Why this many Elders? I don't grok the Seven

[TylerAbeoJordan]

@mav

IIRC it comes from routing simulations. Lots of details here:

It’s a bit dated in some ways, e.g. no PARSEC anymore.

The conclusions though don’t seem to justify Seven elders.

@pierrechevalier83

A ratio of 10% of elders per Section seems to be striking a good balance between the scalability cost of having large Sections, the scalability cost of having many elders and the impact on Sybil resilience.

As an order of magnitude, a minimum section size of ~100 seems to be required to be able to significantly affect the ability for an attacker to perform a Sybil attack. A larger Section (as far as connectivity permits) seems to only improve the Sybil resilience properties of the system.

Only a ratio of 10% elders to total section size and the larger the section the better. Unless I missed something - I only skimmed the OP and focused on the conclusions.