The question is whether people would trust a smaller site to protect their privacy when they prove ownership of large quantities of Bitcoin.
The only information I get from "voters" is a Bitcoin address, a signature, and an IP. There's not much privacy to be lost there (besides, I don't log IP with the votes). If users are concerned about IP, they can just hit the site through a proxy/Tor.
There's also the fact that the economy doesn't have to dictate everything, because that would favour richer people.
Yeah, I've struggled with this. Thing is, though, Bitcoin as it exists today is already dictated by Proof of Stake. For those who believe that miners control Bitcoin, Proof of Work is just a proxy for Proof of Stake. A really poor proxy. The more money you have, the more mining power you can buy. But Proof of Work puts a layer of ASIC between, which is why it's a poor proxy.
For those who believe the economic powers of Bitcoin control the network (ala BIP148), that's also a proxy for Proof of Stake. The economic powers are usually also the ones with a lot of coin.
It'd be nice if we had a Proof of Person system. 1 vote per human. Democracy. But that's not feasible in a decentralized system. So we ultimately depend on alternatives, most of which are just forms of Proof of Stake.
You can cheat mining power, you can manipulate the number of full nodes, but you can't fake Proof of Stake.
