interesting, two questions though.
1.since it relies heavily on bitcoin, does that mean if, if ever bitcoin dies, so does komodo?
2.will bitcoin forks/updates ever have any impacts on komodo?
Thank you for a good technical questions!
1. One of the reasons notary nodes are required is to deal with any such black swan events. dPoW is designed to be a two stage confirmation process, actually there would be 4 stages of being confirmed:
a) mempool of komodo
b) confirmed in komodo blockchain
c) notary hash in mempool of bitcoin
d) notary hash in bitcoin blockchain
So you can see b) and d) will continue to accumulate confirmations and therefore more security. Now let us consider your hypothetical where bitcoin disappears. What changes is that c) and d) dont exist anymore and komodo security is "degraded" to its intrinsic security provided by the NXT-style PoS. Which for the years it is in operation has stood the test of time, so its not like komodo becomes insecure without bitcoin, it just wont be secured by bitcoin hashrate
2. I happen to be quite familiar with the btcfork project and its impact on komodo would only be if it becomes the most secure crypto by getting more hashrate than the existing bitcoin.
Again having the notary nodes allows to update the dPoW to change the blockchain that is used for the notary recording and any third party chains that rely on komodo for notary, will automatically switch over.
Some have philosophical issues with ICO, but as I explained above there are sound technical reasons it is needed. The primary one is that there needs to be a set of notary nodes that the stakeholders can trust to perform the notary duties in a timely fashion. And the best way I could find to have a representative set of nodes is from the bitshares witness voting. One could argue about specific votes, but it is unarguable that having a stake based vote is the best way to represent the stake.
Why are these notary nodes needed for dPoW? Primarily fraud protection. Without a know if data in the bitcoin chain is the real notary data, anybody can just post data in the bitcoin chain and claim it was! This is quite a serious flaw if not dealt with and using notaries allows the entire blockchain to verify it was approved notary. And by having the notary nodes properly elected on the blockchain, everybody can know that for better or worse the notary nodes are representing the stakeholders. So if there is a misbehaving notary, the stakeholder will need to elect a replacement.
There is separation of powers. Stakeholders have the power to determine the notary nodes. Each transaction can only be authorized by the proper owner of the privkey. Notaries can only approve valid transactions. All nodes can verify both the komodo blockchain and the bitcoin blockchain that everything validates.
I hope you can see the logic of why notary nodes are required and working backward from there why a large number of stakeholders are required and working backward from that, a large scale fully open ICO is required