The biggest failure of modern democratic governance is voter apathy.
The public becomes complacent and cannot be bothered to vote, decision making becomes concentrated, the democratic process is corrupted and cronyism rises.
Pretty soon you end up where we are today in most western nations - with a parasitic elite protected by self-enacted laws and regulations designed to funnel benefits to the top of the pyramid.
Bitshares and other DPOS platforms will start off with largely benevolent delegates and relatively high voter participation.
As the market cap increases the wolves will start circling - existing delegates may become greedy, new delegates may not be benevolent.
As adoption increases voter participation will decay - people will just want to make a buck and won't care how the system works.
Pretty soon we will have a small elite of delegates that will, in small increments, begin entrenching themselves and concentrating power/benefits.
If you take even a cursory look at every system of governance in human history you will see the inevitable centralization/corruption/failure.
Hell, look at how quickly Bitcoin centralized.
There is no decentralized system yet created that has not become centralize/corrupted and this is primarily due to apathy by the governed.
And Bitshares, unfortunately, will suffer the same fate in due course. Imagine the sort of folks that are going to show up when the market cap hits $2bn, $200bn, $2T, etc. Human nature, greed, is simply too powerful.
I believe that Bitshares will fail unless we implement mandatory voter participation.
The mechanism would look something like this:
1. There is an issue/incident that requires consensus
2. Delegates a pay fee to initiate a vote
3. Vote is pushed client side
4. Users must vote prior to completing next transaction
I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: If voting is voluntary Bitshares (DPOS) will centralize, corrupt and ultimately fail.
We should implement a voting protocol now and make rollbacks the first use case.
As Bitshares matures there will be other serious issues requiring forks etc.
A mandatory voting mechanism will ensure the system does not, can not, centralize and corrupt over time.