I guess with masternodes you mean so called SNs (supernodes), right?
Yes, I just use the generic, age-old p2p terminology for any form of systematic recentralization, regardless of the trendy term-of-the-day for it. (... which seems to vary month-to-month anymore.)
Well, I didn't like them too. Not sure if it's possible at all at this stage, but perhaps with your support, it could be possible to think it over again, and get rid of those special nodes.
I doubt it is something that would get sorted out before you guys proceed with the lite wallet launch. It isn't entirely clear to me what the XEL transition plan is from there, though.... so maybe it is something that could be done after or maybe it is something where we'd be talking about a new, distinct network.
HunterMinerCrafter, the SuperNode (or whatever we decide to call it) logic has not been coded yet and has no ties to the Lite Wallet being released soon. I have coded the logic to perform the validation of POW / Bounty submissions, but EK has not had time yet to interface this logic into the Core Server, so we may have some time to refine the approach here...
Originally, I think EK's plan was to have all nodes (the Core Server) run the validation logic; however, the algorithms written in ElasticPL can potentially take quite a bit of time and memory to solve (i.e. seconds...depending on the complexity), so the validation logic could easily be used to attack the network (i.e. submit a complex job and throw 100's of solutions to the nodes to validate).
The next thought was to just have nodes running on higher performance hardware run the validation logic...but you'd still have to have all these nodes perform the validation so there was still too much traffic and overhead on the network, so at that point we looked at just having a small number of nodes to the validation, but then you'd still have the issue of a job author running their own malicious node. So I believe this is when EK added the 250K XEL requirement...to deter anyone from creating a malicious node...basically, the network would trust the decision of a single node....which leads us to where we are today.
Clearly this idea can be improved upon (I have concerns over the 250K requirement as well as relying on a single SN's decision), but I am just coding the logic for the validation, so I can't really say what the best approach....and EK has been so busy I don't think he's had much time if any to think about it.
So as I posted earlier, I think its work discussing again...