Raising the quantity of BTS witnesses & the introduction of vote degradation?

[R]

I like the idea of accountability too. It is very sad to see so few witnesses assisting the Gridcoin MPA, it should be easy to do and we will have more and more communities coming onboard so we need an active set of witnesses.

I am watching the Witness report on Steem and I really like the effort. Unfortunately, It requires a lot of time and effort to kick that off. If the report can be posted on Steem, the analyst would get at least a compensation for his work.

Are we missing the right tools for voting or just the reporting?

@crypto123 which two witness are supporting you right now? Lets give them a push in votes!

The witnesses that have begun providing price feeds for the Gridcoin MPA are 'delegate.ihashfury' and 'wackou', thanks

Here's the witness thread: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,22733.0.html

I'll look into another couple steem posts regarding the Gridcoin MPA, our onboarding process/experience thus far and about black swan events for low trading volume cryptocurrencies (looks like the GRIDCOIN MPA is dead for now..).

[Brekyrself]

Information is still scattered between here and steem thus may make it difficult for witnesses to keep up to date on information. 

-Could there be something built into the GUI when creating a new token that sends a bts with memo to the current witnesses for the feed to be considered?
-Perhaps an additional tab next to worker proposals for this situation to get feeds added by witnesses?

[Chris4210]

I like the idea of accountability too. It is very sad to see so few witnesses assisting the Gridcoin MPA, it should be easy to do and we will have more and more communities coming onboard so we need an active set of witnesses.

I am watching the Witness report on Steem and I really like the effort. Unfortunately, It requires a lot of time and effort to kick that off. If the report can be posted on Steem, the analyst would get at least a compensation for his work.

Are we missing the right tools for voting or just the reporting?

@crypto123 which two witness are supporting you right now? Lets give them a push in votes!

[R]

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.

[pc]

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.

[R]

Hey,

In episode #173 of BeyondBitcoin (https://steemit.com/beyondbitcoin/@officialfuzzy/guest-signups-beyond-bitcoin-hangout-173-9-16-16-rsvp-to-friday-s-hangout-refer-projects-for-rewards) I raised the following questions:

• Should we increase the quantity of BTS witnesses?
• Should we introduce witness vote degradation?

In BTSX we had 101+ witnesses, now we have 27 witnesses in BTS. Currently, witnesses earn approx $200/month. If in the future BTS increases significantly in value these positions will be earning more. The reason why I ask if we should increase the witness count is primarily because of the current witnesses slow reaction to implement price feeds.

Why I ask if we should introduce witness vote degradation:

• Campaigning for these witnesses positions has become almost non existent at this point (no witnesses in beyondbitcoin hangouts asking for votes for example)
• The witness sub-forum (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/board,61.0.html) has become a ghost town (witness channel on steemit isn't populated with BTS witness posts).
• Witnesses once voted in, unless their node degrades, are unlikely to be replaced by another prospective BTS witness. If we had voting degradation where after 'x' months your placed vote on a witness begins degrading over a period of 'y' months, we would see witnesses who actively campaign potentially becoming witnesses, replacing inactive BTS witnesses.
• Getting current witnesses to implement price feeds for new MPAs is quite difficult, I have been actively campaigning for witnesses to publish price feeds for the 'GRIDCOIN' MPA (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,22733.0.html). After 2.5 months and 3 BeyondBitcoin hangout appearances only 2 witnesses have published price feeds for the GRIDCOIN MPA. New witnesses may be more likely to interact with the BTS community.
• By introducing voting degradation, we may increase regular participation in the voting system rather than a 'vote once and forget' mindset right now.

During episode #173, crypto.prometheus raised the issue of due to the current low network voting participation, perhaps an individual armed with $500k they could vote their own witnesses into power - whilst true, on the other hand if an attacker had significant funds they could likely convince an active witness to sell their account (since they only get $200/month, if someone comes along with $10k+ they may be very tempted to take the offer).

Thoughts? No official proposal has been created in the client, just an informal discussion at this point.

Matching Steem post: https://goo.gl/s7xMiT

Best regards,
CM.