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Decentralized? He looks pretty "in-one-piece-ish" to me...
12 public witnesses, explained in whitepaper
Yes, I am aware of that and that's exactly what I was getting at.
The witnesses themselves are not decentralized; they are anything but. You have a maximum of 12 very "central" entities securing the network. And while I believe that the witnesses do not have the same amount of power as, say, EOS delegates have, it is at the very least intellectually dishonest to speak of "decentralized witnesses".
Now, maybe you could actually decentralize a witness, by making it a group of entities, playing merry-go-round or something. I think this has been discussed before.
TL;DR:
Calling a single person a "decentralized witness" is misleading.
I spare us all an inappropriate joke about certain news items and the decentralization of a human being, for obvious reasons.
We could also have 100 or 1000 witnesses but the platform will become
less secure if you have more witnesses. A single witness has no power at all and can easily be replaced by users. Users have the real power in the Byteball network, not witnesses. Only when 6 or more witnesses collude they can harm the network, but they still can't change anything in the past. In fact they have very limited options for abuse.
This is no answer to my original point, which is "a single witness is not decentralized unless the witness consists of multiple entities".
You are trying to make it your point so that you can fire off what you have said earlier, so I'll play along:
Users having the real power sounds nice, but has some serious flaws. I'm too lazy to go into this, but very simplified, choosing witnesses is not much different than choosing delegates in a DPoS system. Go take a look at Lisk and EOS to see how that is going.
It is like talking with a wall, right?
Byteball is not decentralized. I am not fudding, only telling facts.
If I could choose my witness truly freely, maybe it could be called decentralized witnesses election... but I can only freely choose 1 witness. I am obligated to trust the witnesses already chosen if I am a new user, or I can't send transactions in a easy way. Of course I can pick any unit compatible with my list (afaik), but normal people won't do that.
This doesn't have to be a bad thing.
The bad thing is the people who can't accept the truth, and seems more a hooligan than a person argumenting.Yes, a witness has little power in the network. Yes, even if majority of witnesses collude, they can't rewrite the past or move funds which not belongs to him or harm deeply the network. Yes, there are no differences between a normal unit and a witness one.
But all above does not change the fact that A WITNESS IS A CENTRALIZED ENTITY AND WE NEED TO TRUST IT.
Seriously byteball, 2nd time I say this: Don't pretend to be what you are not.