starting point for discussion I'm thinking something along these lines -
- there is a smaller group of block-sign arbiter delegates voted in by all stakeholders via the usual process, on the basis of their proposed selection process for block-signers
- each delegate in this group is required to maintain a template of preferred block-signers
- the combination of these templates determines the 101 block-signers at any time
- block-signing rewards no longer go to delegates but to this set of 101 block-signers
- whenever a block-sign arbiter delegate changes their template, there is a minimum time period before it comes into force, so in effect all stakeholders have a right of veto
- when a new block-sign arbiter delegate is voted in, their template takes immediate effect
So is something like this feasible? How would it affect the integrity of the block-signing process? Does the idea have merit?