I disagree with this because there are many flawed assumptions in it
1. Collusion : This doesn’t make sense. notarizations are public and in the worst case can only refuse to notarize. This is all publically visible so it would be easy to see who isn’t working well with the others.
2. bad for decentralization: 25% of the coin can be mined by anyone, so anyone can participate. Cheaper to get ASICs for the 1.2% coin generation than to buy your way to a spot.
3. Not required to compete in mining and invest in hardware: definitely not true, there is competition among notary nodes ( mempool hunting ) and competition with the FFA miners, and running a top 30 node without a good server costs money. And this isn’t including the costs of keeping up with jl777s updates, which is a job in itself and will only get harder in the future .
4. Small clique of insiders: Even now there is over 100 people working as notaries/ with notaries or trying to become notaries. It’s open to anyone to join, how is this a) small and b) insiders. Every election so far people without the ability to vote themselves in have been elected.
Notary nodes have one job and that’s to notarize. Who does it is pretty irrelevant, and the nodes on the network they are notarizing to will reject fake notarizations and the misbehaving Notary outs themselves as a bad actor.
With KMDs notary system I would argue it is MORE decentralized than 99% of coins which only have a few pools mining everything.
By collusion I mean in the election process to get NN positions, not the notarisation process itself, and when I say bad for decentralisation I'm not talking about mining KMD itself, but more how many independent separate entities become NN, and the extent to which co-operation between them makes them appear to operate as a single dev team sponsored NN system that employs 64 sys admin operators, or at least has potential for that perception to grow.
I strongly disagree with "
Who does it is pretty irrelevant" - if you really believe that why not stick with PayPal & Visa, why not just have one entity responsible for running 64 global NN and let that entity employ 64 contractors?
Crypto users are searching for projects that are decentralized, trustless, competitive, adversarial, and the assumption from nearly everyone in this space is 95% of projects are scams designed by insiders to enrich themselves.
Don't get me wrong, I have been supporting komodo for years and love the tech, but I really hope these elections for NN become super competitive and hard fought.
Even worst case scenario where all the notaries collude to get their friends in , Notary mining only makes up 30% of the yearly coin generation. Divide that by the number of colluders and it’s shows it’s not very profitable at all. Let alone dealing with the side effects ( people complaining of collusion ) which could lower the coin price .
It doesn’t matter who does it because the protected networks normal nodes will reject a bad notarization. One person can do it or someone could hire out a bunch of contractors. But Komodo isn’t a company so whoever would want to do that would have to fund that themselves and if one person just did it, I think people would take more issue with 1 person making 30% vs. many splitting it.
In the future there will lite versions of DPoW, some may be centralized some not, some in the middle. All up to the project that implements it. Not all blockchains will be using the model we normally associate with crypto
If the project was only meant to enrich insiders then why is 60% of the coin generation able to be done by anybody? Most coins require massive amounts of hardware or coin supply to get a slice of coin generation, komodo only requires 10KMD and sending a transaction once a month. I realize that you weren’t criticizing Komodo directly on this, but compared to pretty much any other coin , komodo offers everyone a chance to be part of the generation process.
