I'm still skeptical that the current masternode owners would want to host masternodes at such a reduced reward in DASH. So there's risk that many would dump simply because this is not what they originally signed up for.
Like I say. We already have the scenario. (They also didn't sign up for an asset that they thought would be uncompetitive). If masternodes are profitable at any price then there will be takers at any price because none of the other POW coins in our league are even rewarded yet they all have fairly healthy networks.
I'm aware of a couple of studies which seem to indicate that mining does have an upward pressure on price. But if it's such a great idea, why aren't any of the newer blockchains choosing POW?
First of all, the most specific question here is not POW/POS relative benefits but rather, is Dash's primary supply (the new mining supply) which effectively represents our budget better spent on:
• attracting competition for that supply or
• giveaways to masternodes
The concept of "hashrate" is deceptive because it makes people think it's about wasting energy, but they're missing the economic role it plays which is to mediate competition for the supply. By spending less on "hashrate" we're not saving money, we're just reducing the size of our primary market. I re-emphasis, we MUST see this in terms of
primary and
secondary markets. If we don't take this into account we'll miss the big picture and sink to the bottom of the rankings for focusing on the wrong priorities.
Moving now to the broader aspect of your question...
But if it's such a great idea, why aren't any of the newer blockchains choosing POW?
...as I explained in an earlier post, there are generally only 3 approaches at the moment to store value in a crypto:
1. mining (= a trustless market for the primary supply)
2. on-chain services (the "De-Fi" model which consumes tokens and burns them to pay for on-chain computing services)
3. monetary velocity (your coin has such a high circulation for making payments that that alone sustains demand+price)
The "new chains" can get away with POS because that supply growth is needed to fuel all the on-chain Daps that are growing on their platforms. They also support securitisation models (tokens on top of tokens) which in themselves can consume tokens or create monetary velocity. But Dash is not going the De-Fi route. It's going to have OFF-CHAIN Daps. We don't even have high fees like bitcoin does to sustain demand - our fees are specifically promoted as being LOW, so we can't rely on bitcoin's model of moving from mining to a fee-only model as emission dwindles.
Monetary velocity is also a dead-end because we are not a stable coin. Stable coins are going to be where all the day to day transacting gets done in terms of paying for coffees etc.
So Dash's natural market is still where it always was - a more versatile version of bitcoin. A highly mined store-of-value that is cheap and easy to move around and where it's possible (unlike bitcoin) to earn a trustless dividend by running a masternode. There is nobody else in that space.
But the whole
point of decoupling the mining and service protocols in Dash was so that we didn't
have to compromise services to support a high level of mining or even a slow blocktime. If the protocol doesn't offer a very high mining contingent then that advantage is lost. I mean - what do we have to lose ? The budget is just being thrown away at the moment. It's ok for attracting
masternode growth but once they reach equilibrium nodecount then it's simply wasted.