Quote from: rhinomonkey on November 16, 2016, 06:37:47 AM

A while back, we were discussing the mechanisms for consensus in regards to determining how much Service Nodes would be paid from the coinbase. I know that having an arbitrary taxing of the mining reward that goes to Service Nodes is ridiculous and would annoy much of the mining community.

The solution as it stands, and as I remember it, is that the miners will vote with a signature with every block that they mine, which will produce an average payment that SNs will receive. For those who were not here for this discussion, consider this example:

Two miners are mining Spreadcoin and each have equal mining capabilities resulting in 50 percent of the block being received by both miners. If both voted for zero percent of the mining reward then Service Nodes would receive zero reward for their services (in the early stages this will be the decentralized block explorer). If one miner voted for 0 percent and the other for 100 percent, 50 percent of the block reward would be sent off to SN operators. So each miner would receive half of each block.

While I disagree with the arbitrary taxing of the coinbase, I am still sort of concerned about the solution that I'm assuming is / will be worked on in the future. My main issue with it, which I brought up originally, was that a miner (a rogue miner) could come in and have no care for Spreadcoin's future and set all of his mining blocks to zero thereby resulting in a much lower, and perhaps unsustainable reward schedule for SNs.

Georgem's counter to this, I believe was that it would encourage SN operators to buy mining equipment and mine themselves thereby getting a vote. Or regular Spreadcoin miners, like our main guy Sirazimuth with his huge amount of hash power, could rebel against the rogue miner and set their votes to 100 percent rewards to counter the rogue's 0 percent votes.

I would like to propose a different solution to the above on the premise that miners are inherently greedy and do not have NEARLY as much of a stake in a coin that they mine as those who have invested money to buy the coin. This is clearly the case, as miners have "liquidity" and can bring their mining equipment to new coins should one cease to be profitable. Those who have invested in a coin can not just switch their coins to another coin so easily and thus have far more incentive to ensure that the coin is a success.

My proposal, should it be feasible, is that in order for miners to have a vote they must prove that they have some stake in Spreadcoin's success. A collateral of sorts in order to ensure that they are in fact a community member and not some mercenary coming in to extract wealth from the community. A collateral ensures that they have a stake in the success of Spreadcoin, and thus have the incentive to vote in a meaningful way. A way which has Spreadcoin's best interest at heart. Of course other people would be able to mine the coin, but only those with X amount of Spreadcoin would be able to vote on the reward that goes towards the overlay network.

I am not sure if this is possible through coding. If it is, I think that it solves the problems with 1) assigning an arbitrary amount of coinbase reward to be taxed from miners and 2) the issue of rogue miners having 0 stake in the success of Spreadcoin and thus no incentive to make any vote aside from the one that most immediately benefits them.

tl;dr In order for miners to vote on rewards that go to Service Nodes they must have a stake (in the form of collateral) in Spreadcoin's future so as not to vote in ways which may be detrimental to Spreadcoin for sake of their immediate profits.

Interesting

I don't think it changes anything for miners if its optional. They will only participate if they can make enough money to pay costs and show a profit. They won't lock themselves in so easily as servicenodes, even for the right to vote.

There should be a way to lock miners in through some sort of hybrid collateral and Pow/PoS arrangement, more from a decentralisation point of view. There is an interesting proposals for a way to merge proof of work, with proof of stake and proof of activity

https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/452.pdf

If you can tie collateral to servicenodes to mining, then you have a way to increase decentralisation as buying lots of equipment is not enough, you also have to buy lots of SPR.