Voting for witnesses is a problem. From what I understand, anyone can run a witness node and any witness node connected to #hive can witness and 'verify' #hive blocks on the blockchain. Doing so earns you an amount of $HIVE which is drawn from the pool and paid to you. Sounds great and not that much different from mining cryptocurrencies.

The "voting" process where a vote is assigned by a hive user to any witness nodes is where the unique problem seems to arise with DPoS. Each hive user can assign 30 individual votes, one to each of the many witness nodes out there. It's a pain in the arse and I still don't know how much of a difference it makes to my experiences on here.

I don't mind the idea of an assigned votes' voting power diminishing/ decaying over time but it still wont change the fact that each user being given the option of casting up to 30 witness votes is exploitable. I think that problems down the line will be inescapable with such a setup with so many votes per account. But I don't think changing the maximum witness votes from 30 to say 3 per account will make that much of a difference in the long run.

It's worth a shot still - anything to make the experience of using these blockchain platforms in an easier way is welcomed. I still think that a considerable amount of hive accounts will just not vote as a new account. Or if an account has assigned 30 votes to 30 existing witnesses whose vote decays to 0% of 365 days, they just wont bother re-voting or refreshing their existing vote.

One could muse whether the option to vote could be somehow incentive-driven for the voter. I have enough of voting in real life and having to mimic the same iniquity here is not appealing at all.

Do we really want a governing body that feels it is “untouchable” for whatever reason!
So, that to me personally is reason enough to not place emphasis on the reasons some people have for wanting “vote decay”, but rather a view of “what it brings with it” as far as decentralization and insurances that our governance will not become an “oligarchy” who feel like they can get away with anything they wish to do.

Unless you can hardwire a trustless modus operandi for any governance that's required, I don't believe there will be an effective measure to ensure decentralization or to prevent 'oligarchies' from forming. The linked article makes a similar point: Social consensus and governance is an incredibly tricky problem on a blockchain and I don't really know of any other DPoS blockchains which are doing crash hot now either.

So yeah, I waffled on with much ado about nothing. I have no answers and I assume that witnesses host & run a witness node so they can predominantly make an income by doing so. I don't think votes matter much except in the context of how many votes a witness node has which then enables it to process and verify the #hive blockchain faster. I know votes are a problem (much like in real life) because the illusion of power that voting gives is the power which will allow for oligarchies to form.

Yeah so i'll just end on this paradox from the article I linked and it's concluding thought:

Perhaps a more accurate way to describe blockchains is not as “trustless,” but as built on the basis of distributed trust, We are trusting everyone in aggregate

Can we really trust everyone in the aggregrate?