How to reverse the downward trend of active masternodes?

[GrandMasterDash]

The trend is clear, while the node count for custody providers is going up e.g. CrowdNode, the overall number of masternodes continues to decline. This means, at some point, the majority of voting power will be in the hands of custody providers and, therefore, open to wholesale abuse and corruption.

My logic is questioning why, if a node has a Proof of Service score of zero, then why does it also need to provide collateral? In this case, the collateral is hindering a properly decentralized service i.e. custody services such as Binance or CrowdNode have little difficulty in meeting the 1000 dash requirement.

 

[xkcd]

You don't seem to understand several key points judging by your post.

Binance

While Binance is an issue, they rolled out 270 Masternodes using customer funds just prior to the reallocation hard fork wiping out the gains the network was to receive in reallaction for the first year. They have never voted with those nodes and certainly we do track them on MNOwatch. https://mnowatch.org/binance/

What we as holders of Dash should do is simply keep no Dash balance on Binance, if we all pull our coins out, then maybe they will have to take some nodes down to cover withdrawals.

Crowdnode

Unlike Binance, Crowdnode (CN) is fully transparent and creates traceable masternodes with onchain transactions from customer deposits, customers can then vote on the site and those votes are carried out with their masternodes. MNOwatch also tracks their nodes https://mnowatch.org/crowdnode/ . You observation that the masternode count has been decreasing while the number of masternodes held by CN has been increasing is correct and the reason for that is there is demand for investment in Dash, however, 1000 Dash ($50k) is too high. I have been barking on about reducing the collateral reqs for a MN down to 500, or 250, or even 200, but it is a tremendously unpopular idea. Fortunately, CN have continued to work on trustless masternode shares (where you control the private keys!) and will be releasing it later this year! (I am currently actively testing it on testnet!). I suspect once this service is offered to the community we will see a huge surge in the number of nodes organised by CN as many people just don't jive with the custody part of it.

The trend is clear

Umm, not really, that shows the active MN count, not the collateralised count which is more steady, basically nodes are allowed to atrophy as holders become despondent, but your whole claim is wrong, Binance do not vote and Crowdnode vote according to their users, so the votes in the DAO are all from individuals with a stake in Dash.

https://mnowatch.org/dash-stats/

This means, at some point, the majority of voting power will be in the hands of custody providers and, therefore, open to wholesale abuse and corruption.

Wrong conclusion based on misunderstanding the data.

My logic is questioning why, if a node has a Proof of Service score of zero, then why does it also need to provide collateral?

You must be having a brain fart, the 1000 Dash collateral is to prove you have stake in the network, we don't want any old Sybil to spin up a node and spam the network with her silliness do we?

As a bonus, the reason the network is shedding nodes and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future is because the ROI on the 1000 Dash is always going down thanks to the yearly 7% shaving. The number of MNs goes down in a manner to keep the ROI up and competitive with other decentralised finance solutions. This helps cap the price and will ensure that Dash does not ever reach the heady highs of 2017, but we can expect more modest price rises, probably trading in the range of $40-$200 for the next 5 years.

Once Evo launches, there is a chance that if anything built on top of it is valuable, then the ROI of MNs could lift and if it does, the MN count could rise again dramatically increasing the price, however, there is no reason to expect that to happen and the safest approach is to extrapolate the past into the medium term future and go with that.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Binance''s voting behavior (or not) is of no consequence to the definition of a custody service. The same is true of CrowdNode, regardless of whether they are "transparent" or not. I can say a government is "transparent", but it doesn't make them honest, nor does it provide any guarantee of future policies.

As for Sybil attacks, a reminder of dash's consensus history may be a good idea. Dash's original PoSe algo was extremely weak compared to the current model. Also, Duffield's original idea of "skin in the game" has served it's purpose and now demonstrably worthless. The fact is, companies such as Binance and CrowdNode have moved "self sovereignty" to "custody provider". Or better still, look at the institutional bitcoin buyers, the ones that would of supposedly squeezed the dash price up if they all had to buy in blocks of 1000 dash... in 8 years it never happened.

Spinning up nodes in dash would not defeat the current PoSe... or would it? For, if it did, then that same weakness could readily be applied to the custody providers mentioned, namely Binance and CrowdNode.