Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 11, 2011, 11:31:23 AM

If there are relatively few delegates then what you have is effectively similar to todays payment networks, in which a few big players with pre-established trust relationships come to a consensus on who owns what between themselves. You'd have invented an open source SWIFT.

It sounds like it could scale to more than just a few. And the voting power might flow much more easily away from corrupted players than with SWIFT due to the almost zero barriers to retracting votes, and to enter into the market to supplant the established delegates. Remember, with delegated voting you don't necessarily give your vote directly to who will eventually cast it - you can just pass it on to someone you trust, hopefully solving the problem of rational ignorance/apathy. That or the bad guys will just buy up all the votes Tongue

Or maybe the good guys will?

I guess the relevant question is if this would do a good enough job of decentralizing the "voting power" and making it accountable? If so, the benefits listed above (that have survived) seem pretty significant. It might at least be a good approach to smaller blockchains that don't expect to attract enough outside computing power to keep them secure.

Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 11, 2011, 11:31:23 AM

But there are workable proposals for breaking that power and restoring Bitcoin to many thousands of voters again instead of just a few. They haven't been implemented but that's because talk is cheap, whereas working C++ isn't.

That is good to hear! I understand that proposals from people who obviously aren't qualified to program the shit they propose, not to mention that most of what they propose is indeed shit, probably gets pretty annoying.

Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 11, 2011, 11:31:23 AM

By the way, I'm not trying to pour cold water on your idea.

Not at all! I quite appreciate your thoughtful responses!