https://twitter.com/OhGodAGirl/status/1509024125276200964
Kristy has some good insights on why mining is still important.
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Hi Reuben,
I just signed up but have been active on telegram. Can you advance my trust level so I can participate in the poll?
You have been upgraded
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You have been upgraded 
From now on for requests, to avoid spams, I’ll just like the post requesting for the trust level upgrade when it’s done or the community managers would like it.
*矿工：25%
*主节点：50%
*社区基金：10%
发展基金：15% 这样不是很好嘛。节点的权重最多 挑大梁 其他平均就很好
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Can I have my trust level increased please. I’m Obfustake from discord.
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25 Miners
50 MN
5 Community
20 Devs
Seems optimal for me.
Good evening everyone,
Any option which supports a 60% reward for the MN’s I believe is the right way to go with this. Their is many points in which I believe supports this in which I will list here.
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This project is taking a long term view for development and success. The crypto market in terms of the macro economics of the world is still in its infancy but the pace in which it is moving into the mainstream is rapid. In the long term, by having a lower PoW energy output, this will allow institutional investors to gain exposure to Firo as they can be bound by ESG requirements. If Firo is shown to be energy efficient, in terms of privacy coins this could create a USP for Firo.
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To obtain a Firo MN, the owner has to acquire 1000 Firo which requires a large investment in capital. The MN’s are instrumental for the security of the chain via chainlocks etc. This will reward MN holders as their interest is aligned with the long term goals of the development team as opposed to a higher PoW reward, by which (some) miners will switch to whatever coin generates the most profit for them but show no loyalty to the project itself.
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By having this aligned interest with the development team, this can allow for a closer co-operation on projects which will help promote Firo and help gain traction and awareness for the project to the wider crypto community.
Have a great evening everyone.
BrotherJ
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Please consider community not to go for an extreme of reducing miners to about 10-15%. This is a huge deal and miners are still important for a security standpoint. I think we should ease up at first that doesn’t shock the system too much. I know for MN holders the shorterm reaction is to vote for yourself to have more money but consider long term it could be detrimental if in worst case, a lot of the miners drop off.
I want to see how the community fund goes as a start then go from there starting at 5% then only reducing miners to 30-35 or 40% with a little bump in master nodes.
There is still time to change votes and hope people won’t just consider paying themselves more in the short term.
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Cutting miners to 10-15% will cause a dangerous shock to the system - for example our pools that have been with us through thick and thin, may abandon us. Please don’t do this!
I also prefer to see Masternode rewards either being flat or a moderate 5% increase in general. I don’t believe any reward increase is going to have anything more than a negligible effect on Masternodes in operation or an increase in price. Demand driven purely through masternodes is not a healthy demand for our network. We need demand from usage.
I like the community fund options, as they will lock up and reduce supply immediately - until we’re organized to grow Firo’s ecosystem through liquidity, exchanges, marketing, integration, and partnerships. Anything these funds are spent on should be used to grow Firo’s network and value in the future.
Please vote responsibly the future of Firo is in our hands
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When I first envisioned this the major focus would be the creation of a community fund with a SLIGHT rejig in favor of the masternodes, not a wholesale abandonment of mining.
While we are currently overpaying for miner security it doesn’t mean that we should remove them out of the equation, they play an important role in providing backup security when masternodes are taken offline and also keep an open line to new users that may not have access to exchanges.
If we cut miner rewards too drastically, we risk decimating our existing mining ecosystem as the pie becomes too small for pools to support. Pools would shutdown leading to less pool choice (perhaps only 2miners might remain?). I would strongly advocate keeping miner rewards to >30% of the block reward to ensure that we maintain the infrastructure built around mining and keep the accessibility of Firo. The network shouldn’t be run solely by masternodes as we have seen this leads to another form of centralization both in holdings and also reliance on datacentres.
Upping the masternode percentage will not result in a massively increased demand for Firo but if it does, that would also be temporary. Long term growth comes from building the ecosystem and the strength of the community starting with the community fund rather than just pure yield from masternodes. Would you seriously buy more masternodes if the yield of masternodes went from 11% to 15-20% while decimating an entire class of users in the process and possibly losing them forever. Let’s take things in phases rather than doing irreversible changes through gut feeling or self enrichment.
Remember Kristy, who is a PoW advocate and was basically one of the people who was an inspiration for me to open this up to the community said the following in relation to Bitcoin which has some partial relevance to us too:
https://twitter.com/OhGodAGirl/status/1509019906188058628
"So, your solution is to push proof-of-stake which would create a wider wealth gap? Yeah, no. Part of the reason Bitcoin has managed to capture the hearts and minds of a generation is because mining creates a hobbysit, can-do culture.
PoS is suitable for when you want to encourage capital lockup - this is why it works so well for Ethereum (where DeFi and LP’s are rampant).
Bitcoin is trying to be the best form of money - so consistent buy/sell pressure is desired to create volume. Miners help.
The best decision Ethereum ever made was launching as PoW first to bootstrap the network and create a wider plane of issuance, and then moving to PoS once DeFi/utility started to take off. Plus EIP-1559 (which created a consistent sink and pressure on the price floor).
But that is because Ethereum was trying to create certain behaviors in their network (and reward people accordingly). Capital lockup is pretty damn important for any cryptonetwork, and in a chain that’s mostly comprised of L2 protocols you need non-HW based sinks.
In Bitcoin, infrastructure-based sinks are where we get most of our security from.
Wasteful? No.
…
Your solution isn’t to improve the situation via energy research or even pushing for more residential compatible ASICs - it’s to push a decentralized network into the hands of a pocket of centralization (AWS, GCP & Azure and other VPS’) where most PoS nodes operate.
Your ‘narrative’ is to take away the one benefit of Bitcoin - decentralization - and push for heavy centralization. And why? You want to take away power from individuals and put it back into the hands of a few.
But hey - let’s pretend PoS doesn’t consume any energy (it does, go look up how much of a PUE gap Tier 4 datacenters have vs Tier 0) and that it’s somehow ‘cleaner’ and ‘greener’.
And let’s pretend having our entire infrastructure in the hands of three major cloud providers is somehow safer for our financial infrastructure than having our it in the hands of a few million individuals who deeply care about correcting the mistakes of the past.
If anyone wants to change their vote, they can do so by clicking Show Vote > Remove Vote > and then revoting.
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Agree that 10-15% may be too extreme a reduction for miners. While their services are less important, they still strengthen the infrastructure. There’s other considerations too, as Reuben mentioned, like pools that would go away.
It’s easy to just vote 60% masternode and call it a day, but long term healthy growth is what I think we all want.
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I think it’s better keep current mining reward, firo price already at bottom, cutting more mining reward will cause many current miners migrate to another coin. or maybe you should lower the masternode reward or lower the 15% dev fund to 10%
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How do miners help with the price? Evidence points to selling pressure from the miners.
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no, Reuben miners “add value”, as in the economic concept of adding value
staking does not add value
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What is the economic concept of adding value?
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adding value:
You need to produce a product that is “worth” more than its base resources.
Since you are profit motivated, if you perceive that you wont be able to make a profit, you will not produce the thing. Thus you will leave these resources for someone else to use, as that someone will achieve profit.
Adding value is when you make something more expensive. The presumption is the next user will use the product for even greater perceived profit.
Profit motivated PoW adds value, perceived value, even when miners are racing to the bottom. The reward “must” be worth more than the base resources or nobody would risk those resources.
While staking is a rent seeking ponzi.
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This is just a personal opinion based on what we understand so far with a native blockchain project tokenomics design.
Tokenomics should support at least three main subject: security, decentralization, and financial incentives (such as increase in asset value, i.e. halving mechanism).
Being a project developing it’s own blockchain gives another challenge on this tokenomics part because the project focus is usually on technological innovation instead of business (creating product, sell them, gain revenue).
Several project like Bitcoin, Bitcoin cash, Litecoin, Monero, was able to maintain the token market capitalisation thanks to a good branding created by chance.
I am glad that the Firo community is having this discussion right now because it is an important subject.
Based on Reuben post we see that the role of miners are -ranked from the most valuable;
- Decentralization
- Security (since Reuben mentioned “providing backup security” we think that it is less valuable)
- Financial incentives (it is not captured because miners just sell or extract value out of the system)
If we decrease miners rewards, then will we still get those decentralization and security from miners as valuable as before?
A decrease by how many percent will makes them still valuable?
Will new masternode owners behaving differently by not extracting value out?
And to close this comment, Is it actually possible to integrate Firo masternodes staking with Firo DEX to tackle the liquidity potential problem if more tokens are locked?
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I’ve been mining since Zcoin and the advent of MTP and I have to say that to me this discussion put the whole FIRO project under a different light.
Zcoin/Firo has been one of the top profitable coins for a certain type of GPUs for a very long period. This was attracting miners regardless of their perception of the project. The privacy nature of FIRO was another big plus for me to mine it and support it and I believe many other miners stayed loyal because of this combination of profitability & privacy.
Now, I understand that one of the objections against miners is that they sell to much FIROs. I must say that I also sell a good part of my mining rewards too in exchange of what I believe is the undisputed most valuable coin: BITCOIN.
But I also used to keep a decent bag of FIROs with me, because IMO the project was highly underrated and in long term this would have paid off well.
What I saw steadily happening instead is a pump & dump scheme that, despite being a short term opportunity to take profits, it does not bring advantages in the long term.
About the small numbers of miners, I wouldn’t be much concerned about that with the upcoming Ethereum switch to POS. Many GPUs will need to switch to other coins and FIRO would have been in the top list. This move just seems to go in the opposite direction discouraging new miners.
Quote from the firo.org website:
We believe in the importance of fair distribution in FIRO and remain committed to having it mineable using commodity hardware like GPUs.
There seemed to be a certain pride in this sentence, I wonder where it’s gone now that miners are treated with such contempt.
Many can agree that mining with commodity hardware is one of the best ways to get decentralization: very small entry cost, harder to scale up. I wonder if masternodes running on cloud providers and with 1000 FIROs entry cost are able to provide a similar level of decentralization.
I wish the project good luck, I’m bringing my hashrate to other shores 
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