It seems like a good time to repeat part of a couple of post from above that got buried - since people seem to be off topic again.
Having multiple tiers of master nodes is not justifiable - since all nodes do exactly the same amount of work - verify miner blocks, lock the blocks in with chain-locks (preventing a 51% attack on the network) and lock transactions with instasend - they all add the same value to the network - having different tiers does not make sense (if you want more income then spin up more nodes and protect the network even more - pretty simple).
Also - reducing the collateral amount can increase the risk of master node attacks - an attacker can spin-up low cost nodes and try to attack the chainlock mechanism - it is not a good idea - the whole idea of having collateral is to ensure the master node operators have ‘skin-in-the-game’ to keep them honest. I’m sure people appreciate any desires to improve ‘buy-in’ to Firo - and that’s why I suggested that other forms of staking are available and more methods should be created.
So there is no way to modulate the importance of the role played by each masternode on security according to the amount of its collateral (for example on 3 levels)?
Again - this is quite off-topic (since this forum should be about reallocating tokenomics, not redesigning the way nodes work). In the future - if there are multiple functions that NEED to be run on different levels of nodes then I’d be the first person saying we need multiple levels of nodes and likely varied payments - but that’s not the case today - and making changes just to justify multilevel payments doesn’t make sense. The team needs to focus on rolling out the great tech that they are working on.
From what I understand a lot of people were very upset when Master Nodes were first introduced to Zcoin - since they had no function at the time - but now - they perform very important functions - we don’t want the same thing to happen again (multilevel nodes doesn’t make sense right now). Let’s just figure out the best redistribution of the current tokenomics for now - and to more appropriately reward MNs for the work they do. Then we can see how Firo evolves in the future. Let’s take things one step at a time and see where Firo can go.
Do remember that hosting nodes have a cost. Let’s say it is a 5 dollar VPS (which we don’t really like since they are very underpowered). Can someone with 100 firo really earn enough to cover the 5-10 hosting cost along with the setup of it?
Also a huge proportion of our supply is already locked up in masternodes (34.37%).
I think people aren’t really doing the math here.
Let’s do the calculation:
12.5 FIRO per block
1,314,000 FIRO emitted/year
Assume that we get 50% of the block reward to masternodes 657,000
With 4116 masternodes you get 159.6 FIRO a year per masternode or a 16% yield p.a.
PS: For the current block reward, there are 4116 masternodes you get 111.73 FIRO/year (at current prices ~400 USD/year) which is about 11.17% yield. Hosting costs are $4.50 a month for basic hosting or 54 USD a year. You cannot go cheaper than this since if you rent a VPS yourself you already pay 5 USD a month for the most basic VPS.
Masternode hosters tend to crowd other stuff into the node as well to make money which isn’t really that great (for e.g. hosting other coin’s nodes on the same VPS).
Now if you introduce several tiers of masternodes, you need to decide where the reward comes from! Let’s say we create a 100 FIRO masternode tier. If they share in the existing 35% of the masternodes, you dilute the existing 1000 FIRO masternode holders who aren’t making a huge sum of money as it is. Existing masternode holders would instead break their 1000 FIRO into smaller nodes of 100 FIRO and now they have to pay 10x the hosting cost for the same amount of FIRO. So this approach doesn’t work.
Therefore, for a tiered masternode system to work, you need to allocate another part of the block reward to these other tier of masternodes. Where would this come from??? Cut miners more? Cut dev? Cut from the existing masternodes? I am really against this proposal as
a) There’s no technical reason for another tier of masternodes. It in fact makes it more complicated since you have nodes performing the same function but aren’t equal in terms of collateral backing it. I don’t agree in ‘inventing’ a reason for another tier of masternodes.
b) With current prices, if we lower masternode requirements which are already at a point where the hosting costs (which cannot go lower) already eat significantly into the profit of running one), it’s not going to help the situation.
c) Quite a lot of development work for questionable benefit (esp if ppl want to cut out miners completely which I don’t recommend). We should be focusing on what’s important and balance the change in tokenomics with also dev time.
A masternode is already decently affordable and the right balance of it being a significant investment of money while remaining in the reach of most people. There are also other solutions like pooled masternodes or Binance locked staking that allow people with smaller amounts to do these things.
I want to start by saying I am all for the proposal since the point have been brought up of overpaying for security.
After just about 22 days after Decred tried their new payout scheme, their prices has trended down. Its a different project entirely and can yield different results for us.
We could try flipping the Miners and Masternodes payout (that would be less of a shock to miners I think while respecting the role they play in security with respect to the overall ecosystem), reduce one by a bit and have a community fund to start.
From:
50% Miners
35% Masternodes
15% Dev reward
To:
50% Masternodes
30% Miners
5% Community Fund
15% Dev Fund
The community fund can be filled with people not from on the team but are Firo enthusiast in a good effort to further decentralize the decision making like we have with the Magic Fund. The community fund can go towards funding the critical things for Firo like audits of cryptography and code.
Disclaimer: I have Firo masternodes and I recently got into mining.
I think there was talk of a tiered list of MN and I’m against that. For those mining and with less than 1000 Firo required for a masternode, there is a service called Evonodes https://evonodes.com/pool/FIRO where you can deposit just about any amount of Firo to get shared rewards from masternodes derived from pooled together Firo. I have used services like this in the past such as Satang exchange which had something like this to encourage Firo deposits that rewarded you with more Firo over time. Binance also did this for a while. I’ll give Evonodes a try later starting small with 5-10 Firo then will scale up probably.
After reading all comments and thinking about the project, I would most prefer to increase dev reward, but if that would be too controversially I suggest original proposal with changes of community fund.
50% Masternodes
15% Dev reward
15% Community Fund (extra projects, ads, …)
20% Miners
Community fund projects should be approved by some kind of committee from people who has some valid track record (I guess currently dev team who long term proves themselves to have good results and to be committed to the Firo project).
Community fund could be used for community projects and extra projects of dev team which are not part of the main roadmap and rest funds can be used for impactful promotion/advertisements and spreading adoption.
We have best coin, but many people never heard of Firo, some kind of sponsored posts could improve that.
Free money for doing nothing? As a masternode hoster who doesn’t get enough rewards to pay server and network costs in a real data center, and who has to weekly install security updates to the host OS + log review for attacks, this is just simply wrong.
I’m spending money now on strong infrastructure as an investment in the future so one day the price of FIRO will help me cover all historical costs for my hosting efforts.
I didn’t mean to underestimate the master-node role nor expenses, but I still stand by my statement compared to miners who pay and spend way more money and effort. As mentioned earlier I have multiple master-nodes along with my mining operation.
I didn’t understand what a real datacenter is? everyone uses a hosting company for a VPS is evidently using a real datacenter and this costs a minimum of 60USD/per year, and with this amount you will get a functional master-node.
Installing security updates “manually” weekly is NOT a best practice and you need to automate this AutomaticSecurityUpdates - Community Help Wiki because a lot can happen in a week from a security prospective, also NO one manually review log files because it’s a tedious full time-job and even for the experts who stopped doing this at-least half a decade ago, they still missed threats.
Nowadays, there’s multiple automated tools which can be very useful not only in filtering your log files for security threats but also monitoring your entire box, 5 minutes googling the subject will result a resolution. Let me know if you need technical directions in configuring and securing your master-node.
So basically for a master-node we’re talking 60USD/per year or even 100USD to be generous, how much Firo you make a year and what costs are you trying to cover?
The question is whether the miners supply the security they are being paid for.
The answer is unequivocally “NO”.
This thread reminds me of a situation where the security guard for your business leaves the doors unlocked and steals from you. Then you debate about whether you will pay him less.
A VPS to host a node at 60 USD/year, it was valid when the blockchain was tiny and needed the minimum disk.
But since the headers of each block were weighed down by 200 kB, I would say about 2 years ago, the blockchain has grown enormously and I don’t know of any professional VPS provider offering the storage capacity of the FIRO blockchain. for 60 USD/year. And the problem is that the prices go up very quickly.
As Reuben said, this will drastically cut down the size of the blockchain! 4GB to 5GB. Be aware that it will require a resync (which is faster than in the past, but still takes time!)
