RE: Reputational Enhanced Delegated Proof-of-Stake (REDPOS)
As many others already pointed out, making an automatic assessment of reputation is extremely difficult. And that is not all, there is no guarantee that the account owner stays the same. Probably the easiest way to make a reputation system would be account age, capped at 2 years (Else it will get increasingly difficult to remove malicious witnesses in the worst case as well). Now, Justin Sun could just buy 20 accounts (sneaky) of people to do this. Not only that, Steemit Inc probably owns a whole fleet of "old" accounts they could've used for this.
Now, the more complex the reputation system gets the more difficult it will be for an attacker to take over. However, it also gets less democratic with each step. What happens if there is a witness the vast majority disagrees with but due its time on the chain its reputation is too high to remove it from the list of witnesses.
https://steempeak.com/blockchain/@atma.love/re-argsolver-q7d1u0
DPOS is not a democracy it's more like an anarchocapitalist experiment. Is not 1 person 1 vote (or 1 account 1 vote). It is based on ownership rights. The blockchain is a consortium of several SP owners, that designate administrators. The witnesses election process is just an extension of ownership mandate.
The problem with STEEM in particular, is that Steemit Inc.´s STEEM share has been designated as a special type of asset. At code level, SP from Steemit Inc. is the same as SP from John Doe. At social level it was agreed that those STEEM had no voting rights. A soft-fork was attempted in order to code the social agreement regarding that stake.
A REDPOS protocol should not turn a blockchain into a democracy, because if you completely erase the ownership concept, you destroy the value of each stake. However no consortium or human community would let a 0 years old or cero experienced person turn into an administrator.
With less democratic I meant "witnesses get more power the more reputation they have compared to the stakeholders without having any stake".
I agree that new accounts becoming an administrator is bad, the problem, as I pointed out, is that we cannot guarantee how long someone is on chain. We don't know if it is a real person and we don't know if its the same person either.
Yes account age is jut one parameter. A good REDPOS implementation would logically depend on a good REP system development as REP would be a key aspect of such a protocol.
What Justin Sun did to STEEM blockchain is a complex type of Sybil attack, using SP to vote from socially unauthorized sources (both the Steemit Inc. stake and the exchanges stakes were not supoused to vote). It's both democracy and ownership fraud (but ownership restrictions agreed by the human community were not coded).
If you buy an asset that comes with certain restrictions, you get a discount. If you then ignore those restrictions (because there is no code that can actually avoid you to ignore them), you create value in a fraudulent manner.
The aim of a REDPOS protocol should be that the witness designation process be less democratic so to avoid sophisticated sybil attacks.
I understand this. However, designing a good REP system is difficult, designing one that cannot be games even more difficult and designing one that cannot be gamed and users don't sell their accounts with REP is almost impossible.
And if you achieve it, making it SP * REP is probably not a good idea because it takes power away from the stakeholders.
thus, it would make more sense as a minimum safeguard to become a witness.
(Need REP > X to participate in consensus).
Maybe a good REDPOS implementation could use the account-age (or the entire REP) as a parameter affecting not only the eligibility of an account, but the voting power of every account.
If "NEWSTEEM" would run in such a REDPOS, then NEWSTEEM holders would increase or decrease their voting power not only by means of SP, but by means of SP affected by their own REP. Would not affect ownership rights, since it would be a known attribute of the NEWSTEEM asset class.
And "NEWSTEEM" witness candidates would get their rank affected not only by incoming votes, but by their REP.
I like the idea in general, but it would then result in Peer to Peer vote buying to increase your own REP.
Certainly parameters such as account-age wont be affected by peer to peer vote.
Also if REP value increases it should mean that an attack on sucha a chain would be more costly.
The cost calculation for the current hostile takeover was pretty simple. A good REDPOS implementation should turn a hostile takeover cost calculation into a more complex task.
anonymous (to avoid vote wars) peer to peer vote can also be included in a reputation system. i will adjust this https://steempeak.com/blockchain/@atma.love/re-argsolver-q7d1u0
thanks