RE: The Facts
Yes, you covered a few of the larger holes in @steemchillers narrative. Whether you choose to believe JSun's initial statements (move Steem to Tron blockchain, use contacts at exchanges to delist "old" Steem and list a "new" Steem (Tron token) or his second statements, it is misleading at best to leave out the first set of statements. IMO, there is no reason at all to believe that the first set of statements aren't exactly what JSun intended (and likely, intends) to do.
However, I think it is worse to leave out that news broke in the week after JSun's second statements (his statements to the effect that he would not vote witnesses and would not attempt to migrate chain to Tron) that JSun had already broken the exact same promise in the Tron ecosystem, and had used Tron Foundation genesis stake to vote in SR's (Tron equivalent of witnesses). Is there a meaningful difference between:
"JSun promised not to vote for witnesses, witnesses out of fear decided to freeze his stake anyway" and "JSun promised not to vote for witnesses, news came out that he had broken exact same promise not to vote in block producers with Tron genesis stake, and witnesses out of fear decided to freeze his stake"? Of course there is a very meaningful difference, and leaving out that part shows whose pocket you are in. Geez.
Then @steemchiller went ahead and lost his mind publicly with the "external security experts" line. Please look up what "decentralized" means. 20 puppet witnesses controlled by one individual is 100% clear, not an opinion, no two ways about it, centralization. A super majority of independent elected witnesses coming to a consensus is 100% clear, not an opnion, no two ways about it, decentralized governance in action. This last bit is not disputable, these are not opinions that can be thought about one way or another - centralization and decentralization are real words with clear definitions and @steemchiller has lost any credibility he may have had on this network with this stance.
I am not sure that we have ever had independently elected witnesses. Certainly not all top twenty.
Decentralization is a great idea and i support that wholeheartedly but how do we get that with stake based voting for witnesses?
The Steemit inc stake is not the only ninja mined stake out there, Maybe we need to freeze those other accounts stakes as well
For the purposes of comparing with 20 puppet witnesses controlled by a single account and basically voted for by one stake, the old top 20 were independently elected. In the old top 20 there was not a single witness with votes from both of the two largest voting stakes (pumpkin/freedom & blocktrades), and one witness had votes from neither (@aggroed). And even with how large the freedom vote is, when you look at the vote charts the "other" votes on top witnesses that are too small to list individually are collectively larger than the freedom vote, and then of course there is a whole slew of larger votes big enough to show up as a bar in the chart.
I used to be one of the operators of Curie while it was top 20, and am currently one of the admins of @c-squared (which was #38 active witness prior to JSun takeover). I can tell you that even getting up into the top 40 witnesses requires assembling a pretty broad coalition of support, and staying in top 20 position requires constant jockeying for votes.
Is it independently elected in a democratic sense where the average user can feel their vote counts as much as a whale? Nope. But without some kind of KYC / one account per person, that is a literal impossibility.
I would strongly agree with a change to current voting mechanism though to limit the influence of the largest stakes. Rather than reduce the number of witness votes I think the simplest way is simply 1 SP = 1 vote, and allow users to split up their SP among witness votes however they want.