Idea for decentralization -- subscribe to participation nodes through wallet

Hi,

Just want to throw this idea out here, in case it has not been broached before…

As I understand it, individual Algos held in wallets that are committed to or associated with (not sure of the correct terminology) any participation node are eligible to randomly participate in consensus for each block – this is the basis of PPOS and Algorand’s elegant, decentralized design. However, I believe most retail Algo holders will not have wallets (or Algos) that are associated with a participation node, so in reality the random pool is currently somewhat centralized to early holders and coins associated with the Foundation and Inc.

What if instead the Algorand wallet gave any user the option to choose from a set of participation nodes to associate their Algos with? These nodes could perhaps offer this service for the health of the blockchain, or perhaps a subscription model could be designed where the node would receive a small fee for performing the service. This might even encourage more people to create participation nodes.

If all or most of the extant coins in Algorand wallets were participating in consensus, wouldn’t that be the most distributed and decentralized version of the chain? I think someone should ask Silvio what he thinks

Thanks.

Interesting idea!

I agree that incentivizing the creation of more participation nodes is a good thing. Perhaps this a topic that could warrant a governance vote in the future.

I will buy Algos and liked the idea of vested interest in Algorand’s highly ethical and transparent ethos and market position being the reasons for consensus rather than economic benefit—the whole idea of a decentralised and democratised blockchain. Am I wrong?

I am learning, happy to be schooled by experts.

Algorand seems like a great home for investment and our future development. I am very slow to make decisions, but favour Algorand for many good reasons over its competitors.

excellent idea! the wallet source code is available and you can start a gitcoin campaign to fund such a project !

Thanks! I’ll look into that.

Thank you. Yes, maybe the incentive would change things. I just think it would be beneficial if there were more nodes to choose from (if retail users got that choice). I was thinking the incentive could be very small and that we could limit the maximum size of the nodes through some governance procedure.

As an addendum, I came across this really cool project on github. It attempts to quantify Algorand’s degree of decentralization with these parameters:

"We will say that PPoS is “completely decentralized” if and only if:

1. All the ALGO genesis supply is circulating in the ecosystem;
2. All the ALGO circulating supply is taking part to the PPoS;
3. All the accounts that owns ALGOs are taking part to PPoS;
4. All the accounts participating in PPoS hold the same amount of ALGO;

Now we need to quantify each of these 4 statements to express “how far” we are with respect the purely theoretical decentralization."

The solution proposed in this thread would go towards maximizing the value in items 2 and 3. And, if governance set some kind of limits on the size of participation nodes, it could help with item 4.

I dont know who invented this, but it is not true…

First thing for algorand to be decentralized is to put algorand foundation to trash… Only than it can be called decentralized.

One of the fatal things is the domain where list of relay nodes is published. … it is single point of failure… if someone does not pay for the domain, and it expires, whole network will be down

From the list I agree with point 1, 2, and 3… For all acccounts to have the same amount it is quite nonsense…

Also algorand needs to work on the decentralization of all types of nodes… Relay nodes - where everybody search for the point to enter the blockchain and it archvies everything… The participation nodes at the moment absolutely non incentivized and the most important - where application makes requests for transactions. The indexer nodes also non incentivized atm, and very crutial for application development… And KMD nodes - where people can do the ppos work - also non incentivized atm…

It would be so much better if there would be pool of money distributed fairly on the competition manner between each of these pool, and we had a choice to work with any of them…

It would be much more decentralized if you could switch between free participation nodes when the one you have set up has a downtime for example…

Btw, does anybody have list of free public kmd nodes?