Two Weaknesses Of Hive Blockchain

This is not intended to attack current witnesses or developer team, but please consider it as a constructive criticism. Here, I identified two weaknesses of Hive blockchain that are inherited from previous Steem blockchain.

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1. Limited number of consensus witnesses.

This weakness is part of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. By limiting the number of consensus witnesses, will cause the blockchain to be vulnerable to (stake-weighted) sybil attack. This has actually happened on Steem blockchain. A single large stake holder dominated the consensus witnesses and hard forked the blockchain to seize assets of some accounts.

The idea is to get rid of this limitation and make the number of consensus witnesses unlimited. Then, the degree of "consensus power" will be determined by the approval number of the community to the witness. Thus, just like before the most approved witnesses would have the most influences on the governance of blockchain. But to dominate the consensus witnesses, will need more efforts because the number of witnesses is now unlimited.

2. Downvote with no cost and no reason.

This is a feature of Hive (was Steem). Currently, Hive users have downvote mana separated from upvote mana. It means, everyone can downvote without worrying their upvote mana decreases. In other words, everyone can downvote with no cost at all. Even worse, downvoting also requires no reason to be given.

Because downvoting means penalizing, one should not downvote without reason. Every downvote should be accompanied by its reason clearly and responsibly. Moreover, downvote should "cost" something from user. For example, downvote mana could be merged to upvote mana. Thus, a user who downvotes will also decrease his upvote mana. This way, users will be careful when doing downvote.

I think, if we improve on these two points, Hive will be more attractive to broader internet users.

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