in our understanding we don't need to give to miners almost half of the block reward (45%) to secure the network.
That only works if you take the view that people are in the market to invest in "cheaply secured networks".
But from looking at the last 8 years of history that would appear not to be the case.
Rather they seem to want to invest in the coins with most scarcity and the market's definition of "scarcity" in that context is coins that have required the largest amounts of energy to mine.
If you need actual "in the field evidence" of how reducing the mining reward doesn't lead to a higher valuation then try looking at Dash. We've had 50% less mining reward than our competitors for several years now and we've lost market share to all of them. ergo: based on that, reduce it further and we'll lose even more market share.
I just don't see much point in shifting value away from masternodes and towards miners
Quizzie. You spend a lot of time in here. Please go back and read my previous post. We are not shifting reward back to miners, we're shifting it back to the
primary market that pays for the mining cost so that we can supply it a competitive amount of coin, not compared with masternodes but compared with
other competing blockchains.
The point, therefore is to stem the loss of market share to them. The mechanics by which we lose that market share are various, but an example is having to find market liquidity for BOTH the mining cost AND the sale price of the masternode reward. i.e. charging the market for 3 coins and only supplying it with 2.
We need to change our mindset from thinking about the reward split in terms of "mining/masternodes" and think of it in terms of "mining dash/mining XMR" or "mining Dash/mining LTC" etc.
Here's what our "cheaply secured network" did for us so far in terms of market share (% share of leading monetary altcoin marketcap):
Notice I left out bitcoin. If we include bitcoin then Dash is so comprehensively trounced in terms of market share that it barely registers. If we diminish the mining reward any further (or even leave it where it is) we'll have an ultra-cheaply secured network and correspondingly ultra cheaply valued coin that's so cheaply valued it doesn't even make it onto page 1 of cmc.com IMO.
Data: (source: waybackmachine, archive.org coinmarketcap.com month of March)