Miners who can use a pool which doesn't take some of their block reward, will have an economic advantage, thus masternodes will become unfunded and be centralized (offered for free) by whomever can gain from stealing the anonymity (or what ever value they can extract from centralizing masternodes).
With the recent spork that was done with >90% of the network in acceptance, there are no more pools in darkcoin who can offer a block reward without paying the mns. therefore, miners who choose to mine at these pools will be at a distinct economic disadvantage to themselves. The network now rejects these blocks.
If the mn's are economically capable of offering mining for no fee, or a fee less than a non-mn pool (because of the 20% they're already allocated), then that would give them an economic edge over non mn pools. this does assume that the operational costs of the mn and the operational costs of running the pool combined are less than what it receives.
evan's latest post:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9103691I wonder what the technical limitations are on lowering the amount required from 1000 units, to say, one or two units of the currency?
Add: I'd like to make the point that playing with this 20% payment will likely have immediate and lasting effects on the hashrate of the network, because of the chosen emission style where the hashrate defines the block reward. Please note that with this enforcement, the hashrate dropped to levels where the nodes and miners are receiving more currency than they did before because the block reward has moved from the 5drk minimum and now sits at ~7/8drk. I observe that a 20% cut in miner pay seems to have resulted in a
40%50% increase in emission. With no real change in price, this serves to reward miners a net of 20% increase in pay/value reward compared to pre-spork.
As many miners may sell at market, this would require a 20% increase in purchasing power to keep this price. This can be countered with a price increase of 20% if someone wants to have the
potential ability to collect 'anonymous' information through the masternodes in the future. The price increase should logically be met with a 20% increase in hashrate from where it's at now (which will yield the 5 DRK/block emission), where it will sit until either buying or selling power takes precedence over the other; however, the buying pressure would still need to be increased 20% value-wise in order to maintain no change. The only real benefit to raising the price from a whales perspective in this AFAICS is to keep scarcity up, so that the 50% gain in emission doesn't dilute their current holdings. Personally, I'm expecting a 20% rise in the nearish future in order to tackle this very situation.
Alternatively, the price can decrease 20%. While this seems more likely, it could easily cascade into a decreasing hashrate which will yield an even higher emission (what difficulty does it increase from 7/8 per block to whatever's higher than that?) and then a possible 'race to the bottom'. Considering that there is the financial incentive of either the currency itself, or even the incentive of potentially having the ability to collect anonymous data, I'd think that the increased cost route might be justified. Not my money to spend though, nor do I know who's making the spending decisions so it's pretty up in the air.
Alternatively again, Wolf0 has just published a nice increase in hashing power. He says it's '34.34%' overall. The increased hashrate would increase the network difficulty to where it's again sitting at 5 drk/block. economic implications of this are left to anyone that would like to consider the value of purchasing his refinement of the mining algorithm. I'm sure it's less than paying all that extra money on the market