RE: Steem Witnesses: Vote Number and Decay
Vote Decay is a constantly raised issue as I see it, and I think it is very important this sort of community issue is at the very least fully discussed.
I can honestly see both sides of the Witness Vote Decay, looking at the top 100 list visible here https://steemit.com/~witnesses that fact anyone can look down this list and see Witnesses that have not been active for long periods in time - in one case over a year - can not reflect well when viewed from the outside - as a Blockchain surely Steem strives to excel at what it is doing, active Witnesses to me show the support and stability the blockchain has from the community - long inactive Witnesses negate from this and the fact they are clearly visible on the Steemit.com front end feels to me a negative. This is especially true because the presence of these inactive accounts makes it more difficult for the casual viewer to see the active Witnesses we have in the range 101 to 150+ , Steem as a blockchain has an incredible amount of support from people around the world and I think this is often ignored as a massive selling point for the platform.
BUT - I also agree with arguments about the biggest investors into Steem, who have invested but do not make use of front ends for security reasons primarily. When we look at investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars - where investors will only use a back end like Vessel for security, should they be forced to change Witness votes regularly when every log in is a potential security risk.
The DPOS system gives every StakeHolder the right to vote for Witnesses they choose, it is each users own Stake in Steem and they should be able to choose to vote (or not if they wish to abstain) for any Witness they choose - if they continue to vote for an inactive Witness that is still the decision of the Stakeholder on how they wish to direct their investment.
I do agree about reducing Witness Votes so no one voter can dictate a consensus group of Witnesses, it makes sense to me where @ura-soul says 15 Witness Votes would provide a good balance.
I think that asking an investor to cast votes once per year (or at least every 65 weeks) isn’t putting unnecessary burden on them. If they actually value their investment, it would make sense that they have at least this very minimal burden.
As stated in the post, it’s no different than real-world investors holding stock in a company and voting annually on a board of directors. If that’s what we’re pretending that crypto speculators are, then having similar standards shouldn’t be out of the question.
Investment often requires analyzing risks and even taking a somewhat active role in oversight of the company/investment. If we want a healthy investor/investment environment, then we ought to ensure that the “product” isn’t stale and that there’s at least a perceptible amount of oversight. Forever VotesTM don’t accomplish this.