I'm somewhat puzzled by this discussion...
How important is securing the network which is the witness role? How big of a hit would BitShares take if security was compromised? Isn't it better to aim too high than too low?
Bribery, persecution of individuals, DDOS attacks? Do you guys really believe that 17 witnesses is enough decentralization for fighting big government? You may laugh at the Bitcoin crowd, but they know what it means to be under attack. BitShares is still too small to have felt the spotlight, and we're the ones going for the throat of the banks.
Is a potential 100 million dollar financial network really going to run on 17 VPSes costing $40 each? Are we really going to limit the cost of the security for this network to $8160 a year? That sounds kind of absurd to me.
Bitcoin is currently spending more than 200 million dollars on security. Considering the market cap, that is of course not a fair comparison, but even if BitShares brought that number down to 100K (~0.67% of current market cap) it would still be an incredible improvement over Bitcoin.
When I envision the BitShares 2.0 network 2 years into the future, I see 300 high-power witnesses running the network from all corners of the world. The difficulty and cost of attacking the BitShares Network is absolutely mind-boggling, as it should be.
Also, denominating witness pay in BTS is more useful than USD. A higher BTS price means more adoption, higher volume, which in turn places higher requirements on the witnesses. Also, witnesses will participate who actually believe in BTS, not just to make a quick buck.
To sum it up, 17 is way too low. It is natural that the number of witnesses will increase as we grow, not decrease. Start out at 67 witnesses with the option of increasing the number with no upper limit. Keep in mind, letting people run a witness also educates people about BitShares (like me). If you later want to increase from 17 to 35, how long will it take to get 18 qualified admins to jump in?
My 2 BTS. Help me understand why I'm wrong.