When the BitShares devs get a little uppity, I love to remind them that what they are doing is not exactly rocket science. 8)
But, while trying to find a way to communicate the architecture of BitShares to folks on other forums, I've stumbled on the following description, drawing on my past experience with continuously reconfiguring fault-tolerant flight control systems. (Yes I wrote a technical report with that title back before there was an Internet or even a word processor.) See if you buy this way of describing the BitShares architecture:
We tend to get three different attributes mixed up causing endless confusion even among men of good will.
Throughput Scalability and Fault Tolerance and Decentralized Control
are three different concepts.
Fault Tolerance. We are saying 101 highly-reliable, tested and proven, hand-picked parts dispersed across the globe and selected by the entire owner population is sufficient redundancy to achieve reliable fault tolerance. The only thing those parts can do is -- do their job to spec. We can observe their performance and swap them out in ten seconds if they don't perform to spec. So, really, they are just interchangeable slave machines. Producing the blocks is a mindless task.
Selecting which parts make up the machine is where the power lies.
Decentralized Control. The total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization red herring! That's not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured or replaced by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds.
We have decentralized p2p control
of a distributed, fault-tolerant computer
implementing an autonomous unmanned company
running a decentralized crypto currency exchange
which produces stable smart-coin products.
Throughput Scalability is also entirely different. Any of the 101 nodes can scale up by adding parallel machines, side chains, and a thousand inventions we haven't dreamed of. When we get to a billion owners and need a thousand machines per node, we can do that. It will still be decentralized enough to ensure that the 101 (now bigger) parts that make up the distributed, fault-tolerant machine will perform their mindless slave jobs reliability - from positions scattered across 24 time zones.
Those million decentralized owners do not want to have to think about managing more than 101 redundant parts to their machine. 101 is plenty, maybe too many, for the average owner to keep track of how they are performing. Adding more parts reduces the degree to which each part can be vetted and therefore reduces the system's reliability. Total reliability is a combination of node redundancy and node reliability via reputation-based vetting.
In BitShares, absolute control is fully decentralized down to the votes of every single atomic BTS satoshi. You can't get more decentralized than that.
Ok, I have another theory that I would appreciate if someone could locate some facts that would either prove or disprove it:
The Secret Truth About Signing Insiders
I'll bet if you look at the Top 101 most frequent block signers for any major block chain you will find that this same group signs over 90%, maybe even 99%, of the chain's blocks inside a typical transaction confirmation window. For all such windows.
For convenience, I'll call the members of this elite group the block chain's signing insiders.
Everyone who is not a signing insider has a tiny fraction of that final 1% chance to sign a block. This gratuitous honor is shared among all the outsiders and has no material effect on the reliability, integrity, or security of the network.
So it doesn't matter how many outsiders are eligible to sign a block, they have no relevance whatsoever. Their chance to win the signing lottery is a mere placebo, designed to make them feel like they are involved.
Only the insiders matter in determining whether any transaction gets confirmed.
No outsider, much less the same outsider, will get honored with another turn in the same confirmation window to weigh in on whether any particular transaction should be confirmed. Thus, all transactions are confirmed by insiders.
Outsiders don't matter.
Arguing about how many powerless outsiders your chain has is meaningless.
All block chains are completely controlled by their signing insiders.
With Ripple, insiders must appoint new insiders and have economic incentives not to go any where near 101 of them.
With POW systems, you appoint yourself to be an insider by acquiring control of one of the top 101 pools of hardware.
With POS systems, you appoint yourself to be an insider by acquiring control of one of the top 101 pools of coins.
With DPOS systems, you get elected to be an insider by acquiring one of the top 101 most preferred reputations.
Only with DPOS do outsiders have any say at all in who gets to be an insider.
So, its your call. Do you want your blocks signed by people who appointed themselves as insiders through their ability to acquire large pools of coins or hardware? Or would you rather have that job done by the people, even very poor people, who have done the work necessary to earn one of the best reputations?
How do you get rid of a bad actor that owns a large pool of hash power or tokens?
Um, You can't.
How do you get rid of a bad actor who just violated the trust she had painstakingly earned?
"Click."
;)
So, can someone find me some facts about the distribution of block signing percentages among the top 101 most frequent signers for any of the top ten block chains?
I'll start: For BitShares there is a uniform distribution of just under 1% for each of the top 101 signers and then it drops to zero for all remaining potential signers.
I'd love to have enough data to make a few plots like these:
(http://archive.ite.journal.informs.org/Vol1No1/Evans/image7.gif)