I’d be fine if the “can’t-be-evil” contest had a monetary reward, because it’s much harder to game it.
I was wondering if people gaming it on the testnet would be valuable info itself. Better to find out that info before going live, no?
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Hey @fluidvoice, I don’t think this changes anything fundamentally; I think it just slows down the system’s devolution into an oligarchy. If miners can get their hands on STX to Stack at all, regardless of the time scale, then the act of mining and Stacking at the same time will be more profitable in expectation than the act of just mining or just Stacking (thanks to the discount it offers them). This creates a perverse incentive, and a positive feedback loop that ultimately centralizes the system, since richer miners are able to buy up more and more STX to Stack. This is why SIP 007 proposes a phase-out of PoX to PoB over time, in order to ensure the system remains stable while using PoX to bootstrap miner interest.
Mining is still something that earns STX under PoB – miners are getting the STX coinbase and transaction fees. A compelling reason for introducing PoX with Stacking is to bootstrap interesting in mining while the ecosystem is nascent, since Stacking is an activity that people would be able to use their STX for on day 1.
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Understood. I just thought that perhaps by delaying their investment in stacking via a STX node-activation lockup would remove the “at the same time” factor and so lower the incentive. But perhaps you’re right, a merely lowered incentive is not sufficient to completely stop the behavior and so just delays the centralization.