@r0ach have you ever thought that even "collateral bid" is not more secure if the attack is organized from very wealthie/rich witnesses? (like Goldman Sachs or Soros )
I mean a entity for example that owns $1billion dollars in "savings", could easily damage the bts block-chain ...
In our eyes we would assume that they have much to loose compared with the "poor" witnesses when in reality their "big" stake on bts would be like nothing compared with their overall wealth (less than 1%).... So in reality they have nothing to loose compared with a "poor" witness that has for example at stake $10.000 from a total of $50.000.... Which one will secure the network better? Which one looses more? On this example obvious the "poor" witness will probably secure it better....Not?
Your statement is making the assumption that the current system will work in the long run. There's currently no valid entry point for bringing new delegates into the system. They should not have to come through this website to become one, they should not have to beg people like Bytemaster to become one, they should not have to speak English to become one. That's far too much ambiguous friction for a distributed system to function. The way into the system has to be clearly defined and accessible in a step by step chart, it is
currently not.
People like Anonymint criticize Bytemaster as being a Steve Jobs, control freak type figure, and this critcism really shows here. It's far too painfully obvious he's unable to comprehend Bitshares without him existing to control it.
What is your suggestion for bringing new delegates into the system without the centralized bureaucracy that exists now? The only logical way is with some type of finite resource with game theory elements, just like PoW uses. Collateral is the only thing up for the task in a PoS system. It has to be used in some way for bringing new delegates in or the system might not function in the long run from not being automated enough to sustain itself.
The political process in general requires a central point of information distribution, whether it be a town square, website, or news channel. This means instead of game theory elements running the equation, you have a more arbitary information gate keeper(s) guiding the lemmings around to their doom by telling them which candidates do or don't exist at all, and which to vote for.
As for state sponsored attacks, Goldman Sachs probably doesn't have to touch the delegate system to implode the coin. They can probably just buy a bunch of coins, take out a huge short, then dump like mad men while simultaneously circulating some type of "security breach" rumor. They might even profit on it's demise. If they wanted to attack via the delegate system, they could probably easily make it in with or without the collateral bid system in place as well. Just like they can already afford to 51% attack Bitcoin....
If the goal is to harden the system against instant, overnight takeover by large amounts of money, you would need to make it so instead of all delegates being up for re-election all the time, delegate positions would last a specific time span like a senate term and only open up for vote/bids if they go offline for a certain amount of time or other metric. If Bitshares became really huge, delegates would probably be running double or triple redundancy servers in that case to avoid dos attack.