Quote from: stan.distortion on April 14, 2016, 10:11:50 PM

Quote from: smooth on April 14, 2016, 10:00:27 PM

Quote from: stan.distortion on April 14, 2016, 09:53:02 PM

The 45% to masternodes is very profitable at the mo, a bit over 10% a year and the outlay is about $5 a month for a mediocre VPS but hardware requirements will go up significantly with third tier services. The potential capacity of the second tier is huge, thousands of transactions a second in its current state and an easy path to tens of thousands and on top of that it has to handle online wallets, the distributed API, storage and plenty more as time goes on. It won't be a free ride, the returns are extremely profitable at the mo but it'll need top end hardware if/when it needs full capacity.

That should take a while though, for now it's getting a lot of interest as a means of funding third party services. One of the fiat gateway providers is using it to provide free and zero charge fiat debit cards, there's a few gaming sites planning on using the same funding model, it's getting a lot of ideas along those lines. The 10% into development is a no-brainer, that's getting people on board too quickly to keep track of and v2 of the budget system can't come quickly enough, it's getting out of hand

That should be out with v0.12.1 in a few months and some of the features should be available to regular users.

So what you are saying is that the masternodes are (and more importantly have been for the last year or more) a redistribution scheme that further concentrates coins with instaminers and early adopters, since their costs have been negligible. Later, possibly, costs will be higher and no one else will ever have the same opportunity.

Thank you for confirming that.

No, that's a story you made up Smooth. Remember, imagination... reality... there's a difference. It must be the GUI, you're getting as bad as icebreaker with his imaginary mining hardware :/ Digital cash needs more than just security Smooth and incentivising functionallity and development as well as security is a no brainer, you're own coins holders should be asking why it's still using such an outdated funding model Wink

Fwiw mining is getting an overhaul with the next release. X11 is being kept of course, no point fixing what ain't broke and seeing as hardware manufacturers have enough faith to develop ASICs for it then it'd be rude to change it. The focus is on avoiding centralisation, Evan was very concerned about it after attending the Satoshi Island meetup and had definite plans for preventing it happening in Dash, no details so far but considering the core teams record of overdelivering I'm really looking forward to hearing about that one.

This has nothing to do with mining, nor security. If you run a masternode, you are supposed to be providing a service, but as you explained for at least the first year of masternodes and continuing for an indefinite period going forward, the cost to provide the service has been negligible, reducing it to a redistribution scheme funneling coins to people with masternodes (and some have hundreds of nodes -- not surprising since as you say the cost to operate them is so low).

To avoid being a redistribution scheme, a masternode system would have the node earnings (at least most of the earnings; a small subsidy might be justified) coming from fees paid by people who actually use the service.