Quote from: georgem on April 20, 2016, 04:30:19 AM

So everybody gets to observe the misconduct of the big GPU farm very closely, and so the small GPU miners (most of them servicenode operators) decide that it's an emergency so they all apply the maximum counteraction they are allowed to: vote "100".

The project might be in a state where the whole community (devs, miners, node operators, etc..) has agreed to publicly recommend a percentage of 20% (based on state of development, functionality and usecases, etc...) .
So interestingly a party can always give a vote that is much higher than the current recommendation, EXACTLY so they can counteract an "unfair" percentage if necessary!

1000 "0" votes averaged with 440 "100" votes is still a very healthy 30.5 %. So the voting collective would have managed to even surpass the proposed goal during this emergency (suicidal GPU farm).

I actually forgot to mention this when I was writing my initial post. I was thinking that there would be a way for miners to take large corrective actions. One thing that might make things very very user friendly for the voting process is to have two options. The miner can either set in their votes manually as they please. Or maybe there is someway to program the system so that miners can set an INDIVIDUALLY "ideal" percentage and have the votes be entered automatically with best estimates on how to achieve that goal.

The best sort of example I can think of is how Espresso machines use algorithms to maintain temperatures within certain degrees of an ideal. If you were to imagine a graph, it would look sort of like a sine wave with reducing amplitudes as time increases. The same I'm thinking could be done for ideal percentages. If the current percentage of reward is calculated to be 30 percent, and the ideal avg. that I want is 40 percent, then I could enter into some sort of box "40" and my votes would automatically be adjusted based on rates of change / other people's votes. So if reward % suddenly jumped to 50%, my vote would automatically adjust lower than 40, to bring it back to that ideal. (or attempting to, rather)

Is this something that's possible? I know you are planning on doing something similar for nodes - where they may automatically add coins to the collateral to maintain their positions, so I thought to keep in line with that this would be a really quite user friendly feature.

Quote from: georgem on April 20, 2016, 04:30:19 AM

Why should miners be forced to continue to pay into a temporarily broken system?

This, I think, is one of the more compelling arguments for the miner-voting system. In the case of giving service nodes an equal share of votes, they may become a self-perpetuating racket causing damage to the network.

If there were to be equal votes on either side, service nodes could become "too big to fail" so to speak, and if they weren't really providing value to the network, it would purely be a burden on Spreadcoin. I had not thought of this before, but I definitely agree.

This is sort of parallel to your philosophy that nodes shouldn't be doing nothing and that they required a first service, isn't it?

Quote from: georgem on April 20, 2016, 04:45:03 AM

Quote from: rhinomonkey on April 20, 2016, 01:15:00 AM

The only power that node operators have is that they can cease to operate and sell their coins and perhaps drive the price down so that rogue miners are no longer incentivized to remove rewards. Perhaps this is how you foresee the interplay between price, miners and SN operators?

What you describe here is the kamikaze-method which I wouldn't recommend.
You as a node operator can do much more than just the existential "to be or not to be":

3) You can start mining yourself, and you will not just strengthen the system (and slightly weaken the rogue miners power) and earn SPR by doing this, but also influence the percentage (which means more profit not just for your but everybodies servicenode!).
We will stay a solo-mining coin for as long as possible (forever). So we are going to need a steady increasing number of solo-miners!
This is probably one of the more important reasons for introducing such a voting system (which incentivizes people to solo-mine)!
It might also create additional demand for more optimized mining software (which you don't need to share with the bad guys)

(Also: you as a "servicenode miner" are never alone. Talk to other node operators, they will be plenty and they will have the same interests as you. Figure it out! Create a union or whatever!
We see similar things happen with other coins.)

4) You can influence the miners directly. It's not like they are living on another planet! Talk to them, negotiate with them... maybe give them a servicenode as present?
Maybe share profits? Or operate a shared ownership servicenode? Whatever you come up with... keep conspiring and colluding until you reach your goal.
And if all else fails, return to 3).

What do I know...
I propose this system EXACTLY because I know that the collective wisdom will come up with solutions I would never come up with by myself.

And I am absolutely disgusted by a system where a king dev (or a few top "early" investors who own millions of SPR) get to decide the percentage according to their whims, which ofcourse will be:
...more, More, MORE! ... but never less, hm? Huh

Why not? With our voting system sometimes it will make sense to reduce the percentage again. It will be allowed to fluctuate.)

------

Sorry it's getting very late where I am, I'll answer in more detail later today, thanks again!

This last bit has a few interesting facets. One of the goals to the market philosophy is to create few barriers to entry. Barriers to entry create power imbalances which give people monopolistic power over assets (think rent - this is a form of wealth extraction - people who can afford assets sit around making money by taking from the renters).

Anyways, both SNs and mining have barriers to entry. While I agree with the outlined system, I am sort of concerned that there are barriers to entry for mining which may be the cause of some individuals not being able to vote directly (they will have to collude as you said). While I will likely able to figure out mining and have the capital to purchase a GPU or 2, there will likely be people who operate service nodes who cannot operate or purchase mining systems for whatever reasons. If this is only a small percentage of node operators, I don't see this being a huge issue. However if barriers to entry are large, then people who have invested large amounts of money into miners have a huge advantage over people who have only been able to invest in service nodes.

I think this is something important to note and I think that the application of this knowledge should be directed in reducing the barriers to entry. Obviously costs of mining equipment are difficult to change. But education / ease of mining could be improved. Also, maybe there will eventually be mining services - miners to rent - for individuals who are not so tech savvy but have a stake in SPR's future. Although, I don't think that there will be mining rentals until Service Nodes are valuable due to the services they provide.

This highlights how various things may be created that will empower people that wouldn't have been possible had you just decided on a percentage.