If we can get the Harmony team to confirm that a validators self stake does not play a roll in the security of the network I think we should move forward with this as quickly as possible as I see no other reasons not to do it.
6 Likes
The only security issue I could foresee when itâs not expensive to create a validator would be :
- overload of the network with ghost validator only there to put strain into all the different computation the network might be doing with those validator
- network spam (similar to tx spams)
- possibility to attract not too serious validator and endanger the network with low quality node runner. Remember that running a node also requires follow up, monitoring, upgrade etc âŚ
of course there are remediation and counter measure for first two if we strictly talk about securing the network.
@rlan any other security risk you can see by lowering the barrier down for self stake ?
9 Likes
I agree this is important and support this proposal. 
@StakeIt.ONE
While considering security is one thing, like @sophoah suggested, it would also be good to streamline the process of becoming a validator. Right now, most of us have come in and learnt the trade through experience. While this is useful and one cannot ever avoid it, we have some excellent validator documentation that can be of advantage.
If a new validator is serious enough, it would be a good idea for them to go through the validator documentation, then score above 80% (for example) to know if they understand the basic risks and responsibilities of becoming a validator after which they can be allowed to become a new validator (With the reduced limit, of course). This way we could avoid not so serious people too. My 2 cents.
4 Likes
My thoughts align wuth @sophoah proposition of 1000 ONE. This will speed up our goal of 200 validators in the near term. However, this would be dependent on the successful passing of PRE-HIP proposition of limiting max keys per shard/per validator.
2 Likes
If anything we should keep the entry level at the same or even raise it.
10000 of ONE at these price levels are not at all a barrier for entry compared to other chains. If you think there is a high barrier to entry here, go take a look on the requirements for a validator on Solana.
There are plenty of existing validators on mainnet who have pretty much no hope of getting elected right now. As it is existing whale validators are adding more BLS keys which takes away more slots. If anything, lowering requirements will hurt the little guys even more and keep the big players cemented where they are.
In addition lowering the requirement would just lead to lesser quality validators entering the market.
Since someone brought up ETH2 I will speak to my experience with this as I have been an ETH PoW miner since 2017 and right now my mining is my main source of income (not by choice but I donât want to talk about myself). The original requirement was going to be either 1000 or 10000 (I donât remember offhand, but it was huge - at the time ETH was at the $150 level) but they lowered it to 32 to allow more people to participate, and there was also a mathematical reason based on how they were going to do the sharding that made sense for that to be the lowest entry level. When Ropsten went live the cost of 32 ETH was around $5200. Even at this price level it led to a flood of people trying to run their validators off NUCs and residental ISPs. I followed this on Reddit at the time and it was filled with complaints like âThe chain is 200GB WTFâ and âI am getting letters from my ISP about my bandwidth usageâ, people who couldnât set up nodes, memes - basically a giant mess when people realized to run a validator, required actual work and effort and not simply buying some GPUs and run a free program.
I am all for the little guy and I donât begrudge people trying to get into a new space and learn stuff but we are talking about securing a chain with billions of dollars of liquidity. Right now if an ETH PoW miner goes offline it has pretty much zero impact on the chain, the same cannot be said about validators. Given a situation with more âHarry Homeownerâ validators, delegators may have a bad experience with uptime of less-experienced operators and if anything this will push them to the whale validators, and again hurting decentralization.
Iâve seen this so often with other chains when they start to take off itâs going have the âreddit effectâ and flooded with people trying to chase a quick dollar, stupid dog memes and all the host of other stuff that comes with it. Letâs try to keep the standards for validators somewhat high (they are pretty low right now as it is - not saying this is a bad thing, for now).
6 Likes
What are your thoughts on doing this temporarily to get the 200 elected validators by EOY that we need to reach our goals? As a temporary measure to bring new validators up? We can stress the importance of running the validator nodes from a datacenter via VPS or dedicated server. There may be a few that setup on their own without any guidance from our community, but for the most part Iâm sure they will be seeking help and advice, and we can guide them away from using their own servers at home, and towards professionally hosting. Iâm thinking if nothing else, it would be a good temporary measure to encourage more validators to start up right now so we can reach our goal within the next month.
1 Like
Whatâs the goal? More validators or more elected validators?
Encouraging more validators with no hope of being elected seems counter-productive. Iâve spoken with some validators who left because they said itâs just too hard to get elected and too late to get involved in the project.
Right now we have 64 validators on mainnet that have little/no hope of being elected.
There is another thread going around which talks about limiting the number of slots people can bid on, which seems fair but then again they should also be rewarded for getting in early.
To go back to my PoW experience, perhaps set aside some slots and put all the unelected validators into a pool, and reward them if they can support a sufficient amount of uptime. This would help to bring in more validators, keep the ones who can demonstrate they know what they are doing and eliminate the weak.
EDIT: this was just an off-the-cuff proposal and sure there are lots of problems that need to be solved for this to work, but I am just throwing it out there.
6 Likes
200 ELECTED validators is the goal. I do believe there are things in the works to get 200 elected validators online by EOY. Iâm pretty sure every active validator sitting and waiting right now, is going to be elected by the end of this month, one way or another. I do believe that we will accomplish this however we have to. I have no real facts to back up this belief, but I just have the feeling that Harmony, or somebody is going to step up and help make it possible or do something about it. Or perhaps all of us together as ONE.
It would be foolish for anyone who is invested in Harmony, to not do what they have to in order to make sure it succeeds. It makes no sense to me that anyone that holds a lot of Harmony, would not want it to succeed. Some of them are set to make millions upon millions of dollars off of its success, and Binance⌠it blows my mind that things are the way that they are there. They really stand to make some very serious money with Harmonyâs success. More than anyone from what I can see. Are they intentionally trying to sabotage Harmony for the sake of another crypto they are heavily invested in? ADA?
ETH 2.0 etc.? 
Makes me wonder tbh (and forgive me if I am wrong here but I canât help but wonder what is going on there that they wouldnât want to do everything in their power to make sure Harmony succeeds).
In regards to the larger more established validators, I can totally relate to their concerns and tbh this isnât fair to them at all. They got in early and sort of deserve it IMO, but itâs just not going to work out in the long run like this. Perhaps a good way for some of them to look at it is, hey, I got it while the getting was good! They have accumulated massive amounts of Harmony, now they can step up and help Harmony succeed, bringing up the value of their Harmony substantially. Win-win either way for validators that got in early and accumulated lots of ONE imo. You all were still greatly rewarded for getting in early, but now itâs time to make changes to make sure Harmony continues to go on and is not a failed project. Otherwise, we all lose. I feel for you all. I truly do. But changes have to be made or as I said, we all lose.
4 Likes
While I understand and agree with some of your points, SOL isnât exactly the poster child for decentralization. Also itâs tough to compare to ETH 2.0 imo given the vast differences in the two ecosystems. A LOT more people want to run ETH nodes because itâs a bigger, more mature chain with a massive ecosystem.
Having a lower barrier of entry didnât hurt Harmony in the past, but I agree that we should eventually allow the barrier to rise over time as the network grows and matures. I just donât think weâre at that point yet with only ~160 validators getting consistently elected.
3 Likes
Can we answer this question first:
Why does the requirement exist in the first place?
@sophoah: Ghost validators (load on network), Validator Spam, More serious validators
@AffinityShard Slashing concerns
On the other hand, I donât think weâll solve the electing unelected validators barrier with that, as @StakeIt.ONE proposes. Iâm running my validator for a month now, Iâm active in the community, active in the government and active on twitter, but cannot gain any traction.
Itâs hard to convince people to delegate to unelected validators, as they lose money in doing so. There are other proposals that are better in tackling that issue.
However, I personally think itâs good to have a certain barrier of entry, otherwise the slashing mechanism doesnât make any sense anymore. Lowering it to 1000 currently ~250$ is too low as a barrier in my opinion.
I could imagine, that we can target a fixed dollar value, that we want the entry to be and then reduce the barrier of entry over a longer period of time.
E.g. Barrier of entry = 1000$ => This would be currently around 4000 ONE.
4 Likes
I only intended for this to be a temporary part of the fix in regards to getting more validators online right now. There are other factors involved and other things that may have to be done as well. But I do believe that this is a good start.
I hope that clears up my intentions here.
2 Likes
It may speed up the goal to the 200 validators and maybe even the 1000 validators that were originally proposed. However, with so many validators that would start I would expect there to be higher rate of failure in validators in maintaining longevity. That could ultimately harm the reputation of staking on Harmony and possibly lead to creating a lot of validators that end up abandoned. I think it is still worth discussing the proposed 1000 ONE, maybe that is too low of a proposal. Ultimately I would like to see many validators, some going down will not affect the network; we also want to have validators held to a high standard and demonstrate longevity.
4 Likes
What about 2500? Still keeps it fairly fair 
1 Like
If we resolve the lack of open slots issue, all will be elected 
Keep that in mind. It is possible.
I think $1k will price out a lot of validators from a lot of countries.
I would not be a validator now if it was $1k a node when I started. I could not afford it. $100 was enough and I donât live in a poor country.
4 Likes
You are right. That is very expensive in other countries. Great great point Maffaz
1 Like
To me personally, 2500 ONE is fine. But I am only one person within the US. Like Maffaz said, thereâs a lot more people in different countries. Maybe 1500 is also acceptable or 2000. Really would need much more input 
2 Likes
What if it is determined by $ amount, instead of # of ONE? For instance, at least, $1,000 regardless of ONE market price at the time of setting-up the validator.
2 Likes
I think it would be much cleaner to assign it a ONE value. If we assign it a USD price, that doesnât necessarily account for currencies in other countries - and as expressed earlier, itâs likely more of an issue for prospective validators in other countries than the U.S. I think we should agree on a minimum ONE amount here, and revisit it if it becomes prohibitively high in the future.
4 Likes
Yes, agree. I didnât think of other countriesâ currency. I was thinking more of a fixed amount since all will be paying at the same rate now or in the future.
3 Likes