I have a bunch of technical analysis of the new changes, which I've placed in my thread starting at reply #24; here is the link:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=3895.msg50062#msg50062Here's the high-level overview: I had serious doubts about the voting process, and I made a strong technical case for randomly selecting the representatives. However, bytemaster's proposal in this thread incorporates enough of my ideas that I think it's basically secure, and I'm willing to support it. However, there are a few possible abuses I want to keep out of the BitShares X market, in particular: Transaction censorship, private placement, front-running, and re-ordering.
If you want the full technical details of what I'm proposing, you can read my thread. But here's an overview: The board of directors still takes turns in a round-robin manner signing blocks. You can think of the node whose turn it is to sign blocks as the "president" or "chairman." If the protocol isn't carefully designed, the chairman would have a lot of power. Since our blockchain contains an entire market, the chairman has a variety of ways to abuse his position: He can make a transaction that exactly matches the best bid/ask (front-running), drop (censor) or re-order transactions because they move the price in a way that would be inconvenient for the chairman's own investments, or include a transaction that wasn't publicly broadcast (private placement). Worse, the chairman might choose to re-sell these valuable capabilities to others in exchange for votes to stay in office.
My solution is basically appointing a random subset of the board as a committee, which decides by secret ballot which transactions to include in the next block. The chairman still publishes the next block, but he can no longer add or remove whatever transactions he wants. With my modifications, the chairman must accept the committee's product, or resign his position. It is also hard for the committee to arrange collusion with each other, because they are randomly chosen. The chairman can't falsely claim there's no quorum when the committee votes against his interests, because he must agree that there is a quorum before the secret ballot is revealed.