I realized that centralization was an issue quite early, just weeks after the “decentralization phase”. The issue is that P-reps recieve rewards for shilling themselves on social media. Actual honest P-reps are lost in the noise while the lowest quality P-reps (With a few exceptions thanks to whales in particular) generally gets a place in the top 22.
I suggested that P-reps who are in the top 22 gets the same rewards and compete for hashrate - instead of competing for votes, similar to Bitcoin. Why? Because that’s their job. Their job is to ensure the network security, so that’s what they should aim to do.
The current system rewards the P-reps who are most active on social media, which is extremely problematic because most ICONists doesn’t seem to understand what they’ve invested into, which leads to them voting on whichever P-rep is most attention-grabbing. Very few P-reps have actually built exciting ideas the time that I have been around, so what are they actually being compensated for? Why did the DBP program get removed anyways? That was my main motivation to ever build something that ACTUALLY uses blockchain and isn’t built around it like all these tools we so. I don’t have the aspiration to ask for money via grants - but would rather get rewarded for creating transactions On-Chain.
Feel free to read the initial post (although it could have been made more clear):