RE: The Decentralizatoin Of Hive Infrastructure
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With a partner, we have been running a witness till March on the other blockchain. It was a server that we had it at my partners location in the factory he owns, with a controlled climatic environment and a backup generator. We had also the backup server there with a second internet connection in case one was down. This was in a country with one of the best and cheapest internet services in the world, so the second connection was never used.
The things we gave it up was the cost. As we had a separate contract for the machines, we could see how much we have been spending on infrastructure and what was coming in. A lot of long nights, due to failed HF and being somewhere in the 70ish position made us take the decision to plug out the witness server and rent the server to other firms. What I want to say is that we might need to change the payout distribution so that we have more people coming in.
Losing money to run a server or a node is not most people want to do, so with a more linear distribution we might get more people to run the much needed machines. For this the top20 need to agree to a huge pay cut.
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A witness node is really quite cheap to run nowadays on Hive. IMO, the biggest real "cost" at this point is just the skilled labor to update the software and deal with occasional hardware problems, etc.
Running an API node that can serve traffic is a little more costly than just running a witness, but still pretty cheap to run now, and even in that case I'd argue that it is the personal labor costs that dominate.
Thank you for the comment. Agree with you that the labor is the most costly and time intensive. Can we somehow incentive more the one that are running API nodes? I would definitely support a proposal for this. I would write it, but here I think that a node runner shall write it, at least with the sum to cover the cost.
Would be beneficial to make the reward curve for witnesses a little different, so that the block production distribution is different or do you see the risk higher that more blocks are missed by lower witnesses?
I hope that my comments are not seen ac critic as I think that a lot of people are investing a good amount of resources and time into development and I think that 99% of the people in here want Hive to moon!
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At the moment, I think we have an abundance of API nodes, relative to traffic levels. So I think there's enough incentivization now for at least top witnesses to run API nodes. Not all of them do, but again, it's not really needed for all of them to do so now, and they can always make contributions in other ways.
Now the above paragraph is mostly about "now". It's hard to say how things may look in the future, and we may be able to decentralize the infrastructure on a much more massive scale in the future, in a way that would make it less difficult to operate a node in the system, and so that we place less reliance on individual nodes. I think a sort of ideal state would be where the entire system decentralizes down to the level of individual users who all collectively support the infrastructure, and I think it's achievable in the long run.
I don't think it makes sense to change the reward curve for block producers right now, mostly because the witnesses act as elected representatives for consensus changes, and it gets too difficult for voters to track the motivations and opinions of these representatives when too many witnesses are involved in this process.
That, in and of itself, doesn't necessarily mean that we couldn't change reward curve (as was done once before), but leave the relative number of blocks produced among the top 20 witnesses the same (the relative amount of blocks produced is really important, because that's what drives the forking logic in the case of consensus disagreements). And in that case, it wouldn't even likely change the number of missed blocks, unless we assume that top witnesses would simply stop caring about missed blocks because the financial penalties for missing a block was just so small.
But as far as I can tell, there's no major issue here right now, so with many tasks to take on in the development of Hive, I think we can probably class this one in the category of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Thank you for the time invested in the reply. It underlined again my belief, from our past interaction, online and offline, that you have not only the technical know-how, but also the social competence to be able to see different point of views and to discuss open upon them and I admit as for now there are resources, we need more users and this is the duty of everyone
This explanation is really good and makes a lot of sense.
This is also fully understandable as there are other things to focus on, like further development, which is seen better by novices like me on the updates that are appearing.
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