Quote from: Nthelight on Today at 02:13:02 PM

Quote from: qwizzie on December 16, 2020, 09:16:50 PM

Quote from: Nthelight on December 16, 2020, 09:08:49 PM

Quote from: qwizzie on December 16, 2020, 08:09:37 PM

Quote from: Nthelight on December 16, 2020, 07:55:52 PM

2. How would you feel if Dash reduces the capital requirement for setting up a masternode, in the absence of protocol level shared masternodes? Clearly, this forms a high barrier to enter our service provisioning market (masternode network) and not everyone wants to use 3rd party shared masternode services (they should only do that if they are willing to take on the risk). Would you agree that reducing the capital requirement for masternodes should lead to an increased influx of investment? Seems like a no brainer to be honest if we want to see more "investment" into masternodes. With people like birdonthewire going mental about not being able to enter the 'centralized scam' masternode network, I think it would be time to consider it. I believe there is also no longer any technical constraint to manage a much larger masternode list (since DIP003), but the devs would need to confirm that again.

With regards to point 2 : having too many masternodes will slow the masternode network. If the collateral of 1000 Dash would be cut to 500 Dash
and our current masternode operators double their masternodes because of this, we could be looking at close to 10.000 masternodes. That would be too much for our network.

I am not sure how exactly or where exactly it slows down, maybe in the block propagation area or in the quorum area or with Chainlocks perhaps?
Also the time between MN payments would double (from 8,5 days to roughly 16 days).

I know another Dash Community member in here was also entertaining that thought, and i did not respond to that. But now that its getting raised again, i seem to recall that there are technical limitations
to our number of masternodes and the network still running efficient and fast. Get too many masternodes active on the network and it will negatively effect the network .. somehow.

Edit : found the post in question, where this was asked and answerred.
Source : https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/temporary-measures-quick-wins.49138/#post-219044

So a very large increase in number of masternodes (double number of masternodes for example), could have an negative effect on Dash scalability and speed.
While a slow and limited increase in number of masternode (as is currently foreseen) is much less of a problem.

At least that is how i read it.

Ok, thanks for digging up Ryan's (or DCG's) point of view on it. Appreciate it. He does say 'slightly' which is subjective, but indicates minimal effect. Important point is that he assessed the effect to be logarithmic and not linear. It would be good to have a deeper (technical) analysis on it, like you say, in what sense it affects block propagation, quorum management and so on. This could be used to counter anyone asking to lower the capital requirement for masternodes, because today I presumed that there was no longer any reason to not do this.

I wonder if he took into consideration the point that this creates a barrier to entry. With Dash price rising it will become even more so.

If DCG's argument is convincing, then the only option left to have more people enter the masternode network is by implementing shared masternodes on protocol level (at least without having them take on risk).

As Ryan states, I'm fully aware that we have more than enough masternodes already giving our actual usage, but if we really want people to buy more dash for masternodes, then we don't have many options.

Do we know how many masternodes are already running in 3rd party shared masternode services? (Crowdnode has 25).

I also think the masternode collateral serves as protection against sybil attacks. Maybe you remember this one ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz6rFZQywOE
I have no idea how many masternodes are already running in 3rd party shared masternode services.

Ok, good refresh on that angle. I also checked the deeper analysis referred to by Mastermined. The presented layman's explanation by Amanda explains that Dash was already very resistant to sybil attacks with a price of $13 per coin. It was already very cost prohibitive to buy up enough Dash to have a very very small chance at performing a successful deanonymization of a single transaction.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg16106256#msg16106256

Today's price is over $100, even with real support around $40-$60 it has become several hundreds of percent more expensive to own 1 node (compared to 2016). In that sense I presume we could still have more than adequate protection against this form of attack compared to 2016, if we were to lower the collateral requirement for a masternode. I honestly think that sybil attacks are not realistic anymore in Dash.

Plus, we now have the possibility to increase rounds of mixing to 16, instead of the applicable maximum 8 rounds back in 2016.

An important element to keep in mind no doubt, but likely not thé argument to not consider lowering the masternode collateral.

It likely comes down to network efficiency, which surely was the case before DIP003, but I imagined this was now no longer the case.

Thanks for your input though.

An update to the referred calculation (see bitcointalk link) in above comment.