I agree about the votes,
If you look at the world through your own personal microscope you can see that 24 keys at 33% has the most votes so it clearly won! Lets vote on it! But as you can see this is only the way that certain people tend to look at the world…
The truth is that 24 keys barely won at 33% with 8 keys being close second at 30%. In third was 16 keys with 22%.
If this vote is based off of what people desire (which it is) then we need to consider the average weight of what was voted on. In this case it seems 16 keys is the clear winner to get the most Yes votes come time for the actual vote. You will notice though that those same people who want 24 keys tell us that 8 keys isn’t going to pass. So it seems they expect us to negotiate with them, but by the simple fact that they rushed 24 keys without even considering doing a 16 key revote, shows they are not so fast to negotiate with us or even consider our opinions if those opinions hurt their bottom line.
We need to start working together more for the sake of Harmony. Stop thinking about our own pockets and fix these issues. I am sorry that some of you may lose delegates, but maybe we can lower those numbers over time until we hit 1000 validators to ease the burden of the changes? Working together on this is the best way to go about it.
I truly would not even care if you had 500 Million delegated to you if there were a supply of 500 billion ONE. However, there isn’t, so we we need to do some math to figure out how this will all work, not because I want it to, but because it HAS to work.
Lets face it, if Harmony said today, “sorry everyone we only need 150 Validators total”, well I guess that is all they need and the rest of us pack up and leave. But Harmony said they want 1000 validators and 200 by the end of this year.
As per Harmony teams request to grow, lets do some math.
Lets just say there is 7.5 Billion ONE total that can be staked.
**If you want to correct the math feel free to repost new numbers.
7.5 Billion ONE divided by 200 validators = 37.5 Million ONE each, split equally between each validator.
7.5 Billion ONE divided by 1000 validators = 7.5 Million ONE each, split equally between each validator.
If 20 validators had 200 Million each (4 Billion out of 7.5) out of 1000 validators that leaves 3.57 Million each when split equally between the remaining 980 validators. You would end up needing to get validators elected at 200K Stake at that point, maybe less because there won’t be enough to go around.
If even 40 validators had 200 Million each that is 8 Billion and exceeds the total supply to be staked and is not even possible.
So you see, math does not lie. We can sit here in these forums for months(it seems we have) arguing over the same things, debating small changes here and there that will affect what happens today and tomorrow but none of that matters if you aren’t also thinking about deeper into the future than just your own tomorrow.
How can we possibly sustain 1000 validators profitably in the future if there are validators with 200+ Million ONE just on their validators alone?
The new proposal HIP-16 for 6.4% keys per shard is great for the security of each shard but doesn’t even make them have to start up a new validator. Simply just put 1 node on each of 4 shards for 6.4% per shard for a total of around 64 BLS Keys out of 1000, which if we say it is only 5 Mil per BLS key that is a total of 320 Million per validator. This number is not sustainable in the long term. We may simply need some other form of cap such as this BLS cap per validator.
Then there is the idea that if they want they can just open up a 2nd or 3rd validator. This would be great in the short term because it would bring more validators online but you are creating a false sense of security and should be very careful in this. If a large validator did manage to build 2-3 more validators each with 200+ million, not only would that person have a massive amount of voting power, but the security of the network could be at stake. While I do not believe that an attack would happen, my biggest fear would be that something could happen with a person and all of their validators go offline at the same time. This could cause a massive problem if we do not have a balance with the amount of validators elected and amount of ONE delegated to those validators.
With all of that said I do understand that there are quite a few validators currently above the 144 million that 24 keys would cap them to. I feel for them and their situation because they were lucky enough to be the first validators and they worked hard to get things started. Due to, I believe, unforeseen circumstances, they were able to grow to a size that is unsustainable. It is possible they are just now realizing this fact and it will be hard at first to accept. We need you to accept it though and work with us so that we can continue to grow.
This is why I propose that we all agree to 24 BLS keys along with a per shard limit for now to get more validators online and not 16 or 8, but only under one condition. The large validators must agree that when we reach the next point where we are no longer able to get any new validators online, we move to 16 keys, then down to 8 as we get closer to 1000 validators.
As I do not expect that every validator should have the same amount of stake spread across the board (we all know that is unrealistic), we may never have to go below 8 or 4 keys per validator as long as we can keep 1000 online profitably. That though is a topic for in the future as things progress and we know more about the profitability of being a validator at that time.
Lastly I would ask that all large validators refrain from opening up a 2nd validator to bypass the 24 key cap until after we onboard more unique validators. This simply buys us some time to add to the security of the network before we start adding more non unique validators and will also help with the unique spread of delegations in the first phases of the change.
What do you think? Could we all work together and make this happen?
Thank you all for taking the time to read this not so short post!
I look forward to working more with everyone to create a brighter future for all of us!