Had a good night’s sleep, so I wanted to add this to my essay above…
Increasing the rent, i.e. the opportunity or actual cost of having a collator, is not rent-seeking if that is done to protect the network’s interests. There is already a rent to be paid, and that is the illiquidity of a 100K bond. Many of us here think that’s too low.
“Rent seeking (or rent-seeking) is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity .”
So, if anyone is rent-seeking, that is whales that are taking over 5 or more collator slots. Not that I need to do any fancy transaction tracing and count wallets to know that whales ARE taking advantage of the system to its detriment. I can simply count the number of whales raising arguments in this blog.
Another area which didn’t receive more discussion but could help short term and even more in the long term is influencing delegator behavior via UI enhancements to the staking app that promote diversity.
Even with all of the great work done to guide delegators in collator selection, there seems to be some delegators that will just select the first collator they see.
If a default selection were pre-populated, set similar to:
randomize defaultCollator == collator that has an identity &&
identity is associated with less than 2 collators &&
collator is ranked in bottom 20%
this simple nudging technique could funnel more delegations away from larger organizations with multiple collators in the set.
The issue of anonymous, noncollaborative whales is becoming more and more of a problem; these entities are just leveraging their capital to generate additional revenue at the expense of the community and the ecosystem.
I agree with some of the above proposals such as raising the minimum bond to join the pool and to not receive any rewards from this bond.
As it is now there is a strong incentive for whales to enter with as many collators they can to extract as much value as possible.
Raising selfbond limits and eliminating rewards will disincentivize many rent-seeking players. Regarding the inclusion of new players who do not have enough capital, we should look to the orbiter program.
As for the possibility of a 4-slot increase equaling moonriver, I propose 2 for the orbiter program and 2 normal.
There’s also the option of both removing the collator bond from earning rewards and also from the total backing calculation. This would make the collator bond act more like the Orbiter bond. This could be combined with an increased bond, although not too much of an increase, and would solve the problem of those collators having much different APY calculations.
Effectively a potential new collator would post a 1MM bond (as an example) but then also need to acquire 2.7MM of delegations to get into the active set.
Existing collators would stop accruing rewards for their bond, and that bond would stop counting toward the total backing.
I don’t want to add more words to what already been said since I agree with most of the suggested here:
Increasing the min bond. This can be adjsuted in the future once the token will spike.
Remove min bond rewards.
Remove min bond in the pool size - I also liked this idea a lot, especially when it comes together with increasing the min bond size.
Slashes - we should consider it as well imo. We saw many times before when collators were offline although they were active. SOme of them didn’t really care although many here tried to alert them. As long as there are no slashes - they don’t care because they can allow themselves as much as revokes as they wish because they can raise the necessary amount easliy. Impementing slashes will fix it and make them much more responsible.
as @Goldberg_StakeSquid said, I’m not here from the beginning like you, and joined after TF expansion with my 100k self bond, and I definitely support all of those necessary actions (especially removing rewards & slashes) to make our collators network more robust, decentralized and supported by people who really care about it
I don’t see why the self-bond should earn rewards in the first place from an economic perspective. The bond is what you give to get the slot. If the bond earns rewards (netting out the lack of liquidity) and there is no slashing risk, there is nothing you are giving up - no risk, no opportunity cost.
To provide an update on this - we’ve discussed the option of increasing the minimum bond with the engineering team; and this does require a runtime upgrade. This is a great start to community discussion on different options to increase / maintain diversity in the collator set. We need some more time to do more research as well to be able to contribute to this discussion. In terms of timing, perhaps future collator discussions on program changes should be targeted for after runtime 2100 which would be after the holidays (when people’s attention might be elsewhere). This Collator discussion is a super important topic so we want to make sure that this receives adequate visibility within the community.
Community discussions on possible runtime 2100 features including rolling out Gov v2 or OpenGov on Moonriver have already started. These possible collator program changes could make an excellent candidate for the first major topic of OpenGov. Assuming that all makes sense; I think we should target after runtime 2100 to pick this back up to culminate in formal governance proposal(s)
Thank you for your update on this topic and also about timing!
I agree with many of messages above (increasing of min bond & no rewards for self-bond).
In particular I find very interesting what @artkaseman proposed:
Also I don’t think that increasing the set with 4 more slots at the moment will help decentralizing the set, as I can’t see any community collators or new entities in the waiting list ready to join the set.
As a result of this discussion it looks like a delegator decided to turn into a node operator and registered himself 2 collator candidates of which one will be establish in the active set within the next 2 days.
He doesn’t appear to have enough funds to establish his second node yet so it will probably be idling or maybe he sells his reserved slot later to a whale that didn’t read the forum discussion yet.
Would be nice if that person could say something and add his views in the forum as well.
I think this discussion has opened the doors more to the whales that were not completely clear about it. Seeing the possible proposals, many will rush to reserve spaces.
Agreed, in this way we will be a close circle of early investor trying to share the cake… instead we should focus on how to make it more accessible for the average joe to be participant in the network activities…
Imagine in the early day’s of btc asking someone to invest 500 k dollars to produce blocks…
As a immediate and easy fix I think it would be helpful to instruct the foundation nodes to stay somewhere in the last ranks if they happen to drop there.
During the prolonged battle in the last 2 months a major problem was that the collators at the tail where bidding each other up every round change because no one wanted to sit on the last rank and be sniped away in the last block. In 99% of the round changes nothing happened but dropping out would be a existential risk to collators that depend on performance oriented delegators because those get telegram alerts and revoke their delegations next minute and never come back.
The foundation on the other hand can actually afford to drop out for a round or two. Also if there is something the foundation has plenty of it’s probably GLMR and they can always come back to the active set no matter what. In the past we made use of this fact by jumping above them and using them as a shield.
On fridays we occasionaly let one foundation node drop out if there was a ongoing battle with a single new collator on the waiting list, which gave us 2 nights of sleep until the brother in charge to delegate more to the foundation node came back to work on monday. now this brother lost his job because that task is performed by a bot, as well as for orbiters.
So in contrast during the last few weeks we tried to hide above foundation nodes and orbiters but they jumped back above us in the last 10 blocks of each round and caused major panic every time and a bidding war among collators who added more self delegations to stay away from the edge. Thus the minimum requeirement to stay active went up much higher much faster and consumed the defense funds that we keep quickly.
The rules of the game changed. But maybe, can we return to the old ways of doing things please?
Note that Referendum 126 is failing at this time. This is intentional due to an error in the polkassembly voting mechanism which suppressed voter turnout. There will be a replacement referendum soon.