How can a voter know that Delegates are actually decentralized ? Does a 3rd party need to do network analysis and then have that published with IPs claimed by candidates ? There is a problem with economy of scale leading to centralization if the network has strong anonymity and rewards. Is there any way to avoid economy of scale ?
I haven't been following it, I'm not technical and I've probably asked the following and it's been addressed before.
At first glance it seems you can get 51% control really easily is if you're willing to buy votes. (Operate at a loss.)
However if I remember correctly even if someone does get control, it's not the end of the world, there's a limited amount of things they can do and they'll get replaced very quickly.
Edit: Yeah found this answer by BM
First of all someone with 51% of the delegates only has one power: to exclude transactions or to stop producing blocks.
If they gain 51% of the delegates and fail to include transactions that would vote them out then it will be very obvious to everyone on the network, the blockchain will be hard-forked by some developer and the network will continue to function. You see what binds a network is not the software rules, but the social contract among the community. It is almost inconceivable that in the event 51% of the delegates stop including transactions that the community would sit back and take it for long.
Competition among chains and no barriers to entry or forking keeps people honest because there is NOTHING to gain by a 51% attack.
Note that these 51 delegates would have to pretend not to see blocks from the other 49 delegates and thus the attack would be so obvious and disruptive that it wouldn't last more than 24 hours before community members took action.
That was a quite an interesting thread actually, nice support there from clout & delulo.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=558316.40