RE: Peerplays Witness - lukestokes-witness
Thanks @bacchist.
I agree with your assessment, and I'm not too concerned. As you said, the market will decide how many witnesses are needed. If it's wasteful to provide too many resources, those unwilling to take risk and invest in servers (even if at a short term loss) will shut down.
That said, I do think there's a bit of artificiality in the "price discovery" market choice process right now. If only the top 23 witnesses are shown in the GUI, it's not really a vote. It's more like Ford's "You can have any color as long as it's black."
I hope that GUI is updated soon to allow for showing all active witnesses so votes can be distributed based on what people want. I'd also love to see a backup witness rotated in, but that's probably too significant of change to allow and may not make sense for Peerplays.
I think it would make sense for backups to get cycled through. Their configurations and feeds should be tested on a regular basis. It would make the network much more resilient.
I agree incentivizing backup witnesses is a good move. I love how markets and price signals work that way. :)
Without incentive, backups will turn off and if there's a massive flood of new users or a drastic change in price, structure, or something else which needs immediate change, there may not be new witnesses willing to go with the change ready and willing to be voted in.
That said, it's early days so I'm willing to be patient and see how things work out.