Should Platform run on all nodes or should Platform run only on High Performance nodes ?

[qwizzie]

Well, that has been very strange to watch.

First things first : Sam (CTO of DCG) previously mentioned that a DCG decision proposal would most likely emerge, if there is consensus among the Dash Platform team for the High Performance Masternode solution.

Source : www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMmvP6G3NrE (timestamp 54:39)

Watching the Q&A part of the presentation the following question was asked : ''Does DCG have a preference or recommendation out of the three choices?''
(this came up after it became clear that DCG currently focus on either keeping 1K dash collateral as is, or going for 4K dash collateral or going for 10K dash collateral)

Source : www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0iJZ1pvsc (timestamp 1:45:18)

Sam's response pretty clearly conveyed that there was no consensus among DCG / Dash Platform team for either the 1K dash collateral or any of the High Performance Masternode solution (4k / 10K), while also showing that Sam himself has a strong favor for the High Performance Masternode solution. So i am left with the conclusion that these decision proposals are mostly coming from Sam's side, who upon failing to reach consensus on the High Performance Masternode solution within the Dash Platform team / DCG, decided to go to the network anyways, very willing to sacrafice decentralization over getting very low fees, as he seems to feel that is more important.

With regards to the presentation itself, it struck me how much uncertainty, estimates and speculation crept up in that presentation. Not only with regards to all the talk about reaching equilibrium for masternodes (which we have heard for years, yet the number of masternodes is also on a steady decline for years), or the costs in fees for each solution (subject to change) or the estimated TPS for each solution, but also with regards to the research into proportion of staked dash by entity :

Source : source : www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0iJZ1pvsc (timestamp 14:57)

I remember demo / vazaki3 mentioning that WeeJohnny was out of the game, yet that whale is still mentioned in the presentation.
Source : https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...-his-collateral-be-counted.53370/#post-232032
So is that masternode whale in or out ?

Also i am not sure how much value we should place on a tracing tool like mnowatch.org that is not 100% accurate, but who's data is presented pretty much as fact in this presentation. Even worse is that the left side of the 'proportion of staked dash by entity' (the remaining 48.6% that forms the big unknown), should according to Sam be considered pretty much the same as that of the 'known' whales' (the right side). That just comes across as pure speculation to me, and it did not receive any objection from Paul either (the 'faceless' researcher that gave this presentation). That is just way too speculative for my taste and in my view kinda degraded the research of Paul. I have a feeling that a lot of that 48.6% is simply not interested in the Dash governance (unlike those other whales that mnowatch.org identified to the right) or maybe don't want to vote to remain anonymous. That makes linking 48.6% pretty difficult to link to anything or anyone, which is why they are the big unknown.

What the upcoming decision proposals most likely achieve :

Masternode owners with less then 4000 dash or those MNO's that care about decentralization, will most likely vote for the 1000 dash collateral (keeping the collateral as is), thereby offering Dash Platform access to all masternodes (decentralized).

Masternode owners between 4000 dash and 8000 dash or those MNO's that simply don't care for decentralization, will most likely vote for the 4000 dash collateral / 4K High Performance Masternode solution, thereby limiting the access to Dash Platform to a select number of masternodes (centralized).

Masternode owners with 10.000 dash or more or those MNO's that simply don't care for decentralization at all, will most likely vote for the 10.000 dash collateral / 10K High Performance Masternode solution, thereby severly limiting the access to Dash Platform to just a very select number of masternodes (severly centralized).

Question will then be : will the masternode whales (excluding Binance, as Binance does not seem to vote) have enough voting power to swing the vote their way ? Thereby forcing smaller masternode owners out of Dash Platform and out of higher rewards and out of potentional new revenue streams, creating a lot more centralization for Dash and possibly introducing a lot more wild swings in number of active High Performance Masternodes, as a small group of High Performance masternodes (200-300), can experience much wilder swings in their numbers during bear markets / bull markets / software updates, then a large group of normal masternodes (4000). Just think about how many masternodes we lost during the bear market and the v18 update and then think about how this could impact Dash, if we switch to this much smaller subset of High Performance Masternodes.

Also i have my reservations about Dash Core being able to so easily implement a High Performance Masternode solution without further delaying Dash Platform, as Dash Core currently does not have the best of track record, to confidently claim something like that. Also going for the High Performance Masternode solution requires changes to the Dash governance system with regards to High Performance Masternode voting (4 votes / 10 votes), which is not really considered with regards to the impact to the Dash Roadmap or with the impact to third party providers that are currently supporting our Dash governance (Dash Central - Dash Masternode Tool - Crowdnode etc).

 

[qwizzie]

Platform storage fees, per proposed solution (subject to change) :

Are the storage fees huge on the 'All nodes run Platform' solution ? You tell me.... as i understand it there were always going to be some costs associated with using Dash Platform, so i am not sure this equals huge fees. 58 cents seems pretty reasonable to me. I guess it depends who the users target group is (and how poor that target group is).

Platform Transactions per second (estimates) :

Are the Platform Tx/s on the low side on the 'All nodes run Platform' solution ? You tell me... 200 transactions per second sounds reasonable to me for launch.
This transactions per second part kinda reminds me of the Dash blocksize upgrade from 1MB to 2MB, that allowed a lot more max transactions per second in Dash blocks, but which never got maxed out in our Dash blocks (only during occasional stress testing). At least that blocksize increase did not bring a whole lot of centralization into Dash.

Perhaps we can think about either sharding as future solution, or coming back to this topic when we reached the max number of transactions (200/s)
on Dash Platform ?

Why the rush to do either of the High Performance Masternode solutions right now ?

 

[vazaki3]

View attachment 11429
Source : source : www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0iJZ1pvsc (timestamp 14:57)

I remember demo / vazaki3 mentioning that WeeJohnny was out of the game, yet that whale is still mentioned in the presentation.
Source : https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...-his-collateral-be-counted.53370/#post-232032
So is that masternode whale in or out ?

He is out. He didnt upgrate to v18. Look at the weejohnny mnowatch report.

Also i am not sure how much value we should place on a tracing tool like mnowatch.org that is not 100% accurate, but who's data is presented pretty much as fact in this presentation.

Of course it is not 100% accurate. It is just a very good approximation, taking into account the huge database that mnowatch.org maintains. Of course a lot of people do not know how to interpret the results of mnowatch, a good interpration requires for you to look at more than one reports.

Even worse is that the left side of the 'proportion of staked dash by entity' (the remaining 48.6% that forms the big unknown), should according to Sam be considered pretty much the same as that of the 'known' whales' (the right side). That just comes across as pure speculation to me, and it did not receive any objection from Paul either (the 'faceless' researcher that gave this presentation). That is just way too speculative for my taste and in my view kinda degraded the research of Paul. I have a feeling that a lot of that 48.6% is simply not interested in the Dash governance (unlike those other whales that mnowatch.org identified to the right) or maybe don't want to vote to remain anonymous. That makes linking 48.6% pretty difficult to link to anything or anyone, which is why they are the big unknown.

According the latest endofVote mnowatch report, the number of masternodes that ARE interested in Dash governance is 1113 (approx 141 individuals)
At the same date (23 Sep 2022) according the mnowatch statistics report we had a total of 4464 masternodes, among them 3663 enabled and the rest 801 disabled and just collateralized (they didnt upgrade to v18, weejohnny megawhale is among them).
There is also the distribution mnowatch report of the latest endofVote, showing 3314 masternodes not interested in governance, and the rest 1113 interested in governance.

So (for the latest endofvote) the current number of the masternodes that ARE ΝΟΤ interested in governance is approximately the 2/3 of the enabled masternodes, and approximately the 3/4 of the total masternodes (collateralized and enabled).

The above participation changes of course, depending on the proposals that exist in every budget cycle. The latest budget cycle didnt have hot proposals, so the number of masternodes that didnt participate in governance increased. If you investigate earlier endofvote reports, and ask (or code by yourself) the appropriate mnowatch queries, you may discover different participation percentages (or discover the average participation percentage within a time window).

 

[vazaki3]

And by the way, there are alternative solutions that reside in between the "masternode solution" and the "High performance masternode solution".
For example, the megawhales that own many masternodes, should be allowed to maintain only ONE DashPlatform database. That way the databases' replication is reduced, and thus the fee is also reduced. This will result for Dash to have approximately 127 DashPlatform databases, a similar number to the 100 databases that the "High performance masternode solution" is planning to have.
But the 100 databases of the "High performance masternode solution" are not similarly decentralized as the 127 databases of my plan are. Because in my solution the decentralization is achieved due the separate individuals that are holding these databases. Decentralization based on proved individuals is a real decentralization, in contrast to the fake decentralization based on collateral masternode addresses.
Why nobody proposed such a solution? Who insists of reducing decentralization or introducing fake decentralized solutions.
If you add a poll, please add my solution in the poll options.

Has anyone at DCG examined the alternative solution of having masternodes hosting the DashPlatform be determined by some sort of proof of individuality?
A proof of individuality based on voting behavior, maybe?

If yes, where is this mentioned in the presentation? If not, why they didnt examine this alternative?

 

[Semarg]

So i am left with the conclusion that these decision proposals are mostly coming from Sam's side, who upon failing to reach consensus on the High Performance Masternode solution within the Dash Platform team / DCG, decided to go to the network anyways, very willing to sacrafice decentralization over getting very low fees, as he seems to feel that is more important.

Exactly. I was also terrified by ease with which Sam mentioned that only four top-whales will be enough to take over network after implementing HPMs. "Yeah, Just a little trade-off for a low fees..." Excuse me, WHAT???
It is a clear case to me why a project must not be led by an engineer.

 

[qwizzie]

Something else to keep in mind : very low fees does not automatically translate to a large adoption rate among users.
Just look at Dash current average transaction fees ($0.0011) and Dash current number of transactions (only 11.7K per day)

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/dash-transactionfees.html#alltime

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/dash-transactions.html#alltime

There are other factors at play then just having low fees to have a successfull adoption rate among users.
Which makes sacrificing decentralization for low fees very questionable.

We could end up sacrificing decentralization without ever seeing a successfull adoption rate among users, meaning we could end up sacrificing decentralization and gain nothing in return.

Lets not do the 'if we build it and provide low fees, surely they will come' all over again. Lets just release Dash Platform as intended (for all nodes) and see what kind of interest develops and fine-tune and optimize Dash Platform along the way. We can always apply more drastic measures in the future.

 

[Semarg]

If a project is to succeed then one day governments will come for it. And if there are only 4* perfectly-known entities who can control the network - then it will be the end. Another eos-solana-cardano-bnb-younameit kind of crap.

* QuantumExplorer pointed to my mistake, not 4, but 10-11 whales together will be able to take control.

 

[kot]

Perhaps we can think about either sharding as future solution, or coming back to this topic when we reached the max number of transactions (200/s)
on Dash Platform ?

Why the rush to do either of the High Performance Masternode solutions right now ?

I completely agree.
This discussion and presentations are only waste of time and resources.

Stop looking for another geeky thing to do.
Just release the platform!

 

[vazaki3]

I completely agree.
This discussion and presentations are only waste of time and resources.

Stop looking for another geeky thing to do.
Just release the platform!

Is it possible they are afraid to release the platform with many nodes, and they want to reduce the number of nodes running the platform, simply because they are afraid that the platform will crash?

Has the platform ever been tested to run smoothly 3500 nodes?

 

[xkcd]

I remember demo / vazaki3 mentioning that WeeJohnny was out of the game, yet that whale is still mentioned in the presentation.
Source : https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/...-his-collateral-be-counted.53370/#post-232032
So is that masternode whale in or out ?

To clarify on 'weejohnny' this node operator has failed to upgrade to v18, however, he has not de-collateralised his nodes, thus he is no longer able to vote, but he is not out of the game so to speak and thus it was right to consider his stack as an active whale in Dash. https://mnowatch.org/weejohnny/

Also i am not sure how much value we should place on a tracing tool like mnowatch.org that is not 100% accurate, but who's data is presented pretty much as fact in this presentation.

It's almost 100% accurate, weejohnny is a single entity, we know this from several data points, firstly he was identified by on chain analysis as forging all those nodes from a couple withdrawal addresses from Binance. His buying at the time also lifted the Dash price considerably just prior to the news that webull was going to list Dash, so this insider got the name webull because of that, but subsequently he joined his nodes with Johnny (as in Johnny come lately) and earned the name weejohnny. We've also been able to confirm this cluster through voting, in two ways, one he casts all votes at the same and two he votes the same way with his entire fleet, finally, we were able to confirm this cluster with user agent analysis where all the nodes are running the same user agent and as a bonus when he failed to upgrade ALL the nodes in the group went offline yet again confirming 100% that this is a cluster owned by a single entity. I know you don't respect the work of mnowatch, but we take great pride in the work we do and only make clusters such as these when we are very sure they are a real cluster.

https://mnowatch.org/leaderboard/analysis/?20220423132002

https://mnowatch.org/the_results_dashd_2022-04-23-18-12-16.uniqueHashVotes.136.html

Even worse is that the left side of the 'proportion of staked dash by entity' (the remaining 48.6% that forms the big unknown), should according to Sam be considered pretty much the same as that of the 'known' whales' (the right side). That just comes across as pure speculation to me, and it did not receive any objection from Paul either (the 'faceless' researcher that gave this presentation). That is just way too speculative for my taste and in my view kinda degraded the research of Paul. I have a feeling that a lot of that 48.6% is simply not interested in the Dash governance (unlike those other whales that mnowatch.org identified to the right) or maybe don't want to vote to remain anonymous. That makes linking 48.6% pretty difficult to link to anything or anyone, which is why they are the big unknown.

I think Sam is right in assuming that the distribution in the unknown part of the pie is similar to the known part and this is because MNOwatch selects for the biggest whales while paying little heed to the minows, a good example of this is bottles. https://mnowatch.org/bottles/ This is a fleet of 120 nodes that never vote and hence don't get analyzed by the typical MNOwatch dragnet, but we identified him by suspicious onchain activity and recently he reconfirmed his cluster when he also allowed them all to go offline following the v18 upgrade. The point is anyone with a really big hoard is likely to be caught up in our periodic on chain investigations and get a MNOwatch page even if they are not voting.

Question will then be : will the masternode whales (excluding Binance, as Binance does not seem to vote) have enough voting power to swing the vote their way ? Thereby forcing smaller masternode owners out of Dash Platform and out of higher rewards and out of potential new revenue streams

This seems to be a common concern among many MNOs yourself included and I don't assume that Platform nodes will be giving a higher return, this is because it is easy to swap between a regular MN and a Platform MN (PMN) so any advantage will be soon arbitraged away leaving the ROI in both pools more or less the same. Also Crowdnode will be able to play this arbitrage game with their 55k Dash and find the mixture that gives their members the best ROI, this convinces me that Platform will end up paying about the same as a regular node, you should not feel disadvantaged by this, if anything, regular MNs will get a higher reward because the network in total will have fewer nodes and thus our total combined expense on VPS hosting will be lower, which will result in increased rewards for everyone.

 

[xkcd]

Is it possible they are afraid to release the platform with many nodes, and they want to reduce the number of nodes running the platform, simply because they are afraid that the platform will crash?

Has the platform ever been tested to run smoothly 3500 nodes?

I think the concern is around the cost of storing all that data replicated 3500 times. Platform would not crash because at any one point in time only 100 nodes will be active in consensus, this is how Tendermint does it and we have good examples of that working in the wild with Cosmos chain, Thorchain and others, Dash would be just another instance, so I am not concerned by that. However Sam is right that if we if decide to pay PMNs the fair price of storing data for 50 years across 3500, then the fees would be very expensive for simple interactions on Platform and he feels that users would not be willing to pay that much for those sorts of interactions, eg making a friend request or adding a contact.

 

[vazaki3]

I think the concern is around the cost of storing all that data replicated 3500 times. Platform would not crash because at any one point in time only 100 nodes will be active in consensus, this is how Tendermint does it and we have good examples of that working in the wild with Cosmos chain, Thorchain and others, Dash would be just another instance, so I am not concerned by that.

So we have a pool of 3500 nodes, and we randomly select 100 among them to serve the DashPlatform. This is Tendermint's implementation.
I assume in case these 100 become 99 due to a sudent failure of a node, a brand new node among the 3500 replaces the failed one.

My question is, how long the service of these 100 lasts, in case nobody among these 100 fails to provide the DashPlatform service?
Is this time customizable, or hardcoded into the code?

 

[xkcd]

So we have a pool of 3500 nodes, and we randomly select 100 among of them to serve the DashPlatform.
I assume in case these 100 become 99 due to a sudent failure of a node, a brand new node replaces the failed one.

My question is, how long the service of these 100 lasts, in case nobody among the 100 fails to provide the DashPlatform service?
Is this time customizable, or hardcoded into the code?

Yes, this is how it would work, I don't know the duration of this quorum nor how new nodes are selected, I will try and find out. @QuantumExplorer

 

[QuantumExplorer]

Sam's response pretty clearly conveyed that there was no consensus among DCG / Dash Platform team for either the 1K dash collateral or any of the High Performance Masternode solution (4k / 10K), while also showing that Sam himself has a strong favor for the High Performance Masternode solution. So i am left with the conclusion that these decision proposals are mostly coming from Sam's side, who upon failing to reach consensus on the High Performance Masternode solution within the Dash Platform team / DCG, decided to go to the network anyways, very willing to sacrafice decentralization over getting very low fees, as he seems to feel that is more important.

So here's the thing, I didn't want to speak for everyone, because I have not yet asked everyone. I will conduct an internal poll and get back to you on what the devs inside DCG think by team. I know that not everyone actually knew about the tradeoffs before I gave this presentation, and some have come to be and said they now strongly prefer either the 4K or 10K solution. So I would bet that the poll will place the 4K or 10K solution on top, we'll see soon I guess. So far no one inside of Platform teams has come up against the 4K solution, but 1 person didn't like the 10K solution, and a few do not like the 1k every node runs Platform solution.

 

[QuantumExplorer]

Thereby forcing smaller masternode owners out of Dash Platform and out of higher rewards and out of potential new revenue streams

While this might seem true at a first glance it isn't. And I must admit it's not so simple to understand why.

Rewards from Platform actually will creep back through market forces back to the 1k Masternodes not running platform. Let me explain. Platform will generate profit from fees. There is the base cost for hosting a node and then there are the fee rewards. Let's call the net fee profit the fee rewards minus the hosting costs.

So if the net fee profit is very high this will in turn cause more nodes to be attracted to the High Performance nodes. More nodes being attracted will in turn leave more core rewards for 1k Masternodes.

What we are achieving here is both low fees and everyone wins. The fact of the matter is either we make hosting providers more rich or we instead allow for lower fees, and make the system more attractive.

 

[QuantumExplorer]

Exactly. I was also terrified by ease with which Sam mentioned that only four top-whales will be enough to take over network after implementing HPMs. "Yeah, Just a little trade-off for a low fees..." Excuse me, WHAT???
It is a clear case to me why a project must not be led by an engineer.

I believe you didn't understand. 4 top whales would only be able to stop the platform chain, not take it over, and the payment chain would be fine. Dashpay would actually continue to work as well, though you would not be able to create new contacts. Not take it over, stoping it by colluding wouldn't really give them any benefit at all. They would not be able to steal anyones money, and they would lose all their rewards, and DCG would issue a patch within a day, most likely banning them from consensus (up the network to adopt it). There are some ways we can "bootstrap" the network if it stalls because of colluding whales, but it would either mean giving one entity the power to do this, or would require a few months to build.

 

[qwizzie]

I wonder how this will workout in the long run. Lets say for point of argument that the 4K Masternode solution is chosen by masternode owners.

We currently have 3695 active 1K masternodes that are receiving MN payments.
A large portion of those active 1K masternodes will then de-activate their masternode on Dash Mainnet and setup a 4K Masternode to support Dash Platform.

Which means the number of active 1K masternodes on Dash Mainnet will drop considerably from 3695 to ... something very low
The payment interval will get shorter as there are less active 1K masternodes on the Dash Mainnet, so the active 1K masternodes on Dash Mainnet will start receiving MN payments in shorter time periods, accummulating more MN rewards over time (which frankly has already been occurring for the last few years anyways due to the bear market, the current crypto winter and lately also due to the v18 update)

What happens with those active 1K masternodes on Dash Mainnet on the long run ? There is a yearly reduction on the blockrewards in play for Dash (-7.1%) to battle supply inflation, which means lower MN rewards over time. There will be much more centralization within Dash and you have 1K masternode owners who are now locked out of Dash Platform rewards / revenue, which could lead to more selling as they are perhaps not happy with that level of centralization in Dash.

How will this look to the outside ? To possible outside investors ?

A continual decline of active 1K masternodes, combined with a much higher centralization within Dash. Who would want to invest in 1K masternodes in the future ? The 4K Masternodes have not much reason to ever switch back to 1K masternodes, as their reward will at minimum be equal to 1K masternodes. But the 1K masternodes could actually receive less rewards in comparison with 4K masternodes over time, if i remember correctly from the presentation.
The 4K Masternodes will mostly likely be created from already involved Dash investors / Dash whales, not so much from new investors.

Honestly this whole topic feels more like a move to give Dash masternode whales more influence and more access to future revenue streams, while giving smaller masternode owners (those with less then 4000 dash) pretty much the middle finger in the long run. In the short term this may play out nicely with regards to MN payments for those smaller 1K masternode owners, but in the long term i suspect they will end up getting a lot less then the 4K masternodes.

But what bothers me the most is that the presentation has so much guesstimation and speculation about TPS, Fees, Equilibrium trends, Dash whales activity, while at the same time asking masternode owners to make a decision based on all that.

Also i have difficulty understanding the need to implement this all, before Dash Platform has even been released. This could easily be discussed when we have some solid data from an already released Dash Platform. If i remember correctly the goal was never to have super low Dash Platform fees, connected directly to more centralization. Yet we are very hard pushed into that direction. As i mention before, having very low fees does not automatically translate to a higher adoption rate. In Dash case (with the lack of Dash marketing, increase of Dash direct competitors, unfamiliarity with Dash in the general cryptospace) i would even say that is very much an open question.

 

[QuantumExplorer]

@Semarg You do see that the 4 is on the row of the "stop chain" right? And 10/11 on the row for taking control?

 

[Semarg]

@Semarg You do see that the 4 is on the row of the "stop chain" right? And 10/11 on the row for taking control?

Yeah, now I see. My bad, this one.

 

[QuantumExplorer]

Yeah, now I see. My bad, this one.

No worries, all good.