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2018-06-25 Validator Economics Meeting

2018-06-25 Validator Economics Meeting

Jun 25, 2018

Date

Attendees

Goals

Discussion items

TimeItemWhoNotes

Stake weightingGreg
  • Nash prefers no stake weighting.  Rather that spending capital on stake, would rather incent persons to put infrastructure on the network.
  • Concern around the army of ants attack - lots of validators.  Counter measure is fees to join a namespace.
  • Big stake - no work.
  • Greg wants to encourage lots of distinct validators, however there is no way to distinguish between the army of ants and a long tail.
  • We want infrastructure providers to invest in high end hardware to service the blockchain.  We also want these 

BystandersGreg
  • Concept of read only nodes, who pay validators a price for some number of blocks.  Not offering this is an invitation for someone to fork the code base. 
  • These nodes to obtain blocks via the gossip network.
20 minutesEnforcing the structure of the DAGFrom Casper
  • There exists a contract that has an idea of an ideal DAG, and if the validator set collectively generates a DAG close to that ideal, everyone gets more money.  The contract can see all the history (justifications), and the contract controls the payout.  Maximum payout is achieved when all the rules are followed by all the validators.   Coming up with a DAG based on coming up with intuitions really isn't better.  If we are doing a correct by construction is to start with a piece of data to use as a synchrony assumption and then derive the optimum DAG structure.  These are all mathematical proofs, that probably can't be done in the time allotted.  

Finding Validators
  • The validators will find ways to publish their endpoints as a means to find the network.  
30 minutesIncentive for Block Production
  • Need to have at least 2 validators proposing blocks in any given shard, otherwise a single validator is proposing all the blocks.
  • Validators proposing blocks do a bit more work to collect transactions, process them and propose blocks.
  • Everyone has to at least produce blocks.  It's done by producing a block that builds on top of the proposed block.
  • Proposing blocks is what allows for finalization.  

Action items