Has there been any more chatter about further MasterNode tiers? Maybe in one of the chat channels? It's not on the roadmap but I was wondering if this plan is still in the works? Is there also a closer ETA to Stratis Cold Staking?
Vis. masternode tiers, it's not a priority at the moment: right now they're concentrating on delivering the core platform. However, they certainly know that the community want lower collateral masternodes and as far as I know, they have committed to delivering 10k Strat masternodes. I know this has been said for over a year now, but we won't let up until they've been delivered.
As for the cold staking, it will be a feature of the C# Full Node, which will be coming in the next few weeks. It'll be available in the C# Full Node GUI, which is the wallet called Stratis Core (also coming this month). The only thing to bear in mind is that Cold Staking needs to be activated. So it's coming with the C# Full Node BUT it will only be available once 95% of the staking . network is staking using the C# Full Node. This is because cold staking requires a soft fork to activate and so for security reasons we need to have the significant majority of block producers using the C# Full Node client.
So the ETA depends on how quickly people migrate to the new FN.
Understandable, they have quite the roadmap to focus on. Hopefully lower tier masternodes will be something coming soon in 2019 then.
If Cold Staking is a part of the C# Full Node, does this also mean that this feature will not work for the Nano Ledger S? Or might this automatically work as soon as the back end at Ledger gets switched to the C# Full Node? 95% Seems like quite a high number to need to achieve for the soft fork to activate, but presumably when the Full C# Node becomes the new standard people will automatically migrate?
Yeah supporting cold staking for Ledger is up to Ledger itself. They've been good about keeping up to date with client updates in the past, so I think we'll see support for cold staking from them pretty quick off the bat. The other good thing about this is that it means Ledger users don't have to do anything besides keep up to date with updates released by Ledger themselves.
95% is high, definitely. I think there are two reasons: one is security, the network overall has fewer attack vectors if everyone uses the C# Full Node, so I think that cold staking is a good incentive to get people to move over, and the other reason is the soft fork mechanism they're using for the cold staking activation, which is BIP-9:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki. BIP-9 has the threshold at 95% and it has a proven success history. So I think they've decided to stick to the precedent set by BIP-9
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