This is a little red-flaggy for me too. Software patents in this ecosystem are completely antithetical to the spirit of the mission, both in blockchain in general, and possibly Celo even more pointedly. I mean, is the code even going to be auditable, verified on-chain, upgradeable, remixable, replicable, and testable by the community? This may seem trivial or concern-trolling but the power of the open-source movement really lives in these tenets.
That said, I think the authors of PoD have acted in good faith and are genuinely excited about the proposal, but the amount of personal outreach and championing this discussion thread did have me scratching my head a little. To be maximally cynical, a potential patent application perhaps explains the enthusiasm here.
To be less cynical, I’m always a proponent of experimentation and no ideas are ever off the table so I’ll continue to follow the discussion on its own merits.
My main question follows @markbarendt 's concerns about complexity. Why are we adding market dynamics to the role of a validator individually now? We are infrastructure providers, not economists, and this just adds another variable to control for which I’m really not looking forward to.
Why can’t we just have the percentages paid to cStable holders as a governable parameter applied equally across all validators? If PoD works as designed, and the price of CELO starts rising, all CELO holders, including validators, will be thrilled and are incentivised to continue voting to keep the % rate above zero. If PoD has no effect or even deleterious ones, then CELO governance voters can vote it to 0%, as they should if the goals of the proposal dynamics don’t eventuate.
If this is nothing to do with your election standing, uptime or slashing, why are validators involved at all? Can’t we just make a protocol-level change that is something like an auto-Moola where you just continuously earn interest on any cStables you have at rates defined by the community? I understand you can’t get something from nothing and that locked and voted CELO rewards would be decreasing to pay for this.
Additionally, how do we prevent a “race to the bottom” situation where large, well-funded, enterprise staking infrastructure providers can simply out-fund the cStable reward rate offered by smaller independents? Many of these groups are chronically over-voted and can easily convert their over-locked CELO into cStables without changing their elected seats, deposit on themselves in equal ratios, while independents are hobbled by some random cREAL allocation of $1000 and no spare cash or CELO to convert into a meaningful % of cStables.
Again I echo the complexity issue here, even if I’m advertising 100% reward rate on whatever cStable I’m low in %, no one is going to hunt out this information and switch their stable “deposited” to a new validator. It would be great if this is done automatically for depositors by some neutral process which finds the best configuration for every deposit and allocates them automatically.
@Pinotio.com am I understanding your summary correctly? That even though your election standing wont change, your average remuneraiton of 65k cUSD (+ transaction fees, + locked CELO rewards) annually can now theoretically approach $0 if your smallest % of all locked cStables is near zero? Would the Foundation signal any interest in co-depositing cStables to those validator groups in equal ratios that they are currently supporting with locked and voted CELO?
I feel I’m completely misunderstanding the min() thing here…