Why does the Tezos protocol allow for baker over-delegation?
It is the Tezos protocol itself that has encoded the amount of XTZ that needs to be put up for baking and endorsements and the protocol also defines how long such funds need to be held for. Why does the protocol itself not provide a mechanism to prevent over-delegation?
It seems unfortunate that, even if I'm an over-delegated baker, and I can write that fact in size 100px font on my website, yet others can still mistakenly delegate to me.
Couldn't an operation very simply be built into the protocol like: tezos-client no longer accepting delegations for my_baker
?
This would set a flag on the baker account and from then on out delegation operations to this baker would fail. This definitely seems better than nothing, but it does require manual intervention on the baker's part.
Trickier and possibly impossible would be for the protocol to automatically prevent this by detecting over-delegation using its own algorithms that are already built for enforcing deposit requirements. It gets tricky though, because this means a baker would need to fill their account with more and more XTZ prematurely to prevent from becoming over-delegated, instead of just waiting for the delegations to occur and then topping up their accounts accordingly.
Wondering if anyone is thinking about or working on this? It seems to be a significant problem.
(I realize this question starts to veer a bit into the subjective realm, but I still feel its a very important question and I haven't seen it asked or answered anywhere. I feel this question should exist somewhere in a very public and visible forum, so I'm asking it here.)