In essence, the network would weed itself out in this manner naturally. Once it grew to a certain number of merchants, who were running their own nodes / implementation, whether it be through ATMs, Point of Sale terminals, etc, the network would start to adjust itself based on the RoI. People would only run a node and forge so long as it was profitable. We see this in Bitcoin mining.
Early adoption would be from individual users who would be supporting the network and forging, but over time it would adapt to be run by those who weren't concerned with RoI due to the declining rewards as more nodes enter the network and limit the amount of blocks each node forges. This, as you said, leads you to assume it would be vendors running a Point of Sale terminal. I had already considered the possibility and likelihood that this would eventually occur organically, but the initial adoption and user base is an important aspect of building and making Crypti successful in my mind.
Fundamentally speaking, if you are going to eliminate PoT and build the network irrespective and unconcerned with user base issues, why not just build a centralized network internally and then build it out through PoS terminals to vendors without ever involving any form of community in the actual running of the nodes? At that point all you would need is a strong web wallet with multi-sig, 3 factor auth on transfers, and added features such as a merchant directory and built in promotions, etc. You could focus the majority of your development around merchant outreach and the web wallet.
You still run into the same issue with early adoption. Merchants won't sign up if no one is there to spend it and users won't sign up if they get nothing in return. Chicken / Egg.
GreXX, I think all of you guys are doing exactly the right thing under pressure of initial failure, with getting outside review and keeping your commitment to reaching your final stated goal. Just keep going as you are. If there's a way out of this mess, I believe you will find it.
You and I are on exactly the same wavelength in a lot of ways, particularly based on your most recent posts. You "get" what I am trying to propose about focusing the emphasis in XCR from forging to vendors. So I am going back and quoting this earlier comment of yours to discuss some of the other aspects that still need airing.
Say you do get PoT to work. From your comments above, even in your own mind you know and acknowledge that
economics of XCR rewards will eventually turn against forgers anyway. You know this and are promoting PoT and trying to draw in forgers as initial supporters of your network by offering them rewards anyway. This isn't dishonest, in my opinion; every other coin before XCR has done exactly the same thing. But there are two factors at work here that everybody needs to understand.
First factor, you're gonna disillusion and disappoint most initial XCR supporters later on when they learn the economical truth of XCR forging. I saw this over and over and over at NXT. Newbies would show up because they heard they could forge NXT on a $35 Raspberry Pi and didn't have to spend $2000 like they would on a Bitcoin ASIC miner. They were very excited at this innovation by NXT! Thank you NXT! Then they would discover with their small of NXT they parked on their forging board, they were only going to forge one block per year. How can this be? they would ask. Soon they come to understand whales dominate forging in a PoS system by parking / hoarding large amounts of NXT on their forging node. Most newbies would leave in disappointment at this point. The few that were left would buy bigger stakes of NXT for their forging board and eventually forge a few blocks. Hey, they would say, these forging fees are ridiculously low!!! I'm not making enough to pay for this RPi board, and CERTAINLY not enough to keep running a cloud server with its bandwidth costs. I'm outta here.
This is the key problem with a "fixed coin supply / forging fee" system - the
forging fees don't pay enough for running a network node. NXT still doesn't acknowledge the seriousness of this problem even though they set up an "infrastructure committee" specifically to look at issues like that. PoT is an attempt by XCR to deal with the whale domination problem of a PoS system like NXT. It is a good and noble attempt that may very well solve the PoS whale / hoarding problem. However,
PoT DOES NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM OF REWARDING A FORGER IN A SUFFICENT, SUSTAINABLE AND SCALABLE MANNER - IT IS ONLY A "NON-SIMPLE" METHOD TO SELECT WHO FORGES A BLOCK NEXT. Why wait for disillusioned forgers to solve it for you later by "weeding themselves out naturally"? Why not try to solve that problem YOURSELVES, NOW by going to a vendor oriented network from the start?
Second factor, forgers would be only a tiny part of a mature Crypti ecosystem. Most people who would use a "
simple, fast and scalable coin for commerce" are USERS interested in buying a candybar or a song or an EBay win and not running a node. They will not care about PoT, or forging, or accumulating coins from running Crypti software. The only software they are interested in running is a smartphone app that allows them to access coins in a Crypti wallet, and that's an app that doesn't require them to type in a 35 character Ed25519 password every time, either. Instead of trying to work on PoT now and spare the feelings of a few hundred initial investors / forgers now (who will "weed themselves out naturally" later anyway), maybe try to focus on a user app that will thrill hundreds of thousands of new users a year from now?
So, forgers are not going to find a happy place in a fully mature Crypti ecosystem where users dominate. Most of those future end users haven't even heard of Crypti yet and in years to come will not care at all about the heroic history of how you finally managed to successfully implement PoT...or not. So if the whole point of perfecting PoT up front is to draw in forgers initially as pioneer node runners for the embryonic Crypti network only to cast them aside later when the mature network has nodes only run by vendors, then isn't a viable Plan B no-PoT path one that gets those vendors to set the initial nodes up in the first place? As I've said, a node that lets them process Bitcoin now as a hook and Crypti later as another feature?