Quote from: puppies on August 27, 2015, 06:13:21 PM

I know of no exception. In fact I believe you would need to use coercion in order to attain it. Similar to how the dollar is maintained as a standard.

That is one of the more interesting things about BitShares. It doesn't pretend that math can save you if you don't have a consensus in meat space. ie the meatspace consensus requirement is not ignored as in most other cryptos, but is actively encouraged. I often wish that it could be based more on math, and hard results, but such is the nature of my fellow man. I am glad to be part of a community that doesn't hide from it. Even if I don't always agree with them.

This is a great point. Here's an applicable snippet about In What Do We Trust from the Origin of BitShares series for newbies...

Quote from: Stan on February 04, 2015, 04:59:21 PM

The Origin of BitShares
Part 5
POW to POS to TaPOS to DPOS!

... edited for brevity ...

It took another six weeks to invent DPOS and even longer to test and debug it. Four precious months in this industry is a long painful time. It delayed the launch of BitShares from March to August. But we all feel it was absolutely necessary -- and well worth the wait.

DPOS solved both problems. It was totally analyzable and lightning fast. And best of all, it gave us a new commodity as a by product: Distilled Trust!

Aaack! Another Heresy!
These are supposed to be trustless systems!
What was he doing?!?

Yes! He had recognized that residual trust lay scattered in dark corners all around existing systems. We trusted the coin's self-hired developers. We trusted their wallets with our keys. We trusted its self-appointed big miners and big forgers to sign most of the blocks. Come to think about it, we do a lot of trusting for supposedly trustless systems!

Bytemaster's crowning innovation was to collect all that trust, bring it out into the bright light, make it explicit, subject it to a competitive Darwinian reputation distillation process, and place control over it directly into the hands of the token owners.

If we have to trust somebody, let's make sure we know who it is and how we can fire them!

But it get's better! Once you have such a mechanism, you have a valuable commodity to exploit. Having decentralized hiring and firing of people with trusted reputations as part of the system gives powerful new capabilities. We can have them publish trusted price feeds which are invaluable for bootstrapping market pegs. We can give them control over tunable system parameters - like what fees to charge and what thresholds to set. Hard fork upgrades are now trivial to implement - but only with the approval of elected delegates. The system can hire developers and marketeers using the same distilled reputation mechanism. It can have built-in multi-sig escrow functions and other services that require trustworthy human judgment. This was especially perfect for bytemaster's long term vision of transferring many of the traditional roles of government to the incorruptible block chain.

Systems without Distilled Trust must work very hard to limit the impact of unknown powers in dark places. This makes them very rigid and unresponsive to changes in market conditions. This may be ok if all you aim to make is a single unchanging currency like Bitcoin. But rigidity and unresponsiveness are not exactly what you are looking for in a competitive company!

DPOS is the key enabling factor for highly competitive,
quick responding companies that can turn on a dime.
And that is why the BitShares family of unmanned companies are all built upon it.