That's an easy one: many new people who got masternodes over the past 2 months (to participate in the voting, etc.) ended up selling them because of the reward problem. I don't blame them why run a node at a loss? They will come back once the network issues are resolved.

Also, your count is missing the older protocol 70002 nodes (around 300 of them) which are still on the network so you should add those to your total.

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Also, just because we're forced to clone Dash code for now to move forward it doesn't make this project a scam. In fact what we are doing now is less of a scam than what many of the new ERC20 ICOs are doing!