I thought about this idea a while ago, and reading responses to my recent post got me thinking about it.

I am not sure the exact numbers, these are just the numbers I had in mind when I originally thought about the idea.

What if votes decay when a witness is offline.

I am not saying the votes are removed, think more like voting power, it drains while your witness is offline.

Think of it as a penalty for downtime. Every day your witness is offline the votes for your witness work with reduced effectiveness. After 24 hours of downtime, your witness votes only count for 90% of their true voting power. Witnesses who are down will drop in position but recover by earning that voting power back at the same rate.

For example, witness XYZ is rank 20 and his witness is down for three days. Witness votes will lose 30% effectiveness bringing the witness down a few slots (likely outside of the top 20 and moving someone in to replace him) but when the witness is brought online the witness will climb back to the original position linearly over a period of three days.

This would work similar to voting power where there is a set decay and recharge rate per second. This wouldn't have a dramatic effect on witnesses as for the most part they are not offline for long periods of time but it would encourage uptime.

After all, the purpose of a witness is to maintain a secure and stable blockchain.

I don't suggest using missed blocks as a metric for this calculation, only the time a witness is disabled. This doesn't address witness votes on dead witnesses that have been offline for weeks and months, just short-term outages.