Nodes hold the power in the dash scheme and coins buy that power, which means if coins are aggregated through nodes, that power can continually grow in the hands of a few oligarchs.
I don't know if I should bother answering this. It's a kind of mickey mouse symbolic characterisation. Symbolically - ok - people 'own' nodes in the sense that they own the coinage at some random blockchain address which collateralises it.
But symbolism is where it ends. I might as well characterise the bitcoin miners as 'trusted' for all the power they have to affect the protocol and for that change to have a practical impact on the network's logical integrity.
where this becomes a problem is that you cannot trustlessly verify that these individuals aren't using their collected fees to buy more nodes thus aggregating more control over voting and whatever other functions are tethered to nodes.
Well, the whole point is that they can, so what you see as a "bug" I see as a "feature".
You're confusing a democracy with a capital asset. It remains to be seen how healthy the whole approach is in terms of the long term benefit of the project but one thing they can't do is "vote" the coins out of other people's hands, so what works for large holders has also got to work for small.
Another thing, Dash blockchain governance is only one aspect of "governance". It focuses the voice of one particular set of stakeholders that would not otherwise have a voice. However there are other "quadrants" of stakeholders who are at least equally influential and critical to the buoyancy of the whole asset. Large coin holders have no influence over these. It's a POW coin for a start so the mining majority is one of them. Another is commercial stakeholders such as exchanges and yet another is developers.
So characterising the whole thing as some kind of kind of oligarchy is simply symbolic obfuscation and bluster.
Feature? lol
Lets make this simple, though I wonder how much simpler I can make it?
Dash's nodes collect fees, those fees can be used to buy more nodes, which in turn collect more fees, which in turn can buy more nodes and on and on and on....
That should be the end of the argument for someone who actually gets why these systems are built to rely on mathematics rather than protocol, but Tok has proved over and over and over that he doesn't get this little tidbit. So I'll try to dumb it down even more than I have already--though I suspect Tok might just be playing dumb and wants to muddy the waters while he regroups for another game or graphic versus reality. But whatever.
Why this isn't a problem for Bitcoin and is a problem for dash is that dash's nodes are used for goverance, privacy, and an ever growing laundry list of features (probably to validate why they are collecting fees in the first place), it doesn't take a genius to realize that this fails as a trustless system because I must trust that the node holders aren't using their fees to buy more nodes, or engaging in market manipulation to gain more nodes at a cheaper price and thus increasing profit and power at the same time.
It would be severly naïve to think that this isn't happening, but luckily in the world of cryptosystems, these systems are supposed to work in a trustless manner, so I can safely say that dash fails to deliver decentralization because it cannot verify this claim trustlessly.
And why this is important follows, so keep reading....
Dash is useless because it can't work trustlessly, because credit card companies and banks can do the same thing, only better (looks at ripple). It's only trustlessly decentralized systems that can offer something banks and credit card companies can't--a way for instituions, individuals, and citizens to work in conjunction without the threat of manipulation and coercion. Any system that can't offer a trustless means (or at the very least a statistically acceptable risk of decentralization--though that is a risk that is time madated) is doomed because it fails at being of any more use than what already exist.
Now watch half the dashtards scramble to argue why it is decentralized, while the other half argues it doesn't need to be. Or maybe they can just mumble jealousy under their collective breath--though they may need to vote on that.