BitShareholders get to vote on how many witnesses (signing nodes similar to low cost miners) they want to pay for. In BitShares 1.0 that was hardwired to 101 which meant that every node was guaranteed to be signing less than 1% of the blocks, in a rotating random order.
To become a signer you need to earn a public reputation in order to get elected. To get fired, all you have to do is get caught breaking the rules once and your reputation is destroyed. Now you have to start over, earning a new reputation. So nodes can be fired and are limited to only one function: faithfully include transactions and sign blocks. Failure to do that is 100% visible to everybody.
Compare that to Bitcoin. The top three or so
companies sign over 51% of the blocks and therefore their three CEO's effectively control the whole network. You can't fire them because they still control all that hash power. Pools don't distribute control, they just distribute workload. Not the same thing.
Which is really more decentralized?
Decentralization has its costs so arguing that you have more independent nodes has diminishing returns. BitShareholders must decide how many independent node reputations are enough to secure their network. We think it will turn out to be somewhat less than 101, but that decision rests with the voters and their elected expert delegates. It's a simple question of marginal utility, what is the incremental cost vs payoff of going from 101 to 102?
Here are two articles that provide more detailed answers, although they have not been updated to reflect BitShares 2.0 advances.
Decentralization, Scalability, and Fault ToleranceThe Minimal Requirement for DecentralizationHere's an excerpt so you can decide if you want to read the rest:
We tend to get three different attributes mixed up causing endless confusion even among men of good will.
- Throughput Scalability
- Fault Tolerance
- Decentralized Control
These are three different concepts.
Fault ToleranceWe are saying 101 highly-reliable, tested and proven, hand-picked parts dispersed across the globe and selected by the entire owner population is sufficient redundancy to achieve reliable fault tolerance. The only thing those parts can do is – do their job to spec. We can observe their performance and swap them out in ten seconds if they don’t perform to spec. So, really, they are just interchangeable slave machines. Producing the blocks is a mindless task.
Selecting which parts make up the machine is where the power lies.
Decentralized ControlThe total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization red herring! That’s not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured or replaced by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds.
BitShares has decentralized p2p control
of a distributed, fault-tolerant computer
implementing an autonomous unmanned company
running a decentralized crypto currency exchange
which produces stable smart-coin products.
Throughput ScalabilityAny of the 101 nodes can scale up by adding parallel machines, side chains, and a thousand inventions we haven’t dreamed of. When we get to a billion owners and need a thousand machines per node, we can do that. It will still be decentralized enough to ensure that the 101 (now bigger) parts that make up the distributed, fault-tolerant machine will perform their mindless slave jobs reliability - from positions scattered across 24 time zones.
Those million decentralized owners do not want to have to think about managing more than 101 redundant parts to their machine. 101 is plenty, maybe too many, for the average owner to keep track of how they are performing. Adding more parts reduces the degree to which each part can be vetted and therefore reduces the system’s reliability. Total reliability is a combination of node redundancy and node reliability via reputation-based vetting.
In BitShares, absolute control is fully decentralized down to the votes of every single atomic BTS satoshi. You can’t get more decentralized than that.
) and stop listening to "everyone".
