A super delegate system - Re-inventing the Roman Republic

[santaclause102]

Why would a super delegate vote for someone that acts not like itself?
Also there is not much of a continuum for a witness (new block producing role in bitshares 2.0) to act like. A witness can either be honest or not (aside from performance (uptime etc.)).
If a super delegate picked a junior delegate that showed non honest behavior (= diverging from the super delgegate's behavior  / intent) then that is obviously not a a desired outcome. What is left is that such a second order delegation introduces more indirectness of control.

You may be interested in "proxy voting" aka RDPOS, a related idea.

[r0ach]

I believe DPoS is currently the best distributed consensus mechanism, but it might be possible to improve further.  Let's say, for instance, someone was to accidentally fall down the stairs and die, or accidentally shoot themselves in the head 16 times.  The balance of power shifts a lot with a system of only 101 delegates.  People like Vitalik have theorized about a node system consisting of 1000 nodes.  Darkcoin seemed to like numbers in this ballpark as well, beating Vitalik to this estimation.  If you've read one of my posts before, this is another example of convergent evolution, where you're starting to reach a more pronounced point of diminishing returns in delegation.

The problem with having such a large number of nodes is obviously voter apathy.  Nobody in their right mind is going to vote for 1000 different people and take time to vet them all.  The only real, practical solution is to resurrect the Roman republic.  The system I propose is, just like how the system currently functions, you would have people vote for 101 delegates to hold accountable, but their new title would be super delegate.  Each super delegate would have power to induct two other delegates of their choice unilaterally, for a total of 303 delegates.

The first thing people are going to think is, doesn't this give too much power to each super delegate?  The answer is no, you're both increasing redundancy, and increasing distribution of power at the same time.  The worst case scenario is that each junior delegate votes and behaves exactly the same way as the super delegate, but you've lost nothing if this occurs.  An increase in redundancy has occurred, while still keeping an identical political system as before.  The other scenario would be if the junior delegates behaved in a different manner than the super delegate.  In this scenario, you have an increase in functional power distribution as well as an increase in redundancy.

You'll notice I specified the number two for junior delegates.  There are several reasons for this number.  If you allow super delegates to induct a large number of people, something like ten, they basically become a career politician that just sells open slots to the free market.  Since it's the super delegates' job to vet the junior delegates, the number also can't be large because for many people, it might require them to travel the entire earth to find ten people they can trust.  The total delegate count also needs to be an odd number for conflict resolution.  The general vicinity of the number 300 has a symbolic meaning of western civiliation as well.

You'll notice I used the words "Roman republic" in the title.  This was not by accident.  The consuls elected the senate in Rome.  The distribution of power, even in distributed systems, originates from one person, or a small group at the beginning, the developer in this case.  Whatever framework they create decides how the system evolves from there.

Edit:  I'm not saying a permanent system of 101 won't work, it probably will, I'm just looking at exploring increased redundancy and distribution of power.