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Quote from: illodin on March 25, 2015, 12:38:42 AM

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Quote from: illodin on March 24, 2015, 10:52:54 PM

Quote from: fluffypony on March 24, 2015, 10:23:18 PM

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.

Let's assume hypothetically that holding DRK is riskless. In that case you have a riskless investment that has a return on equity of about 10%. Since that is obviously absurd, something must be wrong with this analysis.

It's often hard to argue with people about ponzi schemes because it seems like it should work and proving that it won't is difficult because we don't know the exact mechanism of failure in advance.

The talked ROI is indeed not an ROI, because everyone has invested dollars at the beginning, these figures going around are not a "return of investment", masternode payments are in DRK and DRK<->Dollar changes. (and your investment was in dollar, so these percentage figures of masternode drk returns are absolutly pointless in the relation to your initial invest because you cant know the price of drk in the future.)

So in the end the 10% has not to be absurd, the price of DRK has just to adjust. And voila it could be also a negative ROI.

So how would this help in answering illodin's question?

you said Since that is obviously absurd, something must be wrong with this analysis.

my point is that you're right and the missing point is that the masternode ROI is not in dollar, so the initial roi can also go negativ in dollars, and there are no false promises it won't so i can't see any ponzi in it.

You are getting fixated on the ponzi question which was a tool of analysis.

His question was

Quote from: illodin on March 25, 2015, 12:38:42 AM

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?

Care to answer that?

Ah now i see, your right, i was answering out of context and more to the ponzi accusation.

So to the original question, how could unhonest masternodes lead to unprofitable honest nodes?!

Perhaps we could use my previous answer to answer that, too.

If MN get unhonest and collect data, what can they do with that data? - I guess the target is to deanonymize darksend transactions, with the collected data.
So if they succeed and the problem can't be fixed honest people will deinvest from there masternodes because tech is "broken". - The "ROI" cant be achieved anymore because price drops, this will lead to more sells and so on, investment of honest MN is going worthless.
But this is only valid if you see the ROI in dollars, if you see the ROI in drk like it is, they won't devalue because you will always get you drk return.