RE: The Most Voted Witnesses In The Last 3 & 6 Months! This Is What Witness Vote Expiry/Decay Would Look Like (Kinda)
As i understand, the steem blockchain is designed to handle failure of this kind, such that if top witnesses (or any witnesses) fail to process blocks significantly then others automatically make up the slack. If the top ones have much better equipment than others it is to some extent because they can afford to have better equipment as a result of being in that position. The fear that allowing others to switch into that position will result in collapse is akin to the logic used to keep dictators in place. I am not saying that the top 20 witnesses are dictators by any means - but there is absolutely no point in having a voting system if the people participating in the vote are never allowed to progress because they haven't already progressed!
In terms of the actual processing requirement, it would be a fairly straightforward thing to upgrade to new, faster hardware if that was necessary after moving up the list to process more blocks.
But if you kept moving up and down, you would not consistently have funds to invest. You might not feel you can afford say a new $10k piece of equipment (wild guess on amount) if you may make $5k this month, then only $500 the next 6 months, before making $5k again. But if you knew things were a bit more stable, you could reasonably invest for the future.
That's not saying that longterm planning leads to keeping dictators in place. We don't vote for president every month either. Presumably the 4 year term is not a dictatorship.
There is something to be said for giving change some pacing, and allowing for stability. I think what we're debating is more what kind of timeframe is that? How tight? How loose?
As far as I am aware there is no need to have anywhere near that level of hardware investment to process the blocks needed to be a top 20 witness. Currently only one server can be used to fulfill the role of a witness at a time and therefore there is a practical limit to how much money can be spent on one (rental). It generally makes much more sense to rent hardware than it does to buy it for such purposes and with things as they are (I am open to being corrected) it should be possible for medium to high end standard servers to handle the task at such throughputs. It is possible to rent such hardware at prices that are well within the reach of many if they want to get started in that role.
I previously explained a concept of altering the reward curve for witnesses that would potentially make any challenges here easier to process:
https://steemit.com/steem/@ura-soul/can-we-improve-steem-s-future-by-re-distributing-witness-rewards