RE: Understanding Hive Witnesses, Governance, and DPoS

Actually the possibility of that happening is very low if the goal is to gain top 20 ranks as witness only with own stakes even if you buy up a lot of them.

First, it is not a bad thing if one has a goal to become a top 20 witness. But it requires skills, knowledge, commitment and networking. Let's say you are super rich and will buy up 10 million HP. This will not be enough to become a top witness. Others will notice this quick and throw in more votes in other witnesses so you never make it there.

However, if you intentions are good and you offer value, it will be welcomed and you can win over the community to have you as one of the top witnesses. It is a good thing. If you have money, you don't even need technical skills, you can hire someone to run your witness.

But as an investor, I doubt your goal would be to become a witness anyway. Investors invest because they believe in their investment and think they can get returns sometime in the future. Any hostile behavior of an investor will just put their money at risk.

If you are talking about this scenario as an attack vector, we don't even have to theorize, there has already been a real attack in the form of steem hostile takeover. I don't know if you are familiar with the story. Justin Sun bought significant amount of stakes not in the exchange but under the table from the founder Ned Scott for very cheap.

Buying anything on the exchange in large amounts will significantly increase the price of the asset so it becomes a very expensive things to do.

Justin Sun was able to convince big exchanges like Huobi and Binance to power up their user assets and vote for Justin's sock puppet witnesses. We are talking about all of the assets in these exchanges. Big stakes here. Even that didn't give full control over the network to Justin. It did for a very short time like an hour or so.

But when community realized the attack, all votes mobilized and pushed back. Within hours control was in a stalemate mode. Justin controlled 10 top witness nodes, and community controlled 10 top witness nodes.

When you have a stalemate like this, nobody has control, no changes can be made to the code, because there is no consensus. This could have lasted in this state for years or even decades. But when community decided to move on and build a new chain (Hive) and exodus started, only then Justin was able to regain full power.

So lesson from this story is, no it is not possible to gain control. Yes, it is possible for you just with one witness node to become a top 20 witness. But that just gives you a seat at the table and not full control. But if you are going to spend tens of millions of dollars to get that, you probably would choose more qualified people to run witness nodes anyway.

This makes the system very effective.