Consensus Mechanisms

[toknormal]

Masternode costs have nothing to do with the value they provide.

True. But they do have a great deal to do with the value that miners provide because they devalue Dash's hashrate to the market by 50%. Note that:

Investors in Dash have invested in:

• a high energy budget coin
• with on-chain services that are competitive with other high energy budget coins

Not...

• a low energy budget coin
• with services that are uncompetitive against other low energy budget coins

...which would be the case if Dash moves even partially to a POS model.

@BabyGiraffe, I urge you to revisit the appraisals in previous posts from that perspective. While you may not value Dash's high energy budget, many of its core investors do. Its primary market also does (otherwise Dash miners would not find any liquidty). In that regard, the "value" that masternodes provide doesn't matter. The margin does because that margin has to be paid for by the primary market buying newly mined coins.

Given those constraints, the only solution I see that's sustainable is one of:

1. find services (other than holiday cruises, and salaries) that absorb the masternode margin to the extent that it makes the coin attractive again, or
2. reduce the masternode margin to bring it close to parity with mining margin to allow time for [1] to develop or
3. have the market do it for us (which it can do by impacting masternode margin disproportionately compared to mining margin by reducing coin price) or
4. switch to POS and watch the last of us disinvest

4 would clearly be my least preferred option

 

[Ryan Taylor]

This seems much more sensible, especially the long transition period. It also fulfills one of the long awaited promises.

Would MN shares have voting rights?
Would it be better to start off with a higher entry level like 200-500 dash at first, to see how it effects the MN economy, before opening it up to lower amounts? I suspect the lower the amount, the more MN volatility we can expect.

To me this is not off topic, so I'll ask again here, could you explain the likely dynamics of collateralized mining? Would it lead to more centralization or less, or have no effect?

Collateralized miners would have to be insane to risk their skin in the game, centralized or not, chainlocks or no. It may even help decentralization.

At least as far as delivering an initial version, I would not anticipate including voting rights. I would be reluctant to include voting rights AND continue requiring 10% net votes for proposals to pass, because I think it's unlikely that a population of 10 Dash collateral holders would vote with the same frequency as those with 1,000 Dash. It runs the risk of stagnating the voting system and cutting off project funding. Perhaps there is a solution to this risk, but it would require more time to solve.

I actually don't think MN volatility would result... if anything I believe it would be lower for several reasons. First, I presume you would have more MNs, so a whale shutting down their MNs would have less impact on a % basis. Also, if shared nodes required locked inputs they couldn't be shut off at will by the individual collateral providers.

Collateralized mining basically reduces the hashrate / expense of mining by requiring miners to hold a certain amount of Dash to compete for blocks. There are several ways to implement it, so I'll describe one scenario to give you an idea. In normal mining, miners need to provide equipment, labor, and electricity. Collateralized mining requires holding Dash so that holding Dash either affects the "difficulty" of the hash (and therefore affects the odds of finding a block), or holding a certain amount of Dash enables a certain number of blocks to be found (e.g., low levels of collateral could limit the number of blocks you are permitted to find out of the last 100 blocks for example). The added "cost" of the collateral prevents any one miner from easily controlling the mining layer just as MN collateral prevents any one person from controlling the MN layer of the network. The result is 1) Increased demand for Dash (for the collateral), 2) better alignment of incentives for miners (because they are Dash holders), 3) more capital is directed toward holding Dash, which leaves less capital for hashrate. Basically, you get the same "cost" to attack the network with less expense of equipment and electricity with collateralized mining. That is the idea behind it.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

True. But they do have a great deal to do with the value that miners provide because they devalue Dash's hashrate to the market by 50%. Note that:

Investors in Dash have invested in:

• a high energy budget coin
• with on-chain services that are competitive with other high energy budget coins

Not...

• a low energy budget coin
• with services that are uncompetitive against other low energy budget coins

...which would be the case if Dash moves even partially to a POS model.

@BabyGiraffe, I urge you to revisit the appraisals in previous posts from that perspective. While you may not value Dash's high energy budget, many of its core investors do. Its primary market also does (otherwise Dash miners would not find any liquidty). In that regard, the "value" that masternodes provide doesn't matter. The margin does because that margin has to be paid for by the primary market buying newly mined coins.

Given those constraints, the only solution I see that's sustainable is one of:

1. find services (other than holiday cruises, and salaries) that absorb the masternode margin to the extent that it makes the coin attractive again, or
2. reduce the masternode margin to bring it close to parity with mining margin to allow time for [1] to develop or
3. have the market do it for us (which it can do by impacting masternode margin disproportionately compared to mining margin by reducing coin price) or
4. switch to POS and watch the last of us disinvest

4 would clearly be my least preferred option

If they happened to base an investment decision on that basis, that is simply a purchase made on the basis of poor rationale. Dash does not accrue value because of the costs it incurs. It is valuable despite the costs it incurs. The costs are necessary to provide security (which is necessary to be valued). But, if the network can be equally secure for less cost, that is a very good thing. I think we can keep having the same debate here, in Discord, and elsewhere. I simply do not agree with you that costs are in any way, nor in any free market, an input into value except to the extent that it provides security (a necessary component no doubt). Unfortunately, the relationship between cost and the value of security you get is not linear, so we would be foolish to spend more than is needed to secure the network as hashrate beyond what we need is waste. ChainLocks provide immutable security within 4-6 seconds using clever code (delivered by one-time coding expense and some small overhead for masternode bandwidth and CPU), rather than expensive hashrate. It is a real example proof that we can deliver value with lower expense.

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with your general philosophy that costs must increase to add to the value of Dash. Quite the opposite.

 

[JGCMiner]

I have been reviewing the comments here and in discord, as well as working with our developers to assess various options for the consensus mechanism. There are clearly some very good reasons that both pure PoS and hybrid PoW / PoS would be problematic. There are very good reasons why Ethereum is struggling to deploy PoS. My conclusion is that if we chose that route, the project would run the risk of being a monumental effort... at least if you want a highly secure network. That said, there may be a solution leveraging BLS "magic" that could enable a safe implementation of PoS at some point in the future, but I believe there is much we could do now to improve economics even if we stay with PoW for the time being.

Therefore, if we assume staying with PoW is the most direct path to a better economic profile, it begs the question "how should our PoW allocation be adjusted in light of the enhanced security from ChainLocks?". If you enhance security through ChainLocks, it logically follows that you are less dependent on PoW than you were before. What is clear is that we would want to remain the dominant X11 PoW chain. Therefore, we calculated the hashrate of the other X11 chains. There wasn't much out there... Happycoin, Axe, Imagecoin, Magnet, Cannabiscoin, MonetaryUnit, Startcoin, and PACcoin were the biggest. There are others, but collectively, they are a rounding error. I then multiplied the sum of these other chains by 10x. To buy that much hashrate, we would only need about 5-7% of our block reward. Therefore, even if you rounded up to 10%, there is very little incremental security from spending more than 10% of our block reward on mining.

This is great news, because it means we have the ability to safely reduce mining from 45% of our block reward to 10% (which represents about 80% reduction in mining expense), and that is the vast majority of the gains we could be making with pure PoS. And we could capture that efficiency gain without a lengthy development process.

I believe the best approach to distributing the gains is to ensure as wide of participation as possible. This means one of two paths... either a deterministic holders list, or masternode shares. There are pros and cons with each approach.

DHL:
+ Likely simpler to implement... similar process to DML
- Because DHL participants wouldn't really be doing "work" for the network, this would make Dash more closely resemble an investment... I believe that we would nonetheless have a compelling case why Dash is not a security, but it might nudge Dash in a direction that regulators would view less favorably. Not a reason not to do it, but it is a consideration.
- Not that scalable. We might need a minimum of 100 Dash to prevent the list from becoming too long for nodes to maintain. Or we would need to rearchitect the way the DML list works to make it more scalable. Either way, this is less than ideal.

Protocol level shared MNs:
+ Not difficult to implement, but there are a few minor complexities we could work through quickly (e.g., the engineers have practical solutions in mind)
+ Can scale very well. Completely feasible to stake 10 Dash or less, which mean the benefits are extended to the most number of users.
+ Provides incremental decentralization and security to the network... because it provides benefit to the network, this would make Dash no more susceptible to being labeled a security than it is today.
+ Ensures that shared MN services are trustless, which eliminates the need to take risks that people currently take to earn rewards on smaller balances
- Might require time-locked inputs to properly function, which may be less attractive to users
- Doesn't fully solve the fundamental issues with the network economics, but it can defer those issues to a later time, when they are less impactful (e.g., several years from now, the inflation rate would be much much lower)

I believe by combining reduced mining expenses with greater access to the MN rewards (and increasing the share of block rewards that go to this larger group of recipients) we can successfully mitigate MOST of the economic issue with a relatively simple solution. My current hypothesis is the following (assuming no change to the proposal funding share, which I view as a fully independent discussion):
1) Introduce shared MNs to enable greater access to staking rewards
2) SLOWLY increase the share of block rewards from 45/45/10 to 80/10/10 over a very long period of time. Our previous reallocation was far too fast. If we reallocated about 0.5% per month, it would take nearly 6 years to fully transition.

One other benefit of this approach is "fairness" to miners, as they would retain the ability to mine dash with the full life of their existing equipment. In fact, I need to model it, but I believe even they would be financially better off. How is this possible if we are cutting the amount of Dash allocated there? First, they would be mining slightly less Dash the next 18 months, but at an otherwise higher price, which would help. They also would face less competition from new mining capacity because miners would be unlikely to invest in new X11 equipment knowing reward reductions were baked into the protocol. Lower competition would in turn extend the life of existing equipment and allow miners the opportunity to mine for longer without replacing their miners. Most of a miner's profit takes place in the first 12-18 months under normal circumstances, so this could create a unusually long runway of profitable mining if new equipment is not brought to market at the same pace it otherwise would.

Another benefit... low risk of implementation. The only complex piece is masternode shares, which wouldn't be overly complex as it would simply require a different DML registration type, a way for users to signal their inputs are available to stake, and the ability to distribute the rewards differently as part of the coinbase transaction. All of that is based on technology we already have, and would simply need to modify.

Would like to hear reactions to this model from the community.

Very interesting and an approach that I am likely to support.

One question though, why is the DML scalable down to 10 Dash and the DHL only scalable down to 100 Dash. Aren’t they basically the same thing?

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Very interesting and an approach that I am likely to support.

One question though, why is the DML scalable down to 10 Dash and the DHL only scalable down to 100 Dash. Aren’t they basically the same thing?

The deterministic masternode list (DML) currently only records less than 5,000 masternodes and was designed for that type of scale. A deterministic holders list (DHL) would probably need to hold hundreds of thousands of records if we had no restrictions on it, a scale at which the system couldn't operate. So we would need some kind of minimum to prevent the DHL from becoming too large. Perhaps that would be 100 Dash or 50 Dash, but it would exclude a lot of people, or we would need to engineer something completely different to facilitate it.

 

[toknormal]

Don't mistake your own motivations for the motivations of others

I'm not. I and others invested in a Proof of Work asset when Proof of Stake / Hybrid Proof of Stake has been available for the last 7 years. Even pre-dating Dash.

We all made the same choice. It turned out to be the correct choice because POW now dominates store of value while POS only serves utility tokens. That has resulted in demand for hashrate. A demand which Dash devalues by supplying half a coin for the price of one compared to our competitors.

I think if you really are so convinced that revising Dash's fundamental algo will appeal more to the market than the approaches I've presented above, you should test it out first by adding masternodes to Peercoin rather than adding POS to Dash. At least the former option would be seen as extending the feature set rather than bining the operating system and starting again.

 

[JGCMiner]

The deterministic masternode list (DML) currently only records less than 5,000 masternodes and was designed for that type of scale. A deterministic holders list (DHL) would probably need to hold hundreds of thousands of records if we had no restrictions on it, a scale at which the system couldn't operate. So we would need some kind of minimum to prevent the DHL from becoming too large. Perhaps that would be 100 Dash or 50 Dash, but it would exclude a lot of people, or we would need to engineer something completely different to facilitate it.

Ok. That makes sense. No matter how many distinct pieces make up a masternode, the DML only keeps track of complete masternodes so it won’t grow to be unwieldy. Got it.

One more thing if you don’t mind, how would the hosting work for these trustless masternode shares? Has a hosting provider offered to run the remote nodes created from these trustless shares? Or is hosting something DCG will get into?

 

[Ryan Taylor]

I'm not. I and others invested in a Proof of Work asset when Proof of Stake / Hybrid Proof of Stake assets have been available for the last 7 years. We all made the same choice. It turned out to be the correct choice because POW now dominates store of value while POS only serves utility tokens. That has resulted in demand for hashrate. A demand which Dash devalues by supplying half a coin for the price of one compared to our competitors.

I think if you really are so convinced that revising Dash's fundamental algo will appeal more to the market than the approaches I've presented above, you should test it out first by adding masternodes to Peercoin rather than adding POS to Dash. At least the former option would be seen as extending the feature set rather than bining the operating system and starting again.

To be clear, I'm not proposing PoS. We think it will be a long time before PoS can be made adequately secure. I tried to articulate in the presentation that I gave that PoS was included because it illustrates the maximum extent to which PoW could be reduced (to zero) to demonstrate the maximum potential economic impact. I was not endorsing PoS as the solution. There are tradeoffs with any of the solutions discussed, and we're discussing a range of possibilities. It's clear that PoS or even hybrid PoW / PoS would be very difficult to implement, and we also know that we could reduce PoW while maintaining a large hashrate compared to all other X11 chains combined.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Ok. That makes sense. No matter how many distinct pieces make up a masternode, the DML only keeps track of complete masternodes so it won’t grow to be unwieldy. Got it.

One more thing if you don’t mind, how would the hosting work for these trustless masternode shares? Has a hosting provider offered to run the remote nodes created from these trustless shares? Or is hosting something DCG will get into?

Likely, an MNO wishing to use other's collateral it would simply be part of the ProRegTx. They would probably need to provide 10% or 20% of the collateral themselves (to align their incentives with the other participants to keep the node operating / earning, and to prevent them from controlling an unlimited number), and identify the other inputs that will constitute the remaining collateral totaling 1,000 Dash. No central entity would operate these nodes. They would continue to be run by MNOs in a similar fashion.

 

[toknormal]

To be clear, I'm not proposing PoS.

But you are advocating a further revision of the reward ratio away from miners. This is where our perspectives diverge because your model of where the value is is not consistent with what Dash investors have bought.

At the moment the priorities you've identified focus on securing the network and you've asserted that by doing so at a cheaper cost than the protocol currently supports we'd be delivering more value to the market.

However, if you actually observe where the (pure monetary asset) market has parked its capital, it isn't in cheaply secured blockchains since they've been available for a very long time and have ended up valueless. Rather it's in high energy-budget coins. i.e. coins that have required large amounts of natural energy to produce on a cumulative basis.

In that context, Dash has a great advantage in being able to provide on-chain services in that group. It's the only leading Proof of Work coin that can (because to do so you need to decouple the service provision aspect of the protocol so it can work independently of the mining process which clocks in slow blocktime. For that you need masternodes).

Utility coins on the other hand are only concerned with.......utility ! That's all they're there for. They don't need any kind of store of value monetary attributes which is why they use POS and we are now starting to see all kinds of technology-driven specialisation which blows Dash's utility features away.

IMO therefore, Dash has to consolidate its strength which is providing utility in the POW sector where it's competitive. That means:

• selling hashrate for a high price
• giving primary buyers a competitive amount of coin for their money (not 1 in every 2)
• only subsidising the service layer to the extent that it adds value to the coin (but growing it because that's where we're strong)

This sector is also diminishing in terms of players but growing in terms of value so it would be a highly rewarded challenge to be able to stay in the pure POW race IMO.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

But you are advocating a further revision of the reward ratio away from miners. This is where our perspectives diverge because your model of where the value is is not consistent with what Dash investors have bought.

At the moment the priorities you've identified focus on securing the network and you've asserted that by doing so at a cheaper cost than the protocol currently supports we'd be delivering more value to the market.

However, if you actually observe where the (pure monetary asset) market has parked its capital, it isn't in cheaply secured blockchains since they've been available for a very long time and have ended up valueless. Rather it's in high energy-budget coins. i.e. coins that have required large amounts of natural energy to produce on a cumulative basis.

In that context, Dash has a great advantage in being able to provide on-chain services in that group. It's the only Proof of Work coin that can (because to do so you need to decouple the service provision aspect of the protocol so it can work independently of the mining process which works in slow blocktime. For that you need masternodes).

Utility coins on the other hand are only concerned with.......utility ! That's all they're there for. They don't need any kind of store of value monetary attributes which is why they use POS and we are now starting to see all kinds of technology-driven specialisation which blows Dash's utility features away.

IMO therefore, Dash has to consolidate its strength which is providing utility in the POW sector where it's competitive. That means:

• selling hashrate for a high price
• giving primary buyers a competitive amount of coin for their money (not 1 in every 2)
• only subsidising the service layer to the extent that it adds value to the coin (but growing it meanwhile)

This sector is also diminishing in terms of players but growing in terms of value so it would be a highly rewarded challenge to be able to stay in the pure POW race IMO.

The long-time "pure monetary" coins like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash (whose chain goes back to Bitcoin's origin), Bitcoin SV (whose chain goes back to Bitcoin's origin), Monero are all around now for a long time. As a consequence, their emission rate has already fallen relative to the number of circulating units (e.g., they all have low supply growth rates). Therefore, the one thing all these coins have in common is that they spend relatively LITTLE on hashrate relative to their market cap. Monero actually launched after Dash, but its emission rate tailed off much quicker than Dash's. As a consequence, it spends relatively little on hashrate compared to Dash... about 3.2% inflation. And yes, they incidentally are all PoW because that was the only well-understood consensus mechanism by 2014 when all of them had launched. All of these coins have supply inflation of 4% or less. It is the attractive supply inflation that helps them maintain their value. If the Bitcoin network made the decision to increase the inflation rate to 12% per year, it would begin to underperform Bitcoin Cash and other competitors, guaranteed.

 

[toknormal]

The long-time "pure monetary" coins...their emission rate has already fallen relative to the number of circulating units (e.g., they all have low supply growth rates). Therefore, the one thing all these coins have in common is that they spend relatively LITTLE on hashrate

Indeed ! And if I was an economist I'd probably analyse things the same way. However, I'm an investor and it's economists jobs to get inside the head of investors, not investors jobs to get inside the head of economists

For the record, I think you are doing a very good job in the face of extremely challenging circumstances but you've solicited the opinions of the investor community (which we appreciate) and I'm now providing for my own part. In that context:

What I invested in was:

• a limited supply, 100% POW coin that could provide competitive services in the Proof of Work sector

It was not:

• a POW coin who's value was supported by pretending it was older than it really was or that its original protocol was flawed

I don't think the original protocol was flawed. As I've expressed in previous posts I can see why traffic to order books is greater than it has to be and IMO it isn't because of "uncompetitive emission".

The uncompetitiveness originates in overcharging for hashrate and undersupplying coin to our primary market.

 

[qwizzie]

1) Introduce shared MNs to enable greater access to staking rewards
2) SLOWLY increase the share of block rewards from 45/45/10 to 80/10/10 over a very long period of time.

Just as clarification for myself with regards to masternode shares on protocol level as possible solution : you propose to go to 80% (MN's) / 10% (Miners) / 10% (Budget) very slowly over a very long time (many many years) ?
So in time that 80% of the block rewards goes to both masternodes with 1000 Dash and to shared masternodes ?

How does shared masternodes impact our sybil-attack resistance ?

 

[Geert]

Short term:
reduce mining rewards to 10% incrementally.

Long term:
Figure out a way to repurpose some MNs or use MN quorums to emit blocks. MNs are already POS nodes. The only impediment to this is the reliability of the MN network, and that can be addressed mainly by throttling IS locks if the MN network is under stress, and also having a POW backup mechanism.

 

[p5yc071c]

Would like to hear reactions to this model from the community.

Ryan,

Could you address the model being run on ZEN coin? I'm pretty unfamiliar with that coin/history, but their consensus mechanism is interesting. Here's a couple snippets from their whitepaper:

"In total there are three tiers of nodes: regular full nodes, Secure Nodes and Super Nodes. Secure and Super Nodes are incentivized with a share of the block subsidy of each mined block. Currently, both node classes receive 10% of the total block subsidy, respectively. The effect of two independent funding pools is to create a dynamic equilibrium in node count and returns to node operators. As returns either increase or decrease, the count of the respective class of node naturally increases or decreases, ceteris paribus."

"Incentives are tied to a set of minimum requirements that have thus far been verified by sending computational challenges to nodes and monitoring their response times. A central database hosted on Foundation-managed server clusters has been maintained to track performance and compensation eligibility"

...Maybe I'm missing some big pieces here, but to me, this could be a win for:

Users - Getting security that could be increased or decreased to match the costs that we want to pay
Users - Reaping rewards from these 'mini nodes' (Secure nodes in ZEN)
MNOs - Not competing directly against stakers who may have another level of involvement/commitment/responsibility/risk.
Everyone - Potential reduced cost of security. (as you identified)
Everyone - This model seems like it would be pretty easy to modify in the future...I'm imagining increases to the PoSe req's would be pretty simple?
- In the same line of thought, increasing or decreasing the costs to match that model should also be much simpler. If you're adding to/subtracting from a current layer (MN's) the effects could be pretty drastic, but if you're adding a whole new layer the effects would be limited.

-In your answer to JGC Miner's question about the logistics of the DML... a MNO's wishing to host a 'shared node' would need to then do a touch more work. In our example of 10 DASH as the minimum staking amount, if a MNO had 100 DASH and wanted to run the node with 90 other people, if any one of those guys moved their funds the node would need to be rebuilt. Why wouldn't that person just go on CrowdNode? Would it really be worth the effort? Seems like their system is extremely efficient, but again...no experts here ; )

For this reason I think the MNO's would be required to do more work and accept more risk with this model. If you then wanted to increase the incentives to these shared nodes, there's some (albeit small) chance that they could be more incentivized than a standard MN...

Problems/Issues
The biggest drawback I see to this model that ZEN is using is that it's probably a mega-#@*$-ton of work for DCG. Maybe that's just plain not feasible with our current budget? Should we maybe just wait until it's feasible? A huge increase in effort/work should probably be matched with a proportional increase in funding right?

 

[rick]

1) Introduce shared MNs to enable greater access to staking rewards
2) SLOWLY increase the share of block rewards from 45/45/10 to 80/10/10 over a very long period of time. Our previous reallocation was far too fast. If we reallocated about 0.5% per month, it would take nearly 6 years to fully transition.

After implementation, how would you test whether the solution is 'working'? What metrics, over what period of time?

 

[JOL]

Short term solution, MN share :
yes as a temporary solution.
What would the deadline be as soon as the proposal was voted on?

If I understood correctly, the idea would be to implement them while implementing another type of node/service (to replace POW mining, and see more types of nodes). When the other solution will be implemented, will the share MN function be removed?

medium and long term, new node type(s) :

Would it be interesting to have one or more other type of nodes/services, serving the network, other than replacing the POW mining?

How long will a first type of node/service be able to see the light of day?


i believe serving Dash network +collateral, have sens to receved rewards, and the % can change in time, with new, more efficient, services.

 

[forro]

At least as far as delivering an initial version, I would not anticipate including voting rights. I would be reluctant to include voting rights AND continue requiring 10% net votes for proposals to pass, because I think it's unlikely that a population of 10 Dash collateral holders would vote with the same frequency as those with 1,000 Dash. It runs the risk of stagnating the voting system and cutting off project funding. Perhaps there is a solution to this risk, but it would require more time to solve.

I actually don't think MN volatility would result... if anything I believe it would be lower for several reasons. First, I presume you would have more MNs, so a whale shutting down their MNs would have less impact on a % basis. Also, if shared nodes required locked inputs they couldn't be shut off at will by the individual collateral providers.

Collateralized mining basically reduces the hashrate / expense of mining by requiring miners to hold a certain amount of Dash to compete for blocks. There are several ways to implement it, so I'll describe one scenario to give you an idea. In normal mining, miners need to provide equipment, labor, and electricity. Collateralized mining requires holding Dash so that holding Dash either affects the "difficulty" of the hash (and therefore affects the odds of finding a block), or holding a certain amount of Dash enables a certain number of blocks to be found (e.g., low levels of collateral could limit the number of blocks you are permitted to find out of the last 100 blocks for example). The added "cost" of the collateral prevents any one miner from easily controlling the mining layer just as MN collateral prevents any one person from controlling the MN layer of the network. The result is 1) Increased demand for Dash (for the collateral), 2) better alignment of incentives for miners (because they are Dash holders), 3) more capital is directed toward holding Dash, which leaves less capital for hashrate. Basically, you get the same "cost" to attack the network with less expense of equipment and electricity with collateralized mining. That is the idea behind it.

It seems reasonable enough that MN shares don't get voting rights. I believe it should be a goal for a serious dash holder to eventually have a MN. There should be some bonus for having achieved it. That also keeps it simple for the devs. When someone needs to pull their collateral, how could that be handled? Could they mark their input with a 'free me' tag, and after the next payment occurs, the MN is brought offline and it is unlocked?

Long term we could leave the door open to a POS element as that area matures. Mid-term, perhaps within the year, a shared masternode solution would be coming. Short term, the reward adjustment transition could begin as soon as a vote was passed.

Collateralized mining sounds beneficial. Would it be prudent to 'fortify' the miners with collateral before beginning to reduce their share? You mention there are various ways to collateralize the miners. That never occured to me. I always imagined a simple x amount of dash would be needed, same as with MNs. Would that not work? Which method seemed to give the best effects, and which required the least amount of new code?
Why has the subject seemingly died? Is it too risky to code? Fears of a miner mutiny? Or was it just put on the backburner and forgotten?
If anyone knows any miners, I would love to hear what they think about it.

 

[DeepBlue]

With mining the current X11 "proof of work" is used only to solve a mathematical algorithm that has no value outside of the DASH ecosystem. This is a waste of computational power. Instead, would it not be possible to develop a new algorithm that rewards POW that actually solves computational problems in industry and DASH ecosystem? e.g. hiring our POW computational power to industries search engines, graphic rendering, Artificial intelligence etc. Instead of burning up electricity to solve an equation, burn electricity to solve an industry problem and earn revenue for the rental of our computational power.

If such a POW solution could be developed then it has several benefits as follows:

1. the POW would be useful to the industries outside of the DASH ecosystem and therefore generate a revenue steam independent of DASH.
2. there would be no basis for environmental "waste" of electricity because the POW would be used to solve real world problems in industry.
3. Since miners would be earning revenue from industry it would provide a steam of income independent of DASH and therefore miner would not be pressured to sell their DASH when the price of DASH falls because they have an independent source of revenue.
4. Industries that use our computational power to solve their problems would be exposed to the DASH brand. Effective marketing and awareness of the DASH brand at no additional cost to us.

Every aspect of DASH needs to considered and I feel we need to retain value at every point of our ecosystem. We need to build assets within our network. An asset is anything that can be used again in the future to enhance or aid the growth of DASH. There is far too much wastage in DASH. We need to think how everything in DASH can be converted to an asset. This is how we retain and build value within the network.

 

[radeon_jas]

As a dash (darkcoin) investor since 2015 and MNO, I disagree to change to POW because:

1. Dash is designed to be money; security is top priority. Please operate 100B USD (Bitcoin level) system for 10 years before propose change POW.

2. I believe “you get reward, because you have contribution to the network”, I don’t know what is the contribution if someone is just staking coins. I don’t think I have contribution to APPLE even I buy iPhone since 2007.

3. Before change anything, we need to figure out what is the root cause of current low price. Why BTC/LTC/BCH/XMR/… performance is much better than DASH? Better developers, better BD, better PR, better governance, better management team? How much budget/resources spend on attracting investors for last 3 years? How many proposals target to important markets (US/CHINA/JAPAN/KOREA/INDIA/…)? I never see an objective analysis cover these.

INFLATION is really the answer to all the questions?

If it is, why don’t just reduce 50% block reword, it is simple and fair. If it is not, price is still ~$43 or lower, what we can do next? 89/1/10, or back to 45/45/10? I don’t believe reduce inflation is the cure, so I don’t agree any actions based on that conclusion.

Dash network is still a good public decentralized blockchain solution for payment even price is $1. If dash adjust to be a store of value, want more investors to buy dash, we can do a lot of things before change consensus mechanism.

 

[toknormal]

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with your general philosophy that costs must increase to add to the value of Dash. Quite the opposite.

I think we're at cross purposes here. The significant point is who is paying these costs (of hashrate) ?

The market that buys the new mining supply is paying it. And they're not paying for a "cheaply secured network", they're paying to receive a portion of the coin supply. But Dash protocol only supplies them half the value they would get with other coins. (They pay the mining cost of the full supply but only receive 50% of the mined coin).

Therefore we are increasing the effective cost of hashrate to the primary market by having a reduced reward ratio, compared with other coins. Reducing that ratio again will increase further the effective cost that market has to cover, making us even less competitive and pushing more market share away from Dash and towards our competitors (where cost of hashrate in relation to the proportion of supply the market receives is much lower). Add to that, the adverse impact of masternode rewards to order books and we are effectively needing liquidity for the price of 3 coins for every 2 mined.

So it isn't miners that are impacted, it's the primary market buyers. They are now leaving us for other coins that don't push these costs onto them. (The cost of the masternode margins + proposed 'staking' margins).

This issue was minor when the MN network numbered in the hundreds. As it got into the 4000+ range it's simply to much for it to bear. This is what has led to the collapse IMO. You can model it quite easily. It's also simply expressed as a set to accounting transactions which account for the cost and revenue flows between the relevant players: market buyers (who pay for the hashrate), miners, masternode holders.

It's not enough to just model the Dash economy and look at the various reward ratios within Dash IMO. Also, assumed anecdotal models of market behaviour in this regard are of limited use and accuracy. We have to look at the relative reward ratios between Dash and other coins and account for the costs and revenue flows between the distinct players. It's instructive to bear in mind for example that there is always a primary buyer (who pays for the new supply). If the miner holds past the point of mining, then the miner is the primary buyer. Even statutory accounting procedures see it that way - the miner is considered to have purchased the coin at the point of reward receipt and any value change after that is seen as a capital gain or loss.

I agree that directing a part of the reward ratio to "users" is potentially positive in its own right, but as long as we are a mined protocol then it's the primary market that has to pay for this reward and we've already seen that it has limited capacity or appetite for carrying Dash "staking" costs. It results in a vapourising of our market share. The market simply makes that reward cheaper for itself by crashing the dollar-value of the masternode margin which it has to pay for. With the proposed "staking margin" for users, it would do the same.

IMO increasing the mining reward ratio right back to 90% can restore competitiveness to our primary market while the masternode network can multiply this value by anything from 100% - 400% (simply by virtue of its existence diversifying us so fundamentally from other POW offerings).

Consider the comparison of:

• a 45% reward ratio at $40 per coin = $256 per month
• a 10% reward ratio at $400 per coin = $570 per month

In the latter case, the capital value of the masternode collateral is clearly significantly improved. $400k instead of $40k.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

Ryan,

Could you address the model being run on ZEN coin? I'm pretty unfamiliar with that coin/history, but their consensus mechanism is interesting. Here's a couple snippets from their whitepaper:

"In total there are three tiers of nodes: regular full nodes, Secure Nodes and Super Nodes. Secure and Super Nodes are incentivized with a share of the block subsidy of each mined block. Currently, both node classes receive 10% of the total block subsidy, respectively. The effect of two independent funding pools is to create a dynamic equilibrium in node count and returns to node operators. As returns either increase or decrease, the count of the respective class of node naturally increases or decreases, ceteris paribus."

"Incentives are tied to a set of minimum requirements that have thus far been verified by sending computational challenges to nodes and monitoring their response times. A central database hosted on Foundation-managed server clusters has been maintained to track performance and compensation eligibility"

...Maybe I'm missing some big pieces here, but to me, this could be a win for:

Users - Getting security that could be increased or decreased to match the costs that we want to pay
Users - Reaping rewards from these 'mini nodes' (Secure nodes in ZEN)
MNOs - Not competing directly against stakers who may have another level of involvement/commitment/responsibility/risk.
Everyone - Potential reduced cost of security. (as you identified)
Everyone - This model seems like it would be pretty easy to modify in the future...I'm imagining increases to the PoSe req's would be pretty simple?
- In the same line of thought, increasing or decreasing the costs to match that model should also be much simpler. If you're adding to/subtracting from a current layer (MN's) the effects could be pretty drastic, but if you're adding a whole new layer the effects would be limited.

-In your answer to JGC Miner's question about the logistics of the DML... a MNO's wishing to host a 'shared node' would need to then do a touch more work. In our example of 10 DASH as the minimum staking amount, if a MNO had 100 DASH and wanted to run the node with 90 other people, if any one of those guys moved their funds the node would need to be rebuilt. Why wouldn't that person just go on CrowdNode? Would it really be worth the effort? Seems like their system is extremely efficient, but again...no experts here ; )

For this reason I think the MNO's would be required to do more work and accept more risk with this model. If you then wanted to increase the incentives to these shared nodes, there's some (albeit small) chance that they could be more incentivized than a standard MN...

Problems/Issues
The biggest drawback I see to this model that ZEN is using is that it's probably a mega-#@*$-ton of work for DCG. Maybe that's just plain not feasible with our current budget? Should we maybe just wait until it's feasible? A huge increase in effort/work should probably be matched with a proportional increase in funding right?

Yes, definitely a lot more work to introduce a completely new security model... especially when you consider our current model is already highly secure it would be hard to justify such an undertaking.

We do need to improve our PoSe scoring at some point in the future to make the network more robust, but there doesn't appear to be an issue with our network performance that requires us to do that immediately. It will likely remain on the backlog for a while longer. There are many good ideas out there we could leverage similar to what ZEN does to test the capabilities of the servers.

Shared MNs would likely require locked inputs to avoid the issues you mention. It is unlikely that a MN operator would be required to collect 90 inputs to collateralize a node. There would likely be some larger inputs available as well. I imagine inputs that were locked for longer periods would be the most attractive to a MN operator to use as collateral to avoid the situation where one input moves invalidating the MN. These details would be worked out during implementation, but time locked inputs would easily eliminate the risks.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

After implementation, how would you test whether the solution is 'working'? What metrics, over what period of time?

"Price" would be the wrong metric to use, because many many things can affect the price. Because the goal is to reduce the effect of inflation for users, I would measure the growth rate of circulating supply. If the approach is working, circulating supply growth would slow down. We are model various approaches using different assumptions, and I believe the growth rate could be reduced by such a large margin that you'd see the effect within a couple of quarters. We have nearly 2.5 years of growth history to compare against, so if there was a dramatic improvement, it should improve pretty quickly.

 

[Ryan Taylor]

It seems reasonable enough that MN shares don't get voting rights. I believe it should be a goal for a serious dash holder to eventually have a MN. There should be some bonus for having achieved it. That also keeps it simple for the devs. When someone needs to pull their collateral, how could that be handled? Could they mark their input with a 'free me' tag, and after the next payment occurs, the MN is brought offline and it is unlocked?

Long term we could leave the door open to a POS element as that area matures. Mid-term, perhaps within the year, a shared masternode solution would be coming. Short term, the reward adjustment transition could begin as soon as a vote was passed.

Collateralized mining sounds beneficial. Would it be prudent to 'fortify' the miners with collateral before beginning to reduce their share? You mention there are various ways to collateralize the miners. That never occured to me. I always imagined a simple x amount of dash would be needed, same as with MNs. Would that not work? Which method seemed to give the best effects, and which required the least amount of new code?
Why has the subject seemingly died? Is it too risky to code? Fears of a miner mutiny? Or was it just put on the backburner and forgotten?
If anyone knows any miners, I would love to hear what they think about it.

Locked inputs would be locked when formed. For example, there could be a button in a wallet that says "stake masternode collateral" or something to that effect. The user would click and be asked a series of questions. How much do you want to stake? How long do you want to lock it? What is the maximum share of your rewards you are willing to provide the operator? This would result in an on-chain transaction that essentially registers your UTXO for staking eligibility and would then be eligible for masternode operators to select as part of the collateral for registering a masternode. If the MNO shut down or was proof-of-service banned, the collateral would return to available status for other MNOs to pick up. There are many details that would need to be worked out during implementation, but that is one concept of how it could work.

Collateralized mining has many benefits and drawbacks. One of the biggest drawbacks is that it would complicate our economics further. The more complex we make our economics, the harder it becomes to keep the incentives aligned and working toward a healthy equilibrium. Collateralized mining could be beneficial long-term if mining is a smaller component of the block reward, but I would prioritize easier-to-address pieces first (like spending less on mining in the first place).

 

[bhkien]

In my opinion, originally, POW was not only designed for secure the network, but it was also designed to increase network effect.

Why? Miners don’t receive all the coins he need at one time, instead, they receive little by little, that keep them still in the network. They learn about coin, and talk about it with many people, sell some coins, give away some coins. etc. Those are interactions between members of the network.

Over time, coin emission reduce makes more people rushing into the network, and they interact with each other and it the network effect makes value of the network increase, and number of coins increase slowly and it makes price of coin increase.

However, ASIC appeared. ASIC makes mining become centralized. Instead of distributing coin to more people, ASIC makes only fewer people receive coin. This can be considered as Reverse Network Effect (see the article Reverse Network Effects: Why Today’s Social Networks Can Fail As They Grow Larger). This effect reduces value of the network, and it makes coin price’s reduced. We can see ASIC mining is somewhat similar to spam in a social network. Spam makes information less relevant to the users of a social network, and ASIC makes mining less interesting, less profit for large part of miners, and discourage them continue to stay in the network.

To utilize network effect created by mining, I think we should change mining algorithm so that it could prevent ASIC. Luckily, with the two tiers network like Dash, we can have many options to create anti-ASIC mining algorithm.

In addition, I think using both new mining algorithm with Deterministic Holder List could be very interesting.

 

[TanteStefana]

@Ryan Taylor I do have deep concerns over mining. China almost exclusively manufactures all the silicon chips today. How long (and how cheaply) could they stockpile ASICS For an attack? If chainlocks could be triggered to fail, one country could cause a catastrophic failure. Sure, we could do a roll back the blockchain like eth did, but it would halt the network; possibly for quite some time. It could be very bad. Before you say, oh they'd attack Bitcoin first, that may not be so in a few years. Or, you are paranoid, TS, please at least think about it. As we reduce mining rewards, and hashrate stabilizes or drops, I would not put it past China to attack crypto projects which are a threat to their Belt and Road Initiative which they have been working on for decades. I think this is a very real attack vector that would take a normal democratic country a lot of time and effort to achieve, but a totalitarian government is far more efficient. And I would not put it past, even the US government agencies, to make a coalition to get in on the action.

I'm just saying, Dash needs to be resistant to extra ordinary attack vectors such as this. If chainlocks can not be made 100% fail resistant, we must have a backup that can not fail.

On the other hand I really do like our 2 branches which act somewhat, though not entirely, like checks and balances.

 

[camosoul]

The whole purpose of taking Peercoin's Proof of Stake and converting it into Proof of Service, was that getting rewarded for being useless; is useless. Staking is useless.

Mining is similarly useless. It's useless work. It's a ton of computation that doesn't actually do anything.

There is a security model in deterministic systems.

Proof of Service is fundamentally a more advanced version of Proof of Work. Because you're doing actual, useful, legitimate work for the network.

From the cryptotard's "I want money hose whaaaaa" it ends up misrepresented as a staking concept because that 1,000 dash being tied up as collateral is all they care to consider for their argument.

The truth is that Proof of Service is a different type of Proof of Work. It is not a Proof of Stake. It's already privileged mining by being privileged work. And it can manifest it's security via the deterministic proof it could create.

You're getting caught up in false definitions, and can't see the path because of the language bastardization.

Proof of Work, as we have known it, is busywork. Getting paid to hash. MasterNodes get paid do useful stuff instead. Proof of Service is Proof of Work.

More and more of this work is being expected of MasterNodes, while the incentive drops. Miners keep getting paid to do their fake busywork, while MasterNodes aren't being sufficiently paid for legitimate work.

The work performed by MasterNodes is no less able to be leveraged for security than Mining is. Determinism.

You have to put up collateral to do that work.

So, DASH already has the better version of "privileged mining." DASH has Privileged Proof of Service. Which is a more evolved form of Privileged Proof of Work, because it is legitimate work instead of busywork. It has its own capacity for security in determinism. This security mechanism looks different but is no less valid.

Notice we aren't even talking about the 1,000 DASH in it's original terms. Originally, it was meant to prove that budget votes required having real skin in the game. We don't even mention that because it's a public secret that nobody wants to talk about; this system has failed. Nobody pays attention to what happens to the free-money-for-nothing. The Budget/voting was deliberately implemented in a stupid fashion, and it is an absolute sh!tshow.

The collateral has become nothing more than a bond proof needed to perform the new Privileged Proof of Legitimate Work which MasterNodes have fundamentally evolved to be.

This unintended, emergent model has good and bad in it. I think the good could be improved, and the bad fixed; if all parties involved would learn how to words properly and stop considering only woketard options, but consider things that actually make sense.

All this talk of Proof if Stake is ignorant, woketard regressivism. Mining is not really Proof of Work. It's proof of useless busywork.

You still can't see it?

You don't need mining at all. You just need to make your deterministic security more robust and understood. Not merely a deterministic MN list. A deterministic block proof based upon it. Sort of use proof of stake as proof of existence. If MasterNode exists, it must be doing work (if it weren't, it'd PoSe scored off and be not present anymore). Thus, it's existence can be used in a protocol similar to staking, but leveraging determinism by simply existing in a deterministic list, or not... It's not a directcstsking system. It's a deterministic presence of the node instead of the presence of the funds. The node can't exist without the bond proof as well as an adequately low PoSe score. It interlinks the concepts.

Poof. Problems solved. 90% block reward to MNs. No more mining. Every bit as secure. MNs already are Privileged Proof of Legitimate Work requiring a bond to exist. All you have to do is use it!

Yes, Proof of Useless Busywork has been fundamental up to now, because we had nothing better. DASH has something better. Use it. We don't need mining anymore. Definitely don't need Proof of Mining when we have proof of legitimate work. Add in Privileged to the front. Oh, wait, already got that, too...

Just use it.

You could breathe new life into the Budget system by fixing it with greater control, proportionality, deeper contracting, and requiring a baseline level of participation as part of the PoSe score. The vote was supposed to be a major reason for the incentivization. But most MNs don't even pay attention. Because they don't have to. You definitely can't give them a pay raise from 45% up to 90% without demanding participation in this aspect of the Legitimate Work they're supposed to be doing, but aren't. They must be forced to vote on a certain percentage/number of proposals or they don't get their 90% money hose. Whatever you do with this doesn't affect Instant send, so that aspect should remain isolated from dysfunction, as it currently is, no matter what you do... Which is why you haven't bothered to fix it and it continues to make DASH a laughing stock...

It doesn't matter what the dominant x11 hash is. We don't need to hash anymore. Sha256dr, x11, scrypt. Toss it all. It doesn't matter when you've got deterministic MasterNodes that bring an even better form of security... You've just been so obsessed with other crap that you haven't leveraged it.

Continue stuffing your heads up your butts if you want. You've lost relevance for damn good reason. You either want to be relevant again, or you don't... You've been so obsessed with PayPal and catering to woketards (even adopting their fake language and fake definitions) that you got lost in the weeds. You can't even accurately analyze your situation because words no longer mean what words mean, and you accept it without protest...

 

[forro]

You just need to make your deterministic security more robust and understood.

This is the key part. BLS may in time provide a superior method of securing the blockchain and creating blocks, but it is new, and we must assume it is full of bugs. It is already known to fail under stress. That is why whatever the long term outcome ends up being, the transition must be gradual. I think Ryan's suggestion of reducing the miner's reward by .5% per month down to 10% is appropriate. As he stated, at that rate the transition would take 6 years. We can safely assume chainlocks will become bulletproof by then. And further adjustments could be made. Maybe by then the network would be ready to drop mining altogether. Who knows? Six years is a very long time in crypto. I believe this transition is prudent enough that it would pass a vote, and that we should vote on it this cycle.

 

[toknormal]

You still can't see it?

You don't need mining at all.

...if you want to make a highly efficient, service-oriented network who's services are valued but who's tokens are next to worthless as monetary assets.

For everything else you need....mining.

(Try taking a look out the window at the digital monetary landscape for a moment. Your argument is about as well supported as a flagpole in quicksand )

 

[camosoul]

...if you want to make a highly efficient, service-oriented network who's services are valued but who's tokens are next to worthless as monetary assets.

For everything else you need....mining.

(Try taking a look out the window at the digital monetary landscape for a moment. Your argument is about as well supported as a flagpole in quicksand )

You need block validation. But, no, it doesn't have to be mining. It's an unpopular thing to say, sure. Mining has been the only system up to now. But YOUR argument is as valid as saying Cars will never catch on because everybody likes their horses.

What I'm suggesting is a modification of staking.

Obviously, something exists that can validate blocks, that isn't mining. It's already being used to validate a whole ton of other stuff... Or do MasterNodes not exist? It's all in my head?

Or are you still suggesting Horses > Cars because nobody understands cars? If you go too fast it'll suck all the air out?

I'm not suggesting DASH move to a staking model. That's obviously dumb. I'm suggesting that one take what's good about it and apply it in a way that hasn't been done before, for which DASH is uniquely suited to do. Why should DASH stop being The Borg of crypto?

No, we don't need horses anymore. We've got something better.

Please present your argument why Block Validation can only be done by horses, I mean mining. With an emphasis on explaining why the material being validated by MNs now, using the MNs' determinism model, is so terrible that it can't be used for block validation, but is also totally not terrible and in fact awesome and therefore acceptable for what it's currently being used to do? I'd like to hear it. It seems to be an argument in conflict with itself. Cognitive dissonance. Maybe you're heavily invested in mining rigs? No, I'm not trying to troll, I'd like to hear it. How can a deterministic validation system that is secure in Instance A, not be used in Instance B? Even thought it's still secure. But, uhm, I'm just going to say it's not secure because reasons? If that's the case, than everything about DASH is currently busted and not working... But, it is working, so...? I don't follow. My brain is fried so bad from decades of persecution and stress, I could easily be missing something. Do tell.

The new thing that hasn't been done before either works or it doesn't. PS and IS seem to be working based on it. The list of MNs itself. The payment schedule, VIN locking, ChainLocks even; everything runs on it. Why not blocks, too? Why is it good enough for all that cool stuff that's never been done before, and, in fact, cant be done by mining, but somehow it's also worthless for validating blocks?

I've had a theory for a while that this concept needed a jump start, but once its running, it doesn't need the battery anymore... Mining is where it starts, but once it's going, you don't need mining anymore.

To put it another way, staking is a defective version of what I'm talking about, because, without MasterNodes, all that's left of the idea is staking... Which is dumb.