For all those interested in how a few of the wealthiest Bitshares' stakeholders can effectively rig the mass majority of the elections, here is how.
It doesn't matter if you collect delegates' SSNs, driver's licenses, birth certificates and thumbprints, Bitshares' DPoS mechanism will always be susceptible to manipulation. You have introduced a "social construct" (aka voting) which turns Bitshares' delegates into a "government of the wealthy". No one will ever know what type of "behind-the-scenes" politics is going on which results in which delegates are selected.
Because you have instituted this ridiculous charade into chain security, all your figures on "decentralization" and "speed of decentralization" are speculative and assume that all 101 delegates are unique, non-colluding individuals. The fact is all these delegates are not going to compete against each other for a position. Who will become a delegate and control the delegate selection process are the wealthiest stakeholders. This will be accomplished in a quid pro quo manner. This means that really Bitshares is less decentralized than NXT because they will be able to form political/business coalitions which imo will result in them dominating the delegate selection process. The wealthiest stakeholders in Bitshares can do this very easily because it is an "Approval Voting" process. This allows stakeholders to put the entire weight of their stake behind each and every delegate they approve. The Bitshares' devs will deny this to the very end because they are part of this "ruling elite".
I think I could make a pretty good argument that delegates' "real world" identities being known by the community doesn't really matter or prevent a "Sybil attack". Imo, what would constitute a "Sybil attack" is the collusion of delegates' motives. I'm also pretty positive that the colluding delegates wouldn't "harm" the Bitshares' ecosystem, but instead use their power to manipulate delegate elections to capitalize on the delegate positions. Everybody can know everyones' name, but it's impossible to know their true intentions.
Any block chain has the problem that a few big players can collude, whether they are large stakeholders or large hashpoolers. We dilute that down to under one percent influence per delegate, max.
Then there's the question of what they can collude about. We can all observe whether they are performing their very limited block signing job to spec or not. We can look at their published price feeds. They have no other power.
That's true that in all blockchains stakeholders/hashpower can collude, but they can only collude in a one-to-one proportion to their stake/hash.
Since approval voting is used in delegate elections, I maintain that large stakeholders can effectively collude to a multiple proportion of their stake. Whereby, for example, 20% of colluding stake can disproportionately influence the elections of more than 20% of the delegates. This leads to a coalition of a few wealthy stakeholders being able to determine the outcomes of the mass majority of the delegate elections. This is especially true considering that voter turnout of smaller stakeholders will be lower than the voter turnout of larger stakeholders. As I said previously, it would be the intention of the colluding wealthy stakeholders to not harm Bitshares, but to elect delegates from which they would derive monetary gain in excess to their proportion of stake in the system at the expense of all other stakeholders.
Let's give an example. Remember, in "approval voting", voters do not just vote for one delegate. They can select as many or as few delegates as they wish and the entire weight of their stake counts towards each delegate they choose. Say for instance that the top delegate has 50% of the vote and the 101st delegate has 30% of the vote. The voting spread percentage is 20% (50%-30%). If the votes per delegate is a linear increase according to delegate rank, an additional 10% of the stake vote will move the 101st delegate to the 50th position. Likewise, a removal of 10% of the stake vote from the lower 50 delegates will result in them losing their delegate position. By strategically voting, a few wealthy stakeholders can influence a disproportionate number of delegate positions in relation to their actual stake.
In this example, a coalition of 10% stake was able to control 50% of the delegates.Does this sound fair to you?!