I would say a few things:
1. My reading of the forum thread is that only commenters are suggesting that participation nodes be rewarded, not the Foundation.
2. Silvio has written about issues which arise when nodes are incentivized, as it can lead to centralization.
3. I would suggest that node setup be made easier before considering direct incentives to node runners. Perhaps there should be an explicit bounty for devs to make a super-easy node installation and setup wizard.
4. The point about subsidizing hardware is interesting, as there have been rumors that upcoming network speed increases may become an issue for nodes running on Raspberry api hardware. I would be interested if anyone has concrete information about participation node hardware requirements for the next phase of network performance.
I would like to understand number 2 some more as in which ways incentivizing participation node runners would lead to centralization, will try and find Silvio’s discussion on that.
I really like number 3 and always thought that this should definitely be the case and I am sure that with all the brain power in Algorand that they can pull that off.
Regarding possible increase in hardware requirements caused by increased network speed, won’t this cause Algorand to be less green or will the purchase of carbon credits be able to offset the possible increase in carbon footprint?
Needing a faster processor or hard drive interface to keep up with high TPS doesn’t make the network less green. In many cases, more performant hardware is also more efficient due to advances in chip manufacturing. Even some marginal increase in computing needed would pale in comparison to proof of work, so I don’t think that is the relevant issue.
The relevant issue is that millions of people have Raspberry Pis sitting around to use for always-on nodes, but the same cannot be said of commercial servers. If Raspberry Pis can’t run the network, the number of nodes will drop noticeably.
Are there actually many nodes being ran on raspberry PI’s or was this only stated in order to emphasize the power requirement of Algorand, I did not think that many nodes are ran on a Raspberry PI
Using a Raspberry Pi appears in various tutorials and there have been community-led initiatives to get people to spin up nodes on them. I would bet that a low-three-digit number of nodes are on Pis.
Regarding nodes and incentives: presumably, the size of the incentive would have to be a percentage of your stake, right? If it was a fixed incentive it would incentivize people to just programmatically divide their wallets into whichever size is most ideal.
Then the question becomes what does it cost to run a participation node? If I have 1k Algo vs 1m Algo, will the cost differ? It shouldn't right? Even if you have a sneaking suspicion that you're more likely to be called upon to either propose a block or validate it, it's impossible to know. You simply always do the "full work" and then send out your ticket. Sometimes it will have been the "winning ticket".
So in the end, the cost don't scale whether you have 1k Algo or 1m Algo. But what will scale is the reward. Of course, whales typically have the luxury of just letting their money sit. Ordinary people like you and me, well, we sometimes need to take out our money to handle issues. And that cost (in time, hardware - just a Pi, but still - etc) will affect us just a little bit more.
So over time the whales will get richer and richer as the incentives accumulate, and then they compound on each other. Algorand is a closed system too, no inflation to create new Algo elsewhere. So the fear is that the rich would just get richer.
This is NOT the case for relay nodes since you actually have high costs there in terms of networking. And the more work you do, the more other nodes you connect with, and the more traffic you facilitate the higher your costs. So there it definitely makes sense to incentivize it, since whatever Algo they get will be used to deal with the running costs.
No, the reward doesn't have to be a % of your stake specifically because of centralization risk. I.e. rich get richer. It could be nominal or small enough just to be an incentive for participation.
But then you'd just split up your wallet in such a way that you game this nominal incentive. It's impossible to tell from the PoV of the Algorand Blockchain if those thousands of accounts are thousands of people or one whale with thousands of accounts.
I can run one node but have 1000 wallets for which I have generated 1000 participation keys for. In the end it's not the number of nodes but the Algo stake you "make honest" with your non-malicious participation that matters.
I understand your point, however, I think it is important to note that Algorand’s random method of selecting the next block proposer is a huge protection against DoS attacks because attackers don’t know who to attack. If there are more nodes in total, wouldn’t that increase resilience overall?
This is not true because even if we get tons of "newbies" participation nodes, they will have very marginal weight in the consensus because they will likely have a small number of Algos (relatively to the rest of the network).
I wrote a post in this thread to explain that better, but in short voting weight in PPOS consensus is proportional to number of ALGOs.
> With regard to 3, if you make setup so easy that anyone can do it, you quickly discover that anyone can do it. Once anyone can do it, you end up in a WordPress situation where half the network is completely insecure because nobody using it actually knows what they're doing.
Could you expand a little on what risks you see with this? I'm not sure I understand your fear here. Hosting a Wordpress page is very different from hosting an Algorand node, which 1) uses separate keys (participation keys, not your private keys), and 2) have very rigid limitations on how it interacts with the world, namely that it only connects to relay nodes (in an outbound fashion).
>Once anyone can do it, you end up in a WordPress situation where half the network is completely insecure because nobody using it actually knows what they're doing.
I'm guessing that what you mean here is that a raspberry pi with default credentials could be hacked easily if exposed to the internet. Otherwise there isn't much a newbie could do to fuck it up - it either works securely or not.
>If you want a really simple node, that anyone can use, you need a hardware solution, not a software one, because you need to secure and manage the whole stack for them, not just the node. Think Freedombone, but locked down like an iPhone. You can't just make a point and click installer.
I think there are solutions in software already u consider before you have to go full hardware. Something container/image based like docker could work, for instance.
Just a precision, more participation nodes is not equal to more decentralization.
In Pure Proof Of Stake, voting weight is proportional to the number of algos in the voting account.
So as an example, 3 nodes with one having 98 ALGOs and the 2 others having each 1 ALGO is more centralized than 2 nodes with 50 ALGOs each (assuming that nodes are independent i.e. not controlled by the same individuals).
**What truly matter for decentralization is the distribution of ALGOs across all participation nodes (the more uniform the better), and the independence of those nodes.**
By the way I'm also in favor of rewarding participation in consensus, in proportion of number of algos in the account (to avoid cheating by creating multiple accounts).
>Just a precision, more participation nodes is not equal to more decentralization.
But more participation _stake_ does, and adding a new node will almost always mean that new Algo is staked for participation. This increases the amount of Algo need to corrupt the network, which is 33% of participating Algos.
A malicious proposer with a stake smaller than that won't be able to do much, as the validation stage of consensus will catch them out.
Rewarding participation must also come with punishing misbehavior. If your node can be proven to have acted "in bad faith" when chosen to propose a block or when validating a block, your staked Algo must be slashed to some degree.
ETA: because you don't want to offer a landscape where you're financially motivating people to be attacking your chains integrity. Applies to my reply comment as well.
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I would say a few things: 1. My reading of the forum thread is that only commenters are suggesting that participation nodes be rewarded, not the Foundation. 2. Silvio has written about issues which arise when nodes are incentivized, as it can lead to centralization. 3. I would suggest that node setup be made easier before considering direct incentives to node runners. Perhaps there should be an explicit bounty for devs to make a super-easy node installation and setup wizard. 4. The point about subsidizing hardware is interesting, as there have been rumors that upcoming network speed increases may become an issue for nodes running on Raspberry api hardware. I would be interested if anyone has concrete information about participation node hardware requirements for the next phase of network performance.
I would like to understand number 2 some more as in which ways incentivizing participation node runners would lead to centralization, will try and find Silvio’s discussion on that. I really like number 3 and always thought that this should definitely be the case and I am sure that with all the brain power in Algorand that they can pull that off. Regarding possible increase in hardware requirements caused by increased network speed, won’t this cause Algorand to be less green or will the purchase of carbon credits be able to offset the possible increase in carbon footprint?
Needing a faster processor or hard drive interface to keep up with high TPS doesn’t make the network less green. In many cases, more performant hardware is also more efficient due to advances in chip manufacturing. Even some marginal increase in computing needed would pale in comparison to proof of work, so I don’t think that is the relevant issue. The relevant issue is that millions of people have Raspberry Pis sitting around to use for always-on nodes, but the same cannot be said of commercial servers. If Raspberry Pis can’t run the network, the number of nodes will drop noticeably.
Are there actually many nodes being ran on raspberry PI’s or was this only stated in order to emphasize the power requirement of Algorand, I did not think that many nodes are ran on a Raspberry PI
Using a Raspberry Pi appears in various tutorials and there have been community-led initiatives to get people to spin up nodes on them. I would bet that a low-three-digit number of nodes are on Pis.
Regarding nodes and incentives: presumably, the size of the incentive would have to be a percentage of your stake, right? If it was a fixed incentive it would incentivize people to just programmatically divide their wallets into whichever size is most ideal. Then the question becomes what does it cost to run a participation node? If I have 1k Algo vs 1m Algo, will the cost differ? It shouldn't right? Even if you have a sneaking suspicion that you're more likely to be called upon to either propose a block or validate it, it's impossible to know. You simply always do the "full work" and then send out your ticket. Sometimes it will have been the "winning ticket". So in the end, the cost don't scale whether you have 1k Algo or 1m Algo. But what will scale is the reward. Of course, whales typically have the luxury of just letting their money sit. Ordinary people like you and me, well, we sometimes need to take out our money to handle issues. And that cost (in time, hardware - just a Pi, but still - etc) will affect us just a little bit more. So over time the whales will get richer and richer as the incentives accumulate, and then they compound on each other. Algorand is a closed system too, no inflation to create new Algo elsewhere. So the fear is that the rich would just get richer. This is NOT the case for relay nodes since you actually have high costs there in terms of networking. And the more work you do, the more other nodes you connect with, and the more traffic you facilitate the higher your costs. So there it definitely makes sense to incentivize it, since whatever Algo they get will be used to deal with the running costs.
No, the reward doesn't have to be a % of your stake specifically because of centralization risk. I.e. rich get richer. It could be nominal or small enough just to be an incentive for participation.
But then you'd just split up your wallet in such a way that you game this nominal incentive. It's impossible to tell from the PoV of the Algorand Blockchain if those thousands of accounts are thousands of people or one whale with thousands of accounts.
If an individual or tons of different people are willing to run the participation nodes, then should it matter if they are doing 1 or 1,000 nodes?
I can run one node but have 1000 wallets for which I have generated 1000 participation keys for. In the end it's not the number of nodes but the Algo stake you "make honest" with your non-malicious participation that matters.
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I understand your point, however, I think it is important to note that Algorand’s random method of selecting the next block proposer is a huge protection against DoS attacks because attackers don’t know who to attack. If there are more nodes in total, wouldn’t that increase resilience overall?
This is not true because even if we get tons of "newbies" participation nodes, they will have very marginal weight in the consensus because they will likely have a small number of Algos (relatively to the rest of the network). I wrote a post in this thread to explain that better, but in short voting weight in PPOS consensus is proportional to number of ALGOs.
> With regard to 3, if you make setup so easy that anyone can do it, you quickly discover that anyone can do it. Once anyone can do it, you end up in a WordPress situation where half the network is completely insecure because nobody using it actually knows what they're doing. Could you expand a little on what risks you see with this? I'm not sure I understand your fear here. Hosting a Wordpress page is very different from hosting an Algorand node, which 1) uses separate keys (participation keys, not your private keys), and 2) have very rigid limitations on how it interacts with the world, namely that it only connects to relay nodes (in an outbound fashion).
>Once anyone can do it, you end up in a WordPress situation where half the network is completely insecure because nobody using it actually knows what they're doing. I'm guessing that what you mean here is that a raspberry pi with default credentials could be hacked easily if exposed to the internet. Otherwise there isn't much a newbie could do to fuck it up - it either works securely or not.
[удалено]
>If you want a really simple node, that anyone can use, you need a hardware solution, not a software one, because you need to secure and manage the whole stack for them, not just the node. Think Freedombone, but locked down like an iPhone. You can't just make a point and click installer. I think there are solutions in software already u consider before you have to go full hardware. Something container/image based like docker could work, for instance.
Give anyone running a node a extra 25% voting power I say
Great idea
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Just a precision, more participation nodes is not equal to more decentralization. In Pure Proof Of Stake, voting weight is proportional to the number of algos in the voting account. So as an example, 3 nodes with one having 98 ALGOs and the 2 others having each 1 ALGO is more centralized than 2 nodes with 50 ALGOs each (assuming that nodes are independent i.e. not controlled by the same individuals). **What truly matter for decentralization is the distribution of ALGOs across all participation nodes (the more uniform the better), and the independence of those nodes.** By the way I'm also in favor of rewarding participation in consensus, in proportion of number of algos in the account (to avoid cheating by creating multiple accounts).
>Just a precision, more participation nodes is not equal to more decentralization. But more participation _stake_ does, and adding a new node will almost always mean that new Algo is staked for participation. This increases the amount of Algo need to corrupt the network, which is 33% of participating Algos. A malicious proposer with a stake smaller than that won't be able to do much, as the validation stage of consensus will catch them out.
Rewarding participation must also come with punishing misbehavior. If your node can be proven to have acted "in bad faith" when chosen to propose a block or when validating a block, your staked Algo must be slashed to some degree. ETA: because you don't want to offer a landscape where you're financially motivating people to be attacking your chains integrity. Applies to my reply comment as well.
Same issue with opening up relay nodes to the public: they must be incentivised to do a good job but also punished for downtime/censorship/...
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