Topic: [ANN] SpreadCoin | Decentralize Everything (decentralized blockexplorer coming) - page 141. (Read 790417 times)

This 'tax' notion is nonsense.

Miners provide security. 100% agree with that concept.

ServiceNodes provide the revenue stream that sustains the miners.

It's not a tax. It's a complete system that removes the need for users to pay transaction fees to miners. So, once the coinbase distribution has gone, who pays the miners, while keeping fees for users low?

Yes.

It's ServiceNodes.

So, you could say that ServiceNodes will get their revenue steams taxed to pay the miners.

I think I see where this is going, but it is also useful to have non-miners participate in the infrastructure of the network.

Many non-miners can understand that buying up some coins and locking them up in order to get a decent annual % return makes good financial sense. So there is a reason to set-up a server without getting into mining.

Still. As long as Bitcoin nodes are a top priority, we can always experiment with the rewards structure and if it works, it works; if not, we can change it.

It took me a bit to understand what you were trying to say here, but I think I get it.

You are saying that in the case that a miner has a service node, they will vote for the reward, but will not pay the reward because they have a node...

If miners with nodes make up say, 50% of the network, then in your proposed method, all of those blocks mined by the miner AND service node operators will go directly, 100% to them.

So you have 50% of the block reward left to be mined by miners without SNs.

The other miners pay a 20% (% set in place by miners w/ service nodes) reward on whatever they mine. (Although, the miner AND service noders would probably just vote way higher reward percentages, which could gouge out new supporters to the network totally punishing new mining and effectively creating a monopoly - so they earn more blocks)

That means that they are really effectively paying 20% of 50% of the total reward... which is actually 10%.

So that 10 percent is then distributed amongst the remaining service nodes (which by the way may not be 50% - it could be that the miners w/ service nodes run only 20% total nodes and thus 80% of nodes still need rewards).

So you have 50% of miners distributing 10% of total reward to what could perhaps be a GIANT sum of remaining service nodes.

This creates a huge burden on certain members of the community, and creates uneven power balances in favor of "miner AND service noders".

Unless I am fundamentally misunderstanding something about your proposal.


I see now that you mention that if votes stray from the "proper percentage" then the miners lose their right to full blocks. So maybe my idea about gouging new miners out is not valid.
But your last question becomes the problem - who determines that "proper percentage."

georgem,
All miners and nodes are contributors to the network, right?
The so called "tax" or "service node fee" is miners's payment to the nodes.
Now if I contribute as a miner but also have a service node, would it
make sense for me NOT to pay "tax" when I find a block?
Now I can still vote 20% or whatever, but I get the whole block.

Case A
Hypothetically if all 1440 nodes vote for 20% (default value in the wallet)
and they are also 100% of the mining power that means all 1440 blocks will
be mined in full 100% to the miner (which is also a node).
-- Miners are happy (they got full 100% blocks)
-- Service node operators are happy (they are the miners)
-- Users are happy (there are 1440 healthy service nodes)
(small print: is having a 1440 very dominant service nodes/miners considered centralization? I don't think so)

Case B
Let's say there was 144 nodes that were not elected, which are being elected now.
Now 10% of the mined blocks do not have nodes and will pay the "node tax".
So that will drive the 10% of the nodes that dropped to reinstate themselves.
Basically every miner will be VERY interested to get a service node.

Now how to "enforce" these 20% tax. Since voting for a higher
tax will not hurt the network but the miners, I really doubt that
would be the direction the miners will go. I wouldn't set it to 50%
because if I lose my node every block I find will be halved.

It will be a different story if miners are allowed to vote for less than 20%
and still get 100% of their blocks - then if they all lose their nodes
they will still get 100% going down (with a maximum of 0.07% on each block).
That way service nodes will be barely paid  and I consider this this as harming the network.

A good solution will be if this 20% tax is the default value and if you choose to alter it
you loose your right for a 100% block. So you could still set it to 50% or 0%,
and for each block you mine you won't get a full 100%, but will be taxed the current
service node fee.

In case you like this idea we should come up with the right number -
should this tax be 20%, 30% or how much?

I actually forgot to mention this when I was writing my initial post. I was thinking that there would be a way for miners to take large corrective actions. One thing that might make things very very user friendly for the voting process is to have two options. The miner can either set in their votes manually as they please. Or maybe there is someway to program the system so that miners can set an INDIVIDUALLY "ideal" percentage and have the votes be entered automatically with best estimates on how to achieve that goal.

The best sort of example I can think of is how Espresso machines use algorithms to maintain temperatures within certain degrees of an ideal. If you were to imagine a graph, it would look sort of like a sine wave with reducing amplitudes as time increases. The same I'm thinking could be done for ideal percentages. If the current percentage of reward is calculated to be 30 percent, and the ideal avg. that I want is 40 percent, then I could enter into some sort of box "40" and my votes would automatically be adjusted based on rates of change / other people's votes. So if reward % suddenly jumped to 50%, my vote would automatically adjust lower than 40, to bring it back to that ideal. (or attempting to, rather)

Is this something that's possible? I know you are planning on doing something similar for nodes - where they may automatically add coins to the collateral to maintain their positions, so I thought to keep in line with that this would be a really quite user friendly feature.


This, I think, is one of the more compelling arguments for the miner-voting system. In the case of giving service nodes an equal share of votes, they may become a self-perpetuating racket causing damage to the network.

If there were to be equal votes on either side, service nodes could become "too big to fail" so to speak, and if they weren't really providing value to the network, it would purely be a burden on Spreadcoin. I had not thought of this before, but I definitely agree.

This is sort of parallel to your philosophy that nodes shouldn't be doing nothing and that they required a first service, isn't it?


This last bit has a few interesting facets. One of the goals to the market philosophy is to create few barriers to entry. Barriers to entry create power imbalances which give people monopolistic power over assets  (think rent - this is a form of wealth extraction - people who can afford assets sit around making money by taking from the renters).

Anyways, both SNs and mining have barriers to entry. While I agree with the outlined system, I am sort of concerned that there are barriers to entry for mining which may be the cause of some individuals not being able to vote directly (they will have to collude as you said). While I will likely able to figure out mining and have the capital to purchase a GPU or 2, there will likely be people who operate service nodes who cannot operate or purchase mining systems for whatever reasons. If this is only a small percentage of node operators, I don't see this being a huge issue. However if barriers to entry are large, then people who have invested large amounts of money into miners have a huge advantage over people who have only been able to invest in service nodes.

 I think this is something important to note and I think that the application of this knowledge should be directed in reducing the barriers to entry. Obviously costs of mining equipment are difficult to change. But education / ease of mining could be improved. Also, maybe there will eventually be mining services - miners to rent - for individuals who are not so tech savvy but have a stake in SPR's future. Although, I don't think that there will be mining rentals until Service Nodes are valuable due to the services they provide.

This highlights how various things may be created that will empower people that wouldn't have been possible had you just decided on a percentage.

What you describe here is the kamikaze-method which I wouldn't recommend.
You as a node operator can do much more than just the existential "to be or not to be":


3) You can start mining yourself, and you will not just strengthen the system (and slightly weaken the rogue miners power) and earn SPR by doing this, but also influence the percentage (which means more profit not just for your but everybodies servicenode!).
We will stay a solo-mining coin for as long as possible (forever). So we are going to need a steady increasing number of solo-miners!
This is probably one of the more important reasons for introducing such a voting system (which incentivizes people to solo-mine)!
It might also create additional demand for more optimized mining software (which you don't need to share with the bad guys)

(Also: you as a "servicenode miner" are never alone. Talk to other node operators, they will be plenty and they will have the same interests as you. Figure it out! Create a union or whatever!
We see similar things happen with other coins.)


4) You can influence the miners directly. It's not like they are living on another planet! Talk to them, negotiate with them... maybe give them a servicenode as present?
Maybe share profits? Or operate a shared ownership servicenode? Whatever you come up with... keep conspiring and colluding until you reach your goal.
And if all else fails, return to 3).

What do I know...
I propose this system EXACTLY because I know that the collective wisdom will come up with solutions I would never come up with by myself.

And I am absolutely disgusted by a system where a king dev (or a few top "early" investors who own millions of SPR) get to decide the percentage according to their whims, which ofcourse will be:
...more, More, MORE! ... but never less, hm?   Why not? With our voting system sometimes it will make sense to reduce the percentage again. It will be allowed to fluctuate.)

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Sorry it's getting very late where I am, I'll answer in more detail later today, thanks again!

Awesome comments, thanks for doing this. It's exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping we will have.

Let me first add a few more scenarios just to broaden the horizon a little bit:

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Scenario C:
A big GPU farm gets to mine 1000 of the 1440 blocks. The remaining 440 blocks are mined by hundreds of servicenode operators each operating just 1 GPU, and small/midsize miners who are on our side!
The big GPU farm is greedy, doesn't understand economics, doesn't listen to hundreds of very vocal servicenode operators (and other community members) who do a lot of persuading (in more inventive ways than we can know right now).
So the big GPU farm votes "zero" all the time. (driving the price down, harming itself out of existence until it has to switch to another coin while us little guys take back control again, ... but I digress!   )

So everybody gets to observe the misconduct of the big GPU farm very closely, and so the small GPU miners (most of them servicenode operators) decide that it's an emergency so they all apply the maximum counteraction they are allowed to: vote "100".

The project might be in a state where the whole community (devs, miners, node operators, etc..) has agreed to publicly recommend a percentage of 20% (based on state of development, functionality and usecases, etc...) .
So interestingly a party can always give a vote that is much higher than the current recommendation, EXACTLY so they can counteract an "unfair" percentage if necessary!

1000 "0" votes averaged with 440 "100" votes is still a very healthy 30.5 %. So the voting collective would have managed to even surpass the proposed goal during this emergency (suicidal GPU farm).

For the same reason we can imagine the opposite scenario where servicenode operators somehow manage to largely dominate mining (which wouldn't be a bad thing if you think about it... it would be like they pay themselves lol) ... but analogous to the previous case miners who think the percentage is too high, can always take drastic countermeasures.

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Scenario D:
The network has matured and we see an interesting organic behaviour were people have learned how voting works and how the community can act as a whole to decide the percentage.
The next evolution of this would be to use this voting system in case it turns out something is malfunctioning in the current version of the very very complex servicenode network.

Why should miners be forced to continue to pay into a temporarily broken system?
So the community can now react very swiftly, spread the message and reduce the percentage accordingly in just a few hours.
The devs work out what caused the bug, and create an update.
While they are doing this the miners don't feel like jackasses but instead like empowered members of an everimproving system!
After the servicenode network has been fixed, miners return to the last known "good" percentage.
It's always very easy to return to a percentage, everybody just needs to type in the same vote for a period of 24 hours.
(ofcourse I'm assuming here a system of matured miners that understand what is beneficial for the price of SPR)

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Scenario E:
The network has reached godmode level (the final level) and people don't even need a recommendation anymore to figure out the best percentage.
It has become an inexplicable entangled feedback loop (kinda like a giant orgy) between minining servicenodes and serving miners.
The perfect free market!

Thanks for clearing that up. I made the same mistake in my imagination of the schema as I did when I asked you about "kicking" nodes; I assumed the set up was very black and white, when it is actually more of a continuum.

I think it is a great approach (in terms of establishing yet another "free market") and well thought out too. However, I do have some additional questions that I'd like to air out and hear your thoughts on.

While I don't think the same scenario would happen as Bitcoin (miners voting for zero rewards to SNs), I can imagine situations in which some types of miners could be detrimental to the network of node operators. If you allow me to set this up a bit I might be able to explain this more thoroughly and maybe you can correct some holes in my thinking, if there are any.

Below I have set up a relatively simple game theory matrix:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11cLb-JdW5X20KIrg9kizCRvBpgk7zK11XH_OHY7vGgk/edit?usp=sharing

Essentially miners will have three basic choices - mine & reward (whatever amount they wish), mine & not reward, or not mine at all. Node operators have two options - operate nodes or don't operate nodes.

Anyways, that is really just a visualization.

Scenario A involves a large GPU farm miner not caring much about the coin or driving its price / node count down. This miner comes in and is able to mine the majority of the blocks and votes for zero on all of them. This drives the nodes down to being only profitable for a few and results in a less than optimal SN network supporting services. Is this likely to create an environment that is unsuitable for running nodes - extreme fluctuations reducing profitability creating a frustrating inability to have continuous node operation.

Some checks for this I could imagine would be that new miners can not contribute votes for the first few blocks - aka a trial period where they must wait before having the ability to vote. Although maybe these are unnecessary because centralization of mining is unlikely to happen / extreme fluctuations are unlikely to happen due to the long average taken into account?

Scenario B involves miners maintaining low rewards for nodes - especially in the beginning and taking their profits because they can mine more blocks (due to low difficulty). They either don't see the long term benefit of nodes, or don't want to take short term mining losses.

The only power that node operators have is that they can cease to operate and sell their coins and perhaps drive the price down so that rogue miners are no longer incentivized to remove rewards. Perhaps this is how you foresee the interplay between price, miners and SN operators?

The problem I am envisioning is that there are uneven risk profiles for nodes and miners. The SN operators can't take their SPR elsewhere and decide to use them on another coin, whereas (non-SPR friendly) miners can jump in and out whenever they aren't making money. An investment in the mining equipment is less risky because there are multiple opportunities, whereas investing in SNs you subject yourself to the whims of what I classify as rogue profiteering miners (not the SPR supporters) and can't just take your stack and leave lol.

I am more or less just voicing this out loud to understand how you see the balances working out & to see if these scenarios are implausible / extremes that will be rectified by the market.

its completely bizarre how that abou character posts totally normal polite comments  next to, and seemingly
oblivious to that dispicable avatar of his (that might as well be a flaming swastika) and any comments that allude to it.

Every block will have a vote in it. A value between 0-100.

Obviously whoever finds the block gets to write in that value.
Much like he gets to write in his coinbase tx.

So every block has a vote. Those blocks that don't have a vote (because they are from the previous version) are considered a zero vote.
(this will only have to be considered during the 24 hour interim period after we do the fork. After that it is mandatory protocol for a miner to fill in the vote value.)

How do we now calculate the percentage that goes to the servicenodes?

By looking at the last 1440 blocks, by reading all those 1440 votes and calculating the average of all those votes.

With every new block we repeat this.
Again we look at the last 1440 blocks, which are now 1 block higher, so the average will be slightly different.

And we just repeat this over and over. There is no "voting period" as you say, it just happens continuously, much like new blocks do appear on a constant more or less predictable basis.
(average once a minute).

In effect we are looking at all the votes of the last 24 hours.

And as the globe spins, we are spinning with it!  

BTW: With an average over 1440 values we will see a very steady smooth curve.
The maximum the percentage can be moved from one block to the other is 0.07% (that's in the absolute outlier case of having 1439 "0" votes, and 1 "100" vote.)

should change the bow to the SPR logo, lol

I guess it is funny too

Once the vote is made for how long is that percentage kept in place? Will there be multiple voting periods? i.e. Eventually, as revenues are brought in from services the SPR rewards given to nodes would likely be less necessary, and the community would likely want to change that.

I might look into purchasing a GPU, now. However, I know pitifully little about mining.  

LOL - That is funny!

change your avatar to this here



and keep it online for 30 days.

And then I will answer your questions.

No joke.

georgem, can I receive exceptionally a response to an important question for me ? After all, I'm a great investor of Spread and I'm here with you since the past year.
As you know, BTC halving is in about 2 months. Thus, will be the SN release before or after that ?

I think you guys have been drinking the DASH kool-aid for too long. (I hear there is a DASH soda machine now?)

Miners are more important than servicenodes.
Without miners we can't have servicenodes (we wouldn't even have a coin without them)

But we sure as hell can have miners without servicenodes.

That's just the reality, nobody has to feel duped.
I was talking about "empowering" all the time, right?

Just because miners will get to influence/vote how much they want to give, doesn't mean that servicenodes will get nothing.
I think that's a completely wrong assumption to make.

Anyway, I had to mention my plan, because after long thinking it appeared to me as the perfect match for the competitive collateral scheme.

Embrace voluntaryism guys, no need to be afraid of the voluntary actions of the guys who "make our coin run"!

I know that I will both mine on 1-2 GPUs and run a bunch of servicenodes, and since I am better with servers than with GPUs, I will give a "100" vote all the time.  

You can vote whatever way you want!
That doesn't sound awesome to you?

Stay tuned.

Say that there are 8k SPR released each day. Received partially by miners, partially by SN operators. Why would one group feel sanctioned by the other? Where does the notion come from that miners are being "duped"? Some strange thinking going on. Let's get this ball rolling instead of talking too much. In the end, a finished product will show us what people really want. Probably a mix of both (miners and SN operators).

I call it tax because it's arbitrary and probably not very welcome, especially in a solo-mining environment.

Look, contrary to DASH, I design our competitive collateral scheme specifically so that everybody will easily be able to run a servicenode, especially in the first years.
There will be no fix collateral that lets the ownership of a servicenode get out of reach of the underprivileged class the higher the SPR price gets.

Couple that with the reality that everybody can participate in solo-mining, and miners don't just receive the block reward they also get to vote regarding servicenode rewards.
Mining will be more empowering.

Everybody will be mining and 'noding!


And therefor that will be like saying: your left hand is pitted against your right!  

This is partly the point I was attempting to make. They are both different parts of the whole and it is hard to measure which provides more value thus making relative rewards also difficult to determine.