For the other questions, I think it is useful to distinguish the following questions
- How much voting power do neurons have (did the change decrease or increase this)?
- What would it take to “buy up” 51% of the voting power? (This is related but can also include new players who don’t have a neuron now)
I’ll have to spend more time on the numbers / analysis to provide a more detailed answer, but here some initial thoughts.
- I think this was already pointed out by others, but to recap:
- it might be useful to distinguish the voting power one neuron has and the voting power induced by one neuron (including its followers). A neuron can have more deciding voting power by itself, but have less weight in the overall voting because its followers’ voting power falls away. In this case one can still argue that this is a gain for security.
- it might also be useful to look at different proposal topics. For example, since following has already been reset for the governance topic, the “sleeper neurons” already fell away for this proposal and following was already more diverse for this topic. Therefore, I expect that the numbers look slightly different here compared to other topics, like protocol and canister upgrades. But of course we’d have to confirm.
- Indeed, if the overall voting power considered for proposals is smaller, then a smaller number of ICP is needed to get 51%. In analysis before the feature it was suggested that this number was still large enough to make such an attack unrealistic. Especially also because a large portion of the ICP is still locked in (sleeper) neurons, even if they don’t contribute to the voting power.