It boggles my mind that Evan didn't design the protocol around micropayment channels, where every full node could be incentivised to mix transactions or vote on InstantX transactions or whatever. It would make the anonymity set so much larger.
Perhaps he thought it's better to make sybil attacks harder. It's basically free to launch as many full nodes as required.
He may have thought that (I'm not sure I buy it) but it doesn't work, because there is still no irrevocable cost incurred for bad behavior. If masternodes are profitable then the bad ones are more profitable as the good ones. In a competitive market this will mean that only the bad ones are profitable.
The argument about "losing the value of your coins" doesn't work because it make a few false assumptions including that cheating leads to total collapse and the inability to hedge with derivatives. Both of these and certainly the second only apply in an immature cryptocurrency toy, not in a scaled up system.
Are you talking about DDoS attacks?
No I'm talking about masternode spying.
Ok. Let's assume DRK/DASH gets big, and has a value of $100. (Just an arbitrary number, way below a number where a business model that tries to spy information could be profitable.)
5,000 masternodes, 60% of the block reward goes to masternodes (assume year is 2016), block reward = 5 DRK, 17,280 blocks/month => each masternode earns 10 DRK/month => $1,000 / month.
So, the starting point is $1,000 / month for each masternode, and every node is honest. Also let's assume $100 / month for hosting expenses. How will the honest nodes become unprofitable when some of them start turning dishonest?
Also, what is this data that is spied?
And note, I'm not trying to confront/challenge your predictions, I'd just like to see it from all the angles.
