I don't see many new candidates so far, bear market NN rewards aren't that great now. You should just run your own node trump, not much competition so candidates don't need you
Next year I will try and find a permanent tech partner and we will run two NN every year thereafter and split the rewards 50:50.
It means another year of HODL to preserve my ~2.7% of future VOTE, but from 2020 onwards I should be able to live off the ~1500 kmd per month and maintain my two NN's, even after the BIG players arrive.
In future years I think the discussion around this process will change and the community will speak more of NN 'selection' rather than 'elections'.
When the monthly reward is ~1500 USD candidates will mostly be individuals and small groups of 2-3 guys trying to bootstrap startup projects, and in that context, the process of voting feels similar to a regular political election.
When the NN monthly reward is consistently over 25k USD per month, however, the candidates will be profit-making businesses, and there will likely be quite a few large existing crypto players trying to secure one or more NN, and they won't be investing huge sums in the ecosystem if they have to rely on being 'popular' to attract VOTE from random community members in an 'election' where the community frowns upon revenue sharing to secure one of the limited NN spots.
We should never forget, NN aren't making any real decisions, in this early phase the NN rewards can attract new talent into the ecosystem, and so the process is sort of a popularity contest based on candidates skills and contributions to the community so far, but when the NN rewards are bootstrapping large crypto businesses this process will feel more like how monopoly licenses are allocated to large enterprises in industries where TPTB deliberately restrict who can participate.
Don't misunderstand me - I like the NN selection system jl777 and co. have designed, but we should never forget that the NN rewards come from a restriction on who can become a NN, and the easy mining rewards are by design anti-competitive compared to regular miners, and that's a good design IMO. BUT, this isn't like electing politicians where vote buying is obviously corrupt, this is more like selecting which large telco gets the right to roll out 5G networks, or which mining company can extract minerals from public land. The community wants reliable operators who do a good job, and the businesses want certainty so they can invest capital, time & skill.
Uncertainty is costly, and any business relying on their NN revenue streams to fund operational costs and growth in the ecosystem will not risk relying on an election every year where they have to campaign for votes, that is too uncertain, 'last year we could budget for NN rewards, but oh no, we lost the last election so for the next 12 months our revenue stream is gone' - this is a recipe for disaster, and not how successful businesses operate.
In the future when KMD MK is much larger than it is today NN candidates will look for ways to guarantee their spots over multiple years, and that will include things like competition with other NN candidates using incentives like revenue sharing, other token offerings, and discounts on various services and products offered by the NN business itself, as well as private deals with large holders.
I also hope in the future we see genuine community run nodes for small KMD holders to pool their VOTE.
This is not an outcome we should fear IMO, on the contrary, NN revenue streams will allow komodo based companies to prosper and grow without resorting to the traditional revenue sources of so many existing internet business (selling customer data and advertising), and charging exorbitant fees.
We should prepare for NN candidates to be businesses though, and expect that they will try to secure NN 'licenses' in the future in ways that involve offering incentives to voters, and eventually I think the majority of the community will not be freaked out by revenue sharing, especially if we have genuine community pools.
In the end the community of komodo is best represented by the owners of KMD!
Good luck to ALL the 2019 NN candidates!
