A miner spends $ 1000 and starts mining, and his return is calculated in paying off his miner and electricity.
I can invest $ 1000, even $ 2000 or something more if I know that in a year I pay it off and get 5%, 10% or more depending on my costs.
How much does a master node risk that has bought Dash at $ 500?
You've got your accounting logic all screwed up I'm afraid, as has xkcdd above.
In terms of ROI your "risk" is measured in dollars (or other currency) not dash, because that's what you invested. So you need to measure the return in dollars, not Dash. If the level of masternode rewards results in a NEGATIVE return in dollars, EVEN if you are earning 72 Dash per year then that is because the marketcap has been bled and revalued downwards.
So the problem reverts to supporting the price in markets and there we return to the idea of ALL markets, not just exchanges. Here's how that works:
• miners support the price in primary markets
• investors support the price in secondary markets
• at nodecount equilibrium, masternodes
deplete the price anywhere (because they don't have a purchase side to their net transaction & there's no on-chain sink to absorb it like in De-Fi)
That's all anyone needs to know.
Just because the primary market is termed "mining" doesn't change the fact that it's still a market and if you feed out half of your coin supply around it at a zero price instead of exposing it to competitive bidding then you'll tank the price in secondary markets since you're pump-priming so many of its players with so much unrealised gain.
So what are they going to do ? Realise it of course.
Only masternodes themselves seem to be blinded by this glaring conflict of interest. That's because they think they "deserve" a return for having invested 1000 Dash. But nobody "deserves" anything from markets unless the market gets something in return which means that Dash has to function well as a store of value at least and not have its capital value drained to pay out free coins to a select few holders. This doesn't happen in bitcoin even though it has more "hodlers" than Dash. It doesn't happen in Litecoin, it doesn't happen in Monero, BCH, BSV etc.
The wider market seems to understand it without a problem which is why we're trounced by coins that don't do any development but DO expose all of their supply to competitive bidding.
You affirm a thousand times that a master node should not receive rewards because it does not expose neither work, nor cost, compared to a miner.
I don't affirm that masternodes should not receive rewards at all.
I'm saying that the reward ratio should reflect the investment that contributors make to the network in terms of cost and that more of masternodes reward should be experienced as capital gain rather than income. In that regard, the "cost" of the masternode's contribution is not the 1000 Dash. They still have their 1000 Dash just as a Litecoin investor that bought 1000 LTC still has their litecoin. LTC hodlers hold it even though they don't get any free blockchain coins for holding don't they ? The masternode's cost of network contribution is their hosting fee + labour. A couple of hours per month in maintenance maybe.
I'm also saying that we should stop thinking of miners as "miners" and recognise that they are simply
buyers in a market. This market sets the opening price of each coin (by definition) which in turn influences the selling price on exchanges. In Dash, the reward ratio is skewed away from that market to a ridiculous extent due to a fundamentally flawed appraisal of how a mined coin's monetary model works. By sliding it back we recover marketcap, improve our store of value performance which will consequently bring back blockchain activity AND improve masternode reward in dollar terms.