I intend to discuss/mention this matter in episode #194 of the BeyondBitcoin hangout: https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@officialfuzzy/guest-signups-beyond-bitcoin-hangout-174-9-25-16-rsvp-to-friday-s-hangout-refer-projects-for-rewards#@cm-steem/re-officialfuzzy-guest-signups-beyond-bitcoin-hangout-174-9-25-16-rsvp-to-friday-s-hangout-refer-projects-for-rewards-20160920t231350637z

Chris4210: Did you bring up the worker proposal in a beyondbitcoin episode? Might be a good way of driving up voting participation?

Potentially the 'override_authority: Issuer may transfer asset back to himself' permission could be used to recover an MPA from a black swan event/state.

Thanks @cyrano.witness, I appreciate the write up - I was going to do a write up on this topic but have been swamped with Gridcoin things recently.

I'm very interested in seeing the current 'black swan' state resolved for the Gridcoin MPA, however this will likely continue occuring due to the volatility of Gridcoin's marketcap.

On a positive note - this is a great learning opportunity for all BTS users; it's not often that black swan events occur, better for it to happen on a new MPA than one of the large ones (fiat/btc).

I'm not going to give up on BTS, i've been holding BTS since BTSX so i'm very much so interested in seeing it succeed.

I've promoted your post, let's hope some Bitshares users join in the conversation!

Price feeds can no longer be published after a black swan.

Currently, there is no way to revive an MPA after a black swan event. Therefore, like someone mentioned on mumble today, this requires a hardfork.

Basically, what needs to be done is to pay out all holders from the settlement_fund. There is currently no mechanism to enforce this. Holders must settle individually. I believe forcing settlement of all holders wasn't implemented because it's computationally expensive (has to walk the list of all account balances).

Once all holdings have been settled and the settlement_fund has been emptied, the settlement_price has to be removed. I think it would be safe to do this at that point. This is something that has to be implemented, however.

That's unfortunate & quite a short lived experiment in BitShares by the Gridcoin community then. We're still on track for otherwise integrating gridcoin into Bitshares. I hope black swan handling/recovery functionality is added into BitShares in the future.

Please correct me if I am wrong but you can only change these features once right? So if we surrender these features today we cannot turn them back again, right? So if we change them we can not adjust to any future market conditions where we might use these features.

That would be almost like the block size debate in Bitcoin. I would prefer a more flexible system.

Indeed, surrendering these permissions would be a one-way street, so any action would need discussed by all committee members (and the rest of the BTS community).

I think you have missed the point that CryptoPrometheus was trying to make.

Voting decay means the overall level of votes will go down, due to voter apathy. That means a large BTS holder can vote in not only one witness for himself, but as many as he likes, taking over control of the blockchain.

Note that with 27 active witnesses, buying out 51% of them witnesses will cost at least 14 times as much as buying out one, whereas you currently need less than twice as many BTS to vote 14 in than you need to vote one in.

I get that voter apathy may be a concern in the future, but at the moment the low level of voting participation in the first place is more of a concern than voter apathy IMO.

At the moment, when you're voted in & your node is running you're very unlikely to be at risk of losing your elected witness position (a potential centralization risk). I don't think that users will become apathetic to voting if their vote degrades over say a 6 month period.

We should be continuously driving users to vote (and re-evaluate their votes after a certain period of time) within the Bitshares network. We should be brainstorming new ideas regarding how we can drive up voter participation in the future, such as holding informal fun polls (favourite colour, community mvp polls, etc).

The Gridcoin network is also experiencing a lack of voting participation - only 1/7th of total vote weight votes which brings the validity of poll results mandate into question.

I was thinking about how Project Rain could work for Steem.

1. You could create a thread, request users upvote it and distribute the steem dollars raised to BOINC users.
2. A witness (with their increasing SP) or curation group could allocate up-votes to BOINC users. (Though, you cannot vote lower than 1%, so there would need to be a cut off).

I'd love to hear how you think Project Rain could be used in BTS/Steem/(other graphene projects).

Cheers,
CM.