Would it be considered a good practice for the Cardano Network to have a minimal set of treasury funded staking pools ?
The reason for their existence would be to buffer any potential variability in private staking pool numbers and provide a backbone for network resilience (optimal distribution around the globe for ex.).
The idea is not to siphon out stake and annoy normal staking pools. Anyway, the 1/k reward system prevents that, and should be fine if their number is be kept minimal. I would see that as an insurance for the network and these treasury pools would perform essentially the same job as the IOHK/Emurgo/Foundation pools do now in this Byron phase.
nb : already posted in reddit / Genuinely interested in your opinion about that !!
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I guess you actually mean “Treasury funded nodes” That would make a lot more sense.
It is possible under the treasury model and actually sounds kinda cool. Basically anyone may submit a proposal to receive funding in return for running a node or multiple nodes. The only problem that arises - is transparency and sustainability.
When you have privately funded nodes (pools) - those may be “fired” at any time if delegates decide that this pool does not provide enough transparency, or if it acts weird.
But with a publicly funded nodes (from treasury) you immediately find multiple complications:
- How funding will be sustained and mitigated? (Might be solved with a smart-contract)
- How a node will prove accountability?
The latter is a more complex problem, since even if you find ways for a node to demonstrate it’s active honest participation (system monitoring tools, regular audits, published accounting, etc) - there has to be a way to “fire” that node in the future. And that means - there has to be a set of people responsible for making this decision.
There might be some naive solutions immediately found - like, for example, the smart contract could mention a set of “publicly elected” people that are selected to oversight such node[s] (but you immediately need to remember that people are subjects for corruption), or there may be a function put in place that would allow to run another public vote round that would take away the funding from a node (but you need to remember that any public vote on a treasury would prolly take at least months to be executed, so its use as an emergency solution is highly questionable).
So, in conclusion - the idea is cool, and it is possible\implementable in some ways, although there are still complications to account for
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Thanks for your time !
Indeed, governing such things on the long run looks like a mess (but not impossible)
Anyway, it might not be required. Just a mind game for the moment.
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This is very good to have these games for now! First of all - it’s looking for new use-cases for the treasury, and second - it might give someone else a hint for an even better idea of what the treasury is capable of
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