The comment about "work" was in reply to your request to provide a list which witnesses were for/against the change.
I've never asked that.
Sure, but why should they spend the time to do this on your post if they have already done so? Should witnesses be expected to re-iterate their stances on issues every time a user writes a post about the topic?
I've never implied such things.
I could easily come up with a list of 50-100 changes that the platform "desperately" needs in order to succeed. This one is in there somewhere, but I would not put it in the top 10.
Thanks for letting me know your opinion.
Probably only about a day or two of coding effort. Coding is only 5% of the battle though. There is a very long process (with lots of negotiation) in terms of getting a change merged into the official repository (by Steemit, Inc.) and included in a hardfork. I would estimate the probability of success in terms of someone being able to get this into production before SMTs launch at less than 1%.
Cool! I'll try to see if there are some stuff I could do to increase those chances.
This goes back to your premise that witnesses will not vote for the change in the future because of a conflict of interest. I disagree with that premise.
It's a possibility. You can't deny it. I haven't said they won't. I said it's a possibility. It's a non-negligible one with high very repercussions.
Maybe there are some larger stakeholders that have truly checked out and are no longer using their active key (idk, I don't have data on everyone) but I doubt that getting this change in now going to have any significant impact on the current witness votes. In my view, it is mainly a protection against a future (hypothetical) problem where a large stakeholder looses their key, dies, or abandons the platform for some reason with their witness votes still in place.
We mostly agree. This change is mostly for protection but it surely isn't an overrated feature. What if Freedom lost his ability to vote? No matter how small the chances are of this to happem, this isn't negligible. This would be very bad. And there would be no way to know if they have lost their ability to vote.
If pumpkin (or another large stakeholder) hypothetically became inactive tomorrow I would predict that this change would become more of a priority, and would be more likely to pass.
I do agree that there is always a possibility of conflict of interest getting in the way, so in that sense there can be an argument to do it sooner rather than later, but my personal view is that that chance is quite low. The biggest thing standing in the way of the change (based on my understanding of the situation) is just the list of other things that need to get done.
Thanks for those inputs. I really appreciate these.