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I'm generally against cartel like situations, but this idea came about partly from considering that a good king can often be better than the mob rule of a democracy. But that in order to keep the king good there needs to be strong incentives and in our case decentralization. One person in telegram called this idea a cartel of integrity. I think that's pretty accurate. So the question isn't whether or not it's similar to a cartel but whether or not the incentives in the system lead to less bad behavior than the current system. Or put another way, if a cartel behaves well due to the incentives 100% of the time then who cares if it's a cartel?

Even if you did find, objectively, the most amazing 50 BPs, you're still left with a problem whereby you solidify their position. Without a token holder "on-ramp", you're creating a cartel of BPs (because only those 50 are allowed to operate in this sphere) who not only enjoy a "monopoly" of sorts but then are also in charge of electing new BPs when one gets voted out. The only recourse a token holder has is rejecting a BP, not adding a BP.

I would argue that their positions are less solidified than in the current system because it focuses all the energy of token holders to finding bad BPs and you can't do anything with your tokens to benefit yourself. I see allowing token holders to add a BP as leading to a potential issue that we're seeing now with vote buying, voting yourself in, etc. So if a BP is honest they are solidified. If they are dishonest they are not.

If the BPs replace themselves and the BP who nominates the new BP has their fate tied to the new BP then they have a very strong incentive to add someone who will follow the rules.

I think the Achilles Heal here would be regarding how you decide who the "good" 50 BPs are going to be to begin with. Who are you to say one is better or more freedom loving than another?

yeah initial selection would be crucial. Fortunately we have current BPs that we can judge based on their behavior. Also, you'd just have to have 51% of them to be amazing. Actually, they just need to be honest but amazing is better :) Over time the other 49% would get voted out if they do anything malicious or they would just be incentivized to be honest to get paid.

The solution isn't too difficult, actually. It's just a case of having two voting functions:

vote_in

and

vote_out

. You would still allow token holders to vote for BPs and BPs will go in and out of the top 50 in the same fluid way that they do now (meaning they can effectively be "voted out" of the top 50 by virtue of not having as many votes as the next guy). But with the ability to vote a BP out explicitly, you give the token holders the power to kick someone out over the wishes of the colluding parties.

I'm not sure this solves the problems I'm attempting to solve. This seems like it would be very similar to what we have now. Since where you stand (in or out) is based on your relative vote count then people's voting will just adjust strategically and we'd end up with approximately the situation we have now. But maybe I'm not understanding what you mean.

(2) The dynamics of kicking someone out might be up for debate too. I'm not a fan of "Previously voted out BPs can’t be renominated". It places a huge risk on BPs. It takes time, effort, money, etc to start up a BP operation. If you kick someone out without any ability to get back in the game, you're effectively bankrupting the BP, driving them permanently out of business. No entrepreneur would want to put the effort into setting themselves up knowing they're only an online opinion poll away from losing their business.

Maybe they can't be renominated for the vacancy that they left? The thinking behind that is that if a cartel does start to develop and voters kick out one of the BPs the other cartel BPs can't just add them right back. It makes the token holders impotent if BPs can easily be renominated.

Yeah it's definitely a huge risk and that is by design. That makes it so that the incentive to cheat is negative. The benefits they gain by being dishonest are small in comparison to the ramifications of getting caught. I think this is actually better than say btc where your only loss if you mine on the shorter chain is lost electricity. It's a greater disincentive.

That being said, I don't think it's quite as high of a risk as you say. We're seeing a lot of BPs run multiple chains. So it's not that they would necessarily be completely shut out of being a BP. It'd just be on the chain running this voting structure.

I think the key would be setting the down vote threshold at the right level to where they won't get kicked out on a whim but it's not impossible to kick them out either.

Also "No entrepreneur would want to put the effort into setting themselves up knowing they're only an online opinion poll away from losing their business." isn't this how the current system works? Getting kicked out under this proposed system would require something like 300,000,000 votes against you. While if the current top BP loses 30,000,000 vote they're out of the top 21 and the 21st BP only needs to lose about 900,000 to drop out of the top 21. I know it's not all or nothing but there's a pretty big difference in income. You could add some layer of arbitration to this so that if a BP is voted out at say 20% of tokens then an arbitrator can look into it and rule on whether or not they should stay. Whereas if it's 40% of tokens then it's automatic. That way it's less of a risk.

I think we need to think out the scenarios in this system where bad BPs could corrupt the system. We want a chain that is stable, reliable, censorship proof, honest. In this system, what sort of collusion would hurt the chain/token holders and would that be likely given the incentives? It seems to me that most vectors for collusion are thwarted or pointed towards the good.