Protection against 51% mining attack - YES
Makes hashrate less important - NO
You can see why by looking at the NET reward ratio rather than the gross which is what I think we should have been focusing on all along. Protocol reward ratio is meaningless on its own because the relative value that miners and masternodes extract from the chain is determined by the price, not the protocol.
It's also meaningless to compare them in terms of "traffic to order books" because the two sectors are totally asymmetric in terms of what the protocol requires them to invest back in the chain. So you're only looking at one side of the equation.
If we look at net reward ratio, all sorts of things emerge that show us the way forward, not least where the "sweet spot" is to avoid asymmetric profitability in network operating margins because the price will just be throttled by the part of the coin supply with the largest available gain. So to get scaleable growth in a heterogeneous supply we need to set (net) margins at parity for all prices as far as possible, otherwise we just hit the same glass ceiling as we did before and never escape it since masternodes go to ridiculously unsustainable profit margins at high prices while not investing anything back in the network (as miners have to).
These monthly-based models are based on a notional 10% mining profitability, current emission schedule, $30 per month masternode hosting costs and assumes all treasury budget awarded. The current 45/45 reward ratio one shows straight away the problem in asymmetric profitability:
(Sidenote: The "
Net Reward Ratio" columns below should strictly speaking read "
Net Reward Share")
This is made even more acute when we move to a 60/40 one (which corresponds to a 54%/36% respective share of the total reward):
The sweet spot with these constraints turns out to be at exactly 82/08 mining/masternode reward ratio (expressed as respective proportions of the total block reward). People will probably find that alarming, but it's scaleable in a way that the above two just aren't and at $900 per Dash, not only is the masternode reward greater in value than it is at the moment, the collateral is 9 times the value. That is what matters - not the reward ratio but getting to high valuations and MAINTAINING them
Look at the reward per month for the 82/08 ratio. Does it not make sense to make 1 Dash per month at high valuations rather than 5 for a measly $30 operating cost ? Can you seriously see bitcoin giving away 5 BTC per month for peanuts ? We need to reconsider our priorities here if Dash is to ever get above $200 per coin again IMO. Even at the 82/08 ratio, masternodes are still massively profitable with operating margins back above 90% at $400 per Dash.
Note: Y-Axis rescaled.
Constraints: 60/40
Constraints: 82/08
