Yay?! ... masternodes.
I think 5 million is too high.
A good target for total number of masternodes in the first year is a thousand. Then in the second year maybe 2,000. I base this on some of the other MN coins out there. The grand daddy of all MN coins has around 4000 right now.
There have been "sentiment competitions" in 2018 and you can check out the winners or the top ones, look at their coin supply, look at percentage locked.
If maximum coins is 500 million, and you ideally want between 50% to 60% locked up, that's 250 to 300 million. If the target is 3000 nodes, that translates to 100k GUN for a node.
Current supply is 280 million? (Just looking at explorer data.) We can expect around half will turn into masternodes which will count about 1400 nodes. It will keep adding up over time. The rewards for those nodes will average every 2 days.
Then you'd want to get listed on the "new" coinmarketcap of masternodes, such as masternodes.online and have the platform nodes add us, such as GIN and Genarium? (I forget the spelling), and added to nodecheck.io for remote monitoring services which tag you on discord or telegram.
Those instantly expose the coin to thousands more people who have never heard of GUN. There are "portfolio" managers who do nothing but buy masternode coins and use the rewards to provide liquidity to the market.
The price follows. Remember, stick to sound fundamentals. 5 million GUN limits the average masternode count to only 50 over the lifetime of the coin. That's too small and then you're looking like those DPoS coins (delegated proof of stake) like EOS with 21 block producers, each BP using high end hardware. They did raise a billion dollars in their ICO ...
The average MN runs on a VPS that costs about $5 per month.
I don't know what a proper split between the miner/staker and the masternode would be, but I have seen 65/35 and 80/20, both in favor of masternodes.
Usually nodes have the following features:
1. Instant or swift or fast send, either with a fee, or activate by default without a fee. Not something needed really. But good to have there.
2. Obfuscation or zerocoin. You can actually do both, since obfuscation is merely CoinJoin, but zerocoin uses zero knowledge proofs which does not need a MN to do that.
3. Voting rights for governance budgets. 10% of active nodes required to grant a portion of the superblock reward.
4. They hold the collateral. Not on the node itself but locked away in the owner's wallet. This is usually referred to as a hot-cold setup. Or cold-hot. Whichever way you look at it.
5. They all hold the full blockchain. Welps, not a big deal, everyone does. But since they are public and on the masternode list, light SPV wallets know they can connect to them "safely".
You do not want to change or adapt the numbers after they have been decided upon. This will cause a hard fork, and with that a lot of people selling (and buying) and volatility. Or you could change the numbers a few times, depending on consensus, but those need to be very scarce or maybe just once.
TL;DR (summary) Try 100k.
So good to hear from you again and thanks so much for all the valuable input. A lot of those are our thoughts as well. My thinking is 500K GUN /MN at this point, but again, that is somewhat limiting in the long term. But if you look at today's price, it makes more sense. Of course, once we start coding it, prices will go up as people start accumulating GUN to get a node. There are some technological aspects for us to overcome and deal with going from where we are to that point, but our programming team thinks it is workable. Please stay in touch Dabs - always appreciate your constructive inputs.
I agree that 500K for a masternode at current prices is more then reasonable, but as you said - the price will go up once people find out about masternode implementation plans. I think the price could jump up 10x very very fast, or even triple that if a few dozen people decide to snatch up a masternode. With that in mind I think something in the 100k-250K might be a good idea. If Cryptopia was online I'd take a look at the order books and try to calculate how much the price would rise if 20-30 people all bought a masternode right now....