Re: [ANN][DRK] DarkCoin | First Anonymous Coin | First X11 | First DGW | DarkSend+ Is Live!
Sporkage is just putting the rules you mention into action. Same as if they were hardcoded in the first place.
Of course they had to be hardcoded in the first place for the spork to even work, but the fact that the software can be influenced by an external "switch" that can be turned on or off at any time is not in the spirit of cryptocurrencies. I am fine with it for betas/RCs/development/whatever, but the final product should definitely not have any spork switches.
I don't believe enforcement was ever difficult to implement, I think the problems resulted from the payment/election code sometimes causing different nodes to believe different masternodes should be paid. So when enforcement was switched on (via hard fork), little forks started emerging because there wasn't consensus.
That is what I understand to have been happening; could've been something else though.
This is certainly believable, and I guess it would be a problem if a given miners/pools "chose" the same MNs over and over again, excluding other MNs. However, it is better for them to be paying MNs than not at all.
Personally I've always thought the "election" process was convoluted and prone to error (given that not all MNs can necessarily always be seen by all nodes on the network) and that the coinbase transaction should simply pay the MNs who provably performed the mixing during that particular block. Split it up among them proportionately. The clients will choose which MNs to send to at random; or if they mess with the code to always favor certain MNs, that's fine too (although they will probably be losing some privacy if they choose to always use their own MN = shooting themselves in the foot = hopefully nobody is so stupid as to do this). The MNs are paid for providing a service, and if they provide that service in a given block, then they should be paid in that block. JM2C