RE: The hardfork issue explained from scratch: Flexibility vs Immutability.
Thank you for the detailed description what a hard fork is. Now I get the point of the discussion around this.
Reading your great article one questions popped in my mind:
I agree that due to the fact that the block chain topic is just starting to rise it is necessary to adapt somehow to the future. Hardfork I learned is one option to do this. I also see the point that having just a few numbers of "witnesses" who are running the full block chain makes it easy to organize a hardfork.
On the other hand isn't the fact that the ruleset can't be changed easily that what brings the trust of the community? If only 20 people are able to change rules, ledger and whatever it is a different trust level I have than if 5k are needed.
Or did I miss something?
Yes that is a great question. I wonder why they chose 20 and not 100 or so. They are very focused on efficiency.
The 20 get chosen out of a pool that is larger, which makes it tougher to cheat. If someone would act up he can be voted out, since there are more witnesses to be voted to be the core witnesses.
I think 20 is still a decent amount of "miners". In Bitcoin there are only 12 mining pools and 3 of them have a majority of mining power. The 5k nodes we have in Bitcoin do not actively mine blocks. They still verify Tx and keep a copy of the blockchain but they are not the nodes satoshi describes in his white paper. So steem to me seems more decentralized than Bitcoin after all. Hower this might be wrong. I just find it very risky to have 3 entities that can control the network or could be compromised by an attacker.
Here are some stats about Bitcoin miners: https://blockchain.info/pools