The future of MasterNodes

[camosoul]

The future of MasterNodes beyond 2018 seems confusing to me.

Back in the day, we talked about decreasing MN collateral if/when the network needed more resources.

But, the roadmap shows us eschewing this path, for beefier hardware. I can understand the netwrok handoff requirements, to a degree...

But, the problem I'm seeing is too much integration. Letting this problem be acceptable then leads to MasterNode hardware... Which is nifty stuff, but it's just being nerd for the sake of being nerd.

What happened to reducing collateral? This gives the network more resources while remaining nimble and flexible to the ultimate threat; government.

I give precisely zero fucks if a bunch of lawyers say DASH is legal. Laws change. Governments are always corrupt, it's just a matter of how corrupt. If you believe that governments will not ban every form of crypto that isn't their own, once they invent their own, you're a damned fool.

Why do you care about that?

Because, if it takes being one's own small datacenter with special hardware to run a MasterNode, that's a pretty easy place to find and shut down. Massive resources lost. Definitely not coming back.

The current system has a property of replace-ability and portability that is absolutely crucial. You take that away and two very bad things happen:

1) MasterNodes, and MasterNode Operators, become fish in a barrel on multiple fronts.

2) Running MasterNodes becomes a very niche market, resulting in extreme consolidation from multiple vectors.

I'll elaborate.

There will be very few people willing to stick their neck out making the ASIC-miner-esque investment of dedicated, owned server hardware. Let alone special MN hardware. Let alone stamping their name all over it. Regardless of the current legality, you're essentially asking us to bet on government not doing the very thing that government absolute positively always does... That's like betting that you won't get wet when you jump in the ocean. Who, that has the money to buy MN collateral, is going to be dumb enough to take that bet?

Especially once sharded, how will DashDrive survive a regional gang of guvthugs shutting down several buildings full of MNs?

I realize many will view this as paranoia, or at least label it that way. For these people, I ask them to look to their own actions. These people are the ones who have been on the warpath against any conservative thought for the past decade. Thought Crime is now "Hate Speech." The very people who will pass this off as overblown paranoia, are the very people who have done it. Of course we're all supposed to look the other way... What goes around, comes around... Eventually the spiked club of government changes hands, and it'll be you taking the beatings you've been dishing out for so many years. You set the precedent that it's acceptable, it will be used. Against whoever the government at the time feels like. They don't even have to change the law now. It's been set as acceptable to simply censor and even murder people in large numbers simply because they disagree with the agenda of the moment. Laws aren't even relevant to it, because the corrupt court system simply casts a blind eye to those committing crimes in the name of the agenda. That precedent will change hands eventually... When the club is in the hands of those you've been dong that to for decades, do you think they will show more restraint than you have? I speak from experience. You've seen how unhinged I can be when I'm stressed out. I've lived with a Leftist boot on my neck my entire life, all the while they're pretending to be victims to justify their fascism, even calling themselves anti-fascists as they commit the same... When the veil finally drops, do you think I'm going to hold back? I'm not going to whine and complain about being oppressed. I'm going to kill every last one of these fuckers that I can. There's nothing left to live for but blood.

This is why MNs need to retain portability and replace-ability. Be it the lash, or the backlash; the whip doesn't care. It gets off on hurting whoever it can get away with hurting.

The Hangman is always looking for another neck. He never stops. The ability to dodge him is critical. Heavy hardware requirements make that impossible.

This is a bad direction and must be avoided. My crystal ball can't tell you what new path to forge. But, my ability to read history, especially very recent history, need not be particularly good to tell that this is a bad direction.

Go back to the "reduce collateral, increase node count" school of thinking in spite of the thickening spiderweb it would create? Just as a stopgap? Bring sharding forward sooner? Chainless? Something in between? Tor as a pseudo-transport layer?

The threat of government is not a matter of if, but when. It is an absolute inevitability. Even if you submit and comply in every way, they change their mind. Always. Legality is a trap. What is legal today will not be tomorrow. Corruption means they might just do it anyway with total disregard to any law... How will you enforce limits against government? Even The 2nd Amendment is left dormant when it is desperately needed. Clearly, you can't count on the very people for whom the project is meant to benefit...

You have to protect the MasterNodes, or you won't have any. 8% ROI is not worth it. Hell, no amount of ROI is worth an absolute guaranteed loss... ROI is just a carrot. A carrot that you'll never get is no carrot at all.

You need to think about more than just being trustless. You also need to remember that this is thankless. You have to protect yourself from the inaction of the very people you would seek to help with your project. They won't help you. They won't protect you. MNs and DashDrive are critical to the survival of DASH, so you must protect them. No one else will. Be it ignorance or cowardice, your users and MNOs will never have your back.

 

[Linh Lan]

Everything can change and it may be becoming better. Be optimistic!

 

[djcrypto]

I understand your concerns and think they are justified.
However, the feds can't even stop stinky power-hungry grow-ops little own a few computers.
The only pretentious feature is PrivateSend, and we can roll that back if need be.
I think if Ryan plays our cards right, and get the gov't on our side, we can have our cake and eat it.

 

[akhavr]

I think if Ryan plays our cards right, and get the gov't on our side, we can have our cake and eat it.

I'm afraid, you're not reading:

Even if you submit and comply in every way, they change their mind. Always. Legality is a trap. What is legal today will not be tomorrow.

Imagine writing a software that would execute on a CPU that would change its mind about what an instruction means. That's exactly what "being legal" and "comply" and "agree to be regulated" means.

OTOH, I'm not sure what technical approach would work to satisfy the necessary load. That's why I'm looking to the DAG-based currencies, like IOTA, too.

 

[stan.distortion]

That was surprisingly lucid No arguments here about governments jack-boot methods when protecting their interests but the question of scale changes the situation on both sides of that argument.
Small group protesting an oil pipeline or loan shark bankers? Bring out the teargas and water cannons!
Medium sized group? Nice professional lines of riot cops and make sure the cameras don't see the boot going in, maybe send a few plain clothes lads around to break some windows too if it's a bunch of pansy peaceful protesters.
Large groups... that's where the tables start turning. Getting heavy handed when lots of folks are involved can quickly turn into a national majority, especially these days when even the average Joe is getting thick skinned to the propaganda machine and big numbers can turn the political machine against its self, pesky things like demanding referendums and maybe even the media telling the unofficial side of the story.

How does that add up in terms of specialised hardware? Bitcoin peaked at about 360k transactions a day so with double the block size and 1/4 the block time that's about 2.8 million transactions a day on relatively cheap-ass virtual servers. It seems fairly normal to assume 1 transaction per day per user when doing this so disrupting the network at that point would theoretical work out at 2.8 million pissed of users and its a distributed network so that's not users pissed off with some company suddenly and unexpectedly closing its doors without warning, they're going to know exactly where the blame lies.

Now go for big, swanky hard-core off the shelf virtual servers and a 10x increase in capacity, 28 million users without a single dedicated component. Top end dedicated but still off the shelf hardware, big SSDs, some powerful GPU and CPUs and that's another 10x increase, 280 million... I've never had much faith in that 1 transaction a day figure but even assuming 1/10th of that it would mean about 30 million pissed off users. That might not add up to many per country but it's certainly too many to risk heavy handed tactics and that would just be Dash, the whole cryptocurrency space could easily add up to the full 300 million.

By that point adoption is turning from who can best promote their offering to who's offering the best deal and for digital cash that means the cheapest instant transactions. It's not hard to see who's going to be ahead of that game, scaling solutions still come down to who can manage the most settlements and that means raw blockchain capacity, the biggest chain wins and that boils down to who's running the best hardware. I thought Evan had taken a funny turn when he said 400MB blocks but I was looking at the wrong side of the picture, he's still working on the foundations and they're damn big ones!

 

[GrandMasterDash]

Right or wrong, dash is filling a space that would of been filled anyway. And I don't think dash will be the only ones using this specialist hardware. There are a few contenders with big block plans and maybe masternodes in the future. Digibyte has a long term big block plan. Crown and Stratis don't just have masternodes, they have different types of nodes. What if Bitcoin Cash adopted masternodes? I could be wrong on all of these but the point is, the future is far more uncertain than worrying whether dash masternodes will be sabotaged.

I don't think any of us are so naive not to be eyeing up other cryptos. Most of us have our fingers in a few pies. Whether it's dBFT (Neo) or DAG (ByteBall, IOTA) and so on, the Great Experiment continues. And that's why we need to give our full support to the new R&D arm. We're way too early in the game to be sure of the future.

 

[Macrochip]

All valid concerns and I too don't trust any government to provide us with a consistent legal framework we can rely on but the conclusion of the argument leads to a false dilemma.

The answer: I2P

The XMR guys are working on an implementation (https://github.com/monero-project/kovri), but good luck seeing that scale, especially with bloated RingCT transactions and a tiny node count.

Dash could pull that off easily. With dedicated high end hardware and an incentivized infrastructure the cryptographic overhead hardly impacts transaction/broadcast speeds.

Because to shut down a datacenter you have to find it first.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

All valid concerns and I too don't trust any government to provide us with a consistent legal framework we can rely on but the conclusion of the argument leads to a false dilemma.

The answer: I2P

The XMR guys are working on an implementation (https://github.com/monero-project/kovri), but good luck seeing that scale, especially with bloated RingCT transactions and a tiny node count.

Dash could pull that off easily. With dedicated high end hardware and an incentivized infrastructure the cryptographic overhead hardly impacts transaction/broadcast speeds.

Because to shut down a datacenter you have to find it first.

Are you sure i2p has the transaction throughput?

 

[TroyDASH]

Specialized hardware might be an inevitability. You can't just throw more nodes at the scaling problem through lower collateral and call it solved. Node count helps more with decentralization/resilience than scaling, imo, although both are important. Higher node count may even be detrimental to scaling in certain ways, as I am sure propagation issues might be less difficult to handle if there were only 10 nodes in the whole network.

Governments are bound to get their hands on things they don't think they have control over, but that doesn't mean that the government destroys everything it touches. There are some valid concerns here but it's not necessarily going to be all or nothing.

 

[akhavr]

Well, then, given going the specialized hardware route, it should be as mass-produced and as cheap as possible, to the extend of being throw-off expense (for MNO). Good luck shutting down a rack or a datacenter, if MNOs have dormant ASICs waiting to be brought up.

Are we in agreement?

 

[demo]

What happened to reducing collateral? This gives the network more resources while remaining nimble and flexible to the ultimate threat; government.

How comes and you changed your mind?

The no voters can you care to explain your point of view

Sure. I'm not a stupid snowflake. There. Explained.

So you agree that the MN collateral should be reduced?
So you agree that the maximum number of MN servers should be increased to more than 10000?

In that case, and as a sign of your contrition, go change your "No" vote here.
Then welcome to the club . You are the last but not least.

 

[demo]

That's why I'm looking to the DAG-based currencies, like IOTA, too.

Yet DAG-based currencies have some problems. Did IOTA solved them?

DAG-based technologies
DAG (directed acyclic graph) – is a directed graph with no directed cycles. In DAG-based cryptocurrencies each new transaction confirms one or more previous transactions. As a result, transactions perform a structure which represents a directed graph with no directed cycles. The major problem of developing DAG-based cryptocurrencies were limitations on width growth. The situation, when users can pick the same transaction as a parent, was forbidden. Limitations on choosing old transactions as parent transactions also caused problems [7]. Thus, the key objective of designing a new cryptocurrency was developing an algorithm, which during operation presented transactions in the form of a DAG-chain, a directed acyclic graph, whose length is much more than its width (Figure 1, Figure 2). In this case, the graph’s length corresponds to the number of edges of the longest chain, which connects the first transaction with the current transaction. The graph’s width is the number of points, having the same parent point (transaction) and not connected by edges.

 

[demo]

Well, then, given going the specialized hardware route, it should be as mass-produced and as cheap as possible, to the extend of being throw-off expense (for MNO). Good luck shutting down a rack or a datacenter, if MNOs have dormant ASICs waiting to be brought up.

Are we in agreement?

Not yet in agreement...
The specialized open source hardware should include routing capabilities through wireless optical mesh networks.

MNO OMN . Sounds good, doesnt it?

mnoomn, mnoomn, mnoomn

 

[solarguy]

I have no great love for government, big or small. I trust them as far as I can throw the capital building.

The proposition is that a bigger network of (cheaper/affordable) hardware makes the network more resistant to intrusive governments.
At least, by comparison to a smaller network of more expensive/more capable hardware.

That sounds convincing, but I don't have the technical chops to be certain that it's true. Perhaps others with a more technical bent can enlighten us, one way or the other. A third possibility is that, beyond a certain threshold number, adding more nodes doesn't make the system more resistant to intrusive bad actors, like governments.

I would note that there are already some positive signs. Dash is already pretty international. It would take a lot of coordinated action in several/many countries to shut down Dash. Governments suck at coordinated and cooperative action.

The U.S. feds already tried to demonize Bitcoin and crypto, and failed pretty miserably. Right after that, you could contribute to your favorite Senator's re-election fund with Bitcoin. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it will not go away.

The other fact that sort of gives us a tremendous number of nodes is that if they pick one token to squash, say Dash for example, there are a dozen, if not a hundred other tokens that will ooze in to replace the function of Dash. How many nodes are there in the top 20 cryptocurrencies? It's already the world's biggest game of wack-a-mole. From the government's point of view, if you can't control them all, you lose. And they really can't control them all.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that Evan is in Hong Kong and Ryan is in the US, some of the team is in europe, we have no idea where some of them are. But I think it is not a coincidence.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that we are developing a legal entity for Dash and the Masternodes in Switzerland, not the U.S.

And this is far far outside of the box, but I have good reason to believe that the oligarchy is furiously studying the problem of greater and greater job loss due to automation and AI. If that trend continues, the economy will crash terribly. Worse than the great depression. The present monetary system of fractional reserve banking is totally inadequate to compensate for that kind of disruption and unemployment. Fractional reserve banking absolutely fundamentally depends on loaning new money into existence.

In a broken economy with massive unemployment, fractional reserve banking crashes too.

Universal Basic Income could provide a way around that impending economic disaster, but the numbers just don't work with fractional reserve. I'm not saying I'm in favor of UBI, just that it is a possible solution to the approaching difficulty.

Crypto could do it though. Think about that. Governments are stupid. But the oligarchs are not stupid. They may recognize that we have to fundamentally change money for the system to continue working. Do you want to be the country that scares crypto away and your economy burns to the ground because of it?

When I speak of replacing the legacy banking system on a grand scale, I'm serious and this is why. The world's economy may depend on us doing a good job of making a new and better and more adaptable currency.

They need us and I suspect they know it already.

 

[serg]

Right now wouldn’t the bigger vulnerability for Dash and for cryptocurrencies in general be the government deciding to just plain outlaw the buying, selling and, acceptance of cryptos? Think of the impact of having no easy way to legally exchange fiat to crypto, never mind not being able to use it outside of black markets. And what would stop the government from doing that if they saw a threat to their control of the economy and to their source of funding (taxes).

They wouldn’t even have to go after masternodes. The value of all cryptos would go down and it would make it so that we never get to mainstream adoption which I think is what we’re all hoping for.

I think the trick would be to get as close to mainstream adoption as possible before that happens so that we become "too big to fail" so to speak. Right now I believe Dash has the best plan to make that happen sooner rather than later.

I like what you had to say solarguy - I have my doubts but I hope you’re right. I just don’t know if the powers that be would be willing to give up their power so easily to basically "the people."

 

[crowning]

Because, if it takes being one's own small datacenter with special hardware to run a MasterNode, that's a pretty easy place to find and shut down. Massive resources lost. Definitely not coming back.

I'm also strongly against dedicated hardware. You can't just place a Masternode wherever you want, you have to rent some space in a datacenter, and if it breaks/gets shutdown or confiscated or stolen you can't easily replace it. Everyone has a spare PC to switch over, but if dedicated hardware gets bricked (yes, this happens once in a while when the firmware is updated) you're lost, there's no easy replacement.

And crypto mining has shown where it ends, few will have most of the hardware. Centralization WILL happen.

And, if the hardware has a vulnerability, it'll not be patched in a couple of hours/days. With the right exploit, the network will go down.

 

[camosoul]

All valid concerns and I too don't trust any government to provide us with a consistent legal framework we can rely on but the conclusion of the argument leads to a false dilemma.
The answer: I2P

No...

Because to shut down a datacenter you have to find it first.

That's an unhideable footprint. And this is my very point. Datacenters have these wires going to them... Even if you obfuscate traffic, the sheer disproportionate size of the data moving... How many datacenters have 100% of their traffic routed through an obfuscation network? It's red herring.

I can rent a new server in 10 seconds. I can't build a new datacenter anywhere near that fast.

 

[camosoul]

I have no great love for government, big or small. I trust them as far as I can throw the capital building.

The proposition is that a bigger network of (cheaper/affordable) hardware makes the network more resistant to intrusive governments.
At least, by comparison to a smaller network of more expensive/more capable hardware.

That sounds convincing, but I don't have the technical chops to be certain that it's true. Perhaps others with a more technical bent can enlighten us, one way or the other. A third possibility is that, beyond a certain threshold number, adding more nodes doesn't make the system more resistant to intrusive bad actors, like governments.

I would note that there are already some positive signs. Dash is already pretty international. It would take a lot of coordinated action in several/many countries to shut down Dash. Governments suck at coordinated and cooperative action.

The U.S. feds already tried to demonize Bitcoin and crypto, and failed pretty miserably. Right after that, you could contribute to your favorite Senator's re-election fund with Bitcoin. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it will not go away.

The other fact that sort of gives us a tremendous number of nodes is that if they pick one token to squash, say Dash for example, there are a dozen, if not a hundred other tokens that will ooze in to replace the function of Dash. How many nodes are there in the top 20 cryptocurrencies? It's already the world's biggest game of wack-a-mole. From the government's point of view, if you can't control them all, you lose. And they really can't control them all.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that Evan is in Hong Kong and Ryan is in the US, some of the team is in europe, we have no idea where some of them are. But I think it is not a coincidence.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that we are developing a legal entity for Dash and the Masternodes in Switzerland, not the U.S.

And this is far far outside of the box, but I have good reason to believe that the oligarchy is furiously studying the problem of greater and greater job loss due to automation and AI. If that trend continues, the economy will crash terribly. Worse than the great depression. The present monetary system of fractional reserve banking is totally inadequate to compensate for that kind of disruption and unemployment. Fractional reserve banking absolutely fundamentally depends on loaning new money into existence.

In a broken economy with massive unemployment, fractional reserve banking crashes too.

Universal Basic Income could provide a way around that impending economic disaster, but the numbers just don't work with fractional reserve. I'm not saying I'm in favor of UBI, just that it is a possible solution to the approaching difficulty.

Crypto could do it though. Think about that. Governments are stupid. But the oligarchs are not stupid. They may recognize that we have to fundamentally change money for the system to continue working. Do you want to be the country that scares crypto away and your economy burns to the ground because of it?

When I speak of replacing the legacy banking system on a grand scale, I'm serious and this is why. The world's economy may depend on us doing a good job of making a new and better and more adaptable currency.

They need us and I suspect they know it already.

They banned Methamphetamine, and that didn't go away...

But Meth dealers don't have a name, address, business card, and giant building where we know to find them. They sneak and hide.

A building full of SAN, housing an ungodly huge blockchain doesn't sneak and hide...

The "be ungorvernable" option does not exist once things get that heavy.

I do agree with your outlook on the collapse of the current fractional/debt based money system. It was designed to fail, and has to fail. It's a kick the can system that has an end. But... When planning a system like that, the end is planned as well. "Cryptocurrency is destroying our economy! Crypto users are the devil! they made you homeless by betraying the country!"

It'll become a patriotism/nationalism argument.

Every paycheck you cash makes you complicit in your own destruction. Yet, you do it anyway...

 

[camosoul]

Right now wouldn’t the bigger vulnerability for Dash and for cryptocurrencies in general be the government deciding to just plain outlaw the buying, selling and, acceptance of cryptos?

This is my point.

The BATFE does this to people all the time. They approve a gun design, wait for massive investment and production, and just before product launch, bam. It's illegal, fuck you, confiscating everything.

If/when government does this, they'll wait to you to be balls deep. They'll even tell you all is well. When you think everything is going great, all those concerns are in the past... Everything is chugging along, life is great. That's when they yank the rug out from under you.

Us gun nerds deal with it by simply becoming an unstopable force. They can't possibly put us all in prison. We're not hurting anyone, so attempting to do it would only make them look, well, exactly as evil as they are...

MNOs do not number in the tens of millions. That's not an option.

DASH's current and, thus far, only defense is to be like trying to catch smoke with a butterfly net.

We're talking about giving up that defense with "special" hardware, or even nothing more than the SAN you'll need to house the proposed fucktastically huge blockchain...

Even if the dirty gov doesn't do what it always does... I'm still skeptical of storing such a huge blockchain. We're talking about infinity. Even Moore's Law can't keep up with that.

 

[demo]

I'm also strongly against dedicated hardware. You can't just place a Masternode wherever you want, you have to rent some space in a datacenter, and if it breaks/gets shutdown or confiscated or stolen you can't easily replace it. Everyone has a spare PC to switch over, but if dedicated hardware gets bricked (yes, this happens once in a while when the firmware is updated) you're lost, there's no easy replacement.

And crypto mining has shown where it ends, few will have most of the hardware. Centralization WILL happen.

And, if the hardware has a vulnerability, it'll not be patched in a couple of hours/days. With the right exploit, the network will go down.

and what about open source hardware?