1 Address with 250 NKN holding can run 1 node which is good idea i believe. It’s lead healthy mining. But thing is again nodes will drops heavily.
At this time 23000 Nodes we can proudly say we have strong network and more commercial clients will attract us.
Less network nodes impact on project interests.
Simple fiat swap?
Or even include paid deployment via someone such as NKNx…
“coinbase launches 1 click NKN node”: 90% of nodes on coinbase 
Would be pretty massive numbers if Coinbase had a direct node-launcher on their website, especially if it’s only a couple bucks to do so.
The only question is how does NKN position itself: If it is just a commercial network and business as a NOIA or Harmony - then in principle KYC takes place. But, if we take for example such huge P2P opensourse networks as TOR or Yggdrasil, then there is no KYC and it is out of the question. But it is also worth noting that KYC can be entered optionally - for example, only a past KYC node can run a commercial nCDN. Personally, I don’t like the idea of KYC at all.
I totally agree that we are missing the NKN 2.0 stats, including TUNA, nCDN and off-chain traffic data. It will be really cool if team make smth like nMonitor, where all the network data will be shown. (Maybe team even have such kind of tool, but using it’s internal 
)
Yes, the code backbone of different VPS providers may be a problem, but it’s obviously not a problem of NKN itself. Antifrod systems of DO, AWS or Vultr should deal with these issues themselves. There will always be a loophole and various ways to cheat. I also remember Yilun said that the current geodata of nodes is not quite correct, so not all 97% of nodes are actually located in the US.
It’s true, at the moment the cheapest servers on most popular providers cost from 5$, and if you run nodes without any purity, there will be absolutely no profit. I have a few thoughts on this, too.
Excellent food for thought thanks!
Hi @Mutsi and all: just got back from vacation and here are some personal thoughts.
Thank you Bruce for taking the time and welcome back from vacation hope you’re well rested and in good health.
Its great to read that most of the things are currently in the pipeline.
I would love to be able to show commercial info on nStatus for instance.
It feels like with 2.0 we have been given the hammer but not yet the nails, or rather a complicated magic box and we simply dont know what goes in and what goes out.
The tricky thing is that whomever has access to the cheapest resources will potentially dominate the network and force out smaller players. This will inevitably always lead to a situation where only one player or a few players are profitable regardless of the NKN price or reward scheme.
Perhaps owning a node should have benefits which are not strictly financial, perhaps I could have access to NKN services using a trusted node’s identity for instance. Or someother ways of rewarding running a node. Basically any kind of reward which is non directly linear to the amount of nodes that you operate and not strictly financial.
i will only reply to some points, because otherwise i would be sitting here for hours. i would recommend that we create a list of things that needs to be done from our perspective and the team or one member will have an open discussion with us about it. that means not some 1 hour ama, more like several hours of open discussion. the problem of centralization aside how about we start with the token economics as a new topic. people will have 1 week to write their ideas down. the team will get 1 week to come up with their own ideas and than they will present us lets say 3 options which they think would make sense. and we will have some open discussion about it.
That last one leads me to a thought; the chance of receiving a block is proportional to the number of relays that a node processes, I know there are multiple factors contributing to finding a block. However I believe relaying is an important parameter if not the leading the leading contributor. If so this further benefits local clusters. Perhaps an idea would be to clamp the lower boundry of the latency to lets say 10ms or 20ms so that the benefits of local network effects are gone which is as it stands (afaik) another advantageous mechanic for cloud nodes.
Really insightful and valuable thoughts! Here’s what I think for each questions.
One root cause of the current centralization situation, in my opinion, is the lack of relay traffic at the moment. There are some ways to get very cheap cloud nodes, but one has to pay regular price for the bandwidth (as far as I know). Without enough relay traffic, bandwidth cost is neglectable; but if there are enough relay traffic, bandwidth cost will be high enough to make most cloud nodes not profitable anymore. However, everything is based on my assumption that bandwidth is not free on cloud nodes. If someone can even get free or very low cost bandwidth, the conclusion will no longer be valid.
- Minimum NKN requirement to run a node
We have discussed about it as well and it seems to be a solution in the long term. But there are a few things to think carefully before we decide to do it this way:
Another idea that came to mind which might be feasible regarding pushing out cloud providers; flag and block all 0 ms latency nodes. That should take out large centralised datacenter node clusters. And those nodes add little to nothing to network value at this time. 1st of all they provide no additional geographic coverage, and they provide no additional bandwith as the network is already extremely underutilized. Look at china that is running most services with under 50 nodes in use.
This will not work technically because anyone can easily make a node respond later by modifying a few lines of code, so the observed latency can be increased arbitrarily.
Also, 0ms latency does not mean latency is 0ms, but means latency is not measured (successfully) yet because 0 is the default value in Go. Even local nodes should have very low positive latency (e.g. 1ms). 0ms latency nodes has lowest priority (not highest) to be selected.
- Mining pools to make payout more consistent, no one likes waiting 2 weeks to earn their first 25 cents due to being unlucky.
I would also be happy to see someone creating a mining pool, although I guess it’s not as easy as other mining pools because the network requirements.
- KYC / ZK-Identity to limit nodes/user
- If minimum NKN on a node to participate is not feasible decentralised perhaps this can be facilitated through a centralised solution, all mining nodes for instance should have a minimum amount of NKN on their mining node wallet (1000 NKN for instance) every time a mining node wins a block it can have a potential payout from a NKN mining lottery, this would incentive running more nodes and also lock up NKN and it would draw attention/fun to the mining ecosphere.
That might be too centralized. I think it’s better for the infra and mining to be as decentralized as possible. If there is one part that is centralized in the ecosystem, I hope it’s the business and commercial part.
- We can’t easily know if our node is running commercial, there is no RPC endpoint info made available.
nkn-commercial is designed to be very decentralized, so even the team doesn’t know exactly how many of them are running. But there is a way to estimate it using tuna subscribers (assuming most tuna are running through nkn-commercial):
const nkn = require('nkn-sdk');
nkn.Wallet.getSubscribers('tuna_v1.httpproxy', {limit: 10000}).then(x => {
console.log(x.subscribers.length);
});
Currently the result is around 1600, that means there are at least 1600 nkn-commercial running. Note that this estimation is an underestimate because nkn-commercial will only start tuna if it finds the ports are open.
- There is zero insight in any off-chain traffic it is hard to get excited about all the partners that are being signed if what we can see from that is exactly nothing; granted this is likely under NDA but estimated metrics or anonymized metrics would be godsent.
- TUNA same story, im running TUNA now supposedly on NKN2.0, am I really though? How do I see if I have any open channels.
I can concede that offchain communications on network scale are possibly impossible to measure and report on however surely there are reasonable estimations to be made using metrics such as subscriptions, nkn payments through nanopayment channels and extrapolating from owned nodes.
The current ecosystem is entirely opaque and there is almost no insight into anything. The only thing that I can currently have insights into are onchain metrics and my own node relay performance. I think that is inadequate as with NKN2.0 those are pretty much the least interesting metrics those won’t get anyone excited.
nkn-commercial is actually the foundation (or the miner’s side) of services we are working on. With miners upgrade to nkn-commercial, we are ready on the infrastructure and resource side, but the application side is still chasing up (except iQiyi). The stats will only be meaningful with both are ready to show.
For NanoPay based service (e.g. tuna) one can actually look at the blockchain explorer because NanoPay txn will eventually go on-chain. We haven’t published any stats or make any dashboard showing it because the number is still quite small, as you can see using nscan.io for NanoPay. If the number grows and becomes worth mentioning, we would definitely show it up 
For commercial services (e.g. iQiyi) it’s a bit hard because currently you can only see your own earning through nMobile Pro since nothing goes to the mainnet. But we will try to find a way to show it somehow. We will definitely be happy to do it because it shows real world adoption, which is what we have been trying to achieve.
- I’m supposed to be running nCDN now, how much of my disk is being utilized right now, how much bandwith am I providing over nCDN, again no insight.
You won’t provide services for nCDN or iQiyi if your nodes are not in China because iQiyi only wants China IP currently. But this is only for now: iQiyi is also expanding to non-China market, and we are also trying to replicate the same mode with other companies.
The iQiyi related discussion might be a bit hidden to people outside China, but within Chinese miner community, there are already many hundreds of devices providing services to iQiyi, but they are not running nknd because they most likely don’t have public IP address, so you can’t see them in the node map.
- When will I receive commercial rewards, will this be in form of nano-payments? Also I’m confident pretty much no one in the community even heard about or knows what nano-payments are and how they work.
It will be in the form of NanoPay so visible on explorer. But the problem now is the lack of users compared to providers. Our BD team is working on acquiring customers, so let’s hope they do well!
I tried to address most aspects, but please let me know if I’m missing anything. Again, really appreciate for these insightful and valuable thoughts, including the ones in replies
Thanks a lot for your most valued feedback Yilun.
Blockquote Without enough relay traffic, bandwidth cost is neglectable; but if there are enough relay traffic, bandwidth cost will be high enough to make most cloud nodes not profitable anymore.
That is something I had not considered, I suggest ramping up number of relays for the network, have you considered signing contracts with YouTube, CloudFlare and perhaps integrating NKN in ETH or BTC for faster propagation between nodes ;)?
Thank you for that, this is something I will want to integrate in the nstatus dashboard to provide at least some insight into TUNA!
You have thanks a lot for taking the time to sit down and share all this info!
Haha we definitely have considered and will continue to consider in the future, just need their interests
Reopen this topic, welcome to discuss.
Is an optional miner PoW holding something to consider, rather than losing half your miners due to an eg: 100 NKN minimum holding, you could perhaps slash rewards instead for miners not holding NKN, perhaps they only receive half a block reward for instance.
That way the transition wont be as steep, and perhaps there are plenty of node runners that have zero operational costs so they can just keep going at it without allocatiing the NKN right away.
That might be good for transition, but with one drawback: it won’t increase staked miners’s reward because unstaked miners can still produce blocks, instead it will reduce total mining output. Staking will only become profitable when unstaked miners stop mining and thus reduce total node count.
If the objective is to decentralize the network and encourage people to run nodes from home, you better avoid any entrance barrier such as holding a minimum number of NKN as stake. I personally started playing with NKN because there was no initial payment to make to buy stake like it exists for many altcoins. Furthermore it won’t discourage heavy miners who anyway already have many NKN to put at stake if needed.
Hi Rudolf!
If the objective is to decentralize the network and encourage people to run nodes from home, you better avoid any entrance barrier such as holding a minimum number of NKN as stake.
That depends how you look at it, currently the yield is also a barrier because there is simply no value proposition. Removing large scale operations from the equation by a sufficient minimum nkn holding so that it makes running 10k nodes have a very high upfront cost could stimulate home nodes.
Furthermore it won’t discourage heavy miners who anyway already have many NKN to put at stake if needed.
That depends entirely on the amount needed, I feel like this should be a linear/log progression, perhaps you want 1 billion nodes with 10% of all NKN allocated as the end goal. So then youd want to eventually end up at 0.1 NKN per node. Just some random numbers. But could start with 3333 NKN per node now (10% of total supply / 30k nodes). And slowly progress to that 0.1 nkn per node.
First of all, no one should be using cloud instances to mine. Think about it this way: suppose someone has a money printer that prints $80/hour. The only reason that person would rent you this money printer is if you are foolish enough to pay more than $80/hour, which is what has been happening with cloud mining that costs more per month than it yields in NKN tokens. Mining on hardware that isn’t yours makes absolutely no sense at all - the only way you could profit from it is if the cloud provider is ignorant of NKN. It isn’t just my opinion that cloud mining will stop, it is an inevitable economic truth once more people learn about NKN. When NKN is mature there will be a negligible amount of miners using this approach. Markets can be very irrational and speculative at times, but in simple scenarios (like figuring out if a coin is profitable to mine) they can be expected to act rationally. All mentions of cloud mining should be removed from this website.
On Discord, Yilun said the following:
Actually I’m not a fan of PoS either. What we are discussing is still PoW, but probably with a minimal holding requirement, so the cost will be hardware/data cost (as before) + opportunity cost of the token holding.
The utility of money isn’t linear. The more money you have the less useful each subsequent unit of money becomes - currency adheres to a law of diminishing returns. If I earn $100/month I can afford to buy food and water to survive - the difference between $0 and $100 is life and death. If I earn $10100/month there isn’t much difference between making $10000 - the $100 increase has almost no impact on me.
What this effectively means is that the less money you have, the more “utility” you have to use up to purchase things. A person earning $100/month facing a fine of $50 hurts a lot more than someone earning $10000/month facing a fine of $5000. My point is, under a system requiring a stake of NKN would disproportionately harm poorer users - in other words, the opportunity cost is higher the less money you have. One person who earns $10000/month has much less difficulty paying a minimum token fee for each node than a combined 100 people who earn $100/month. Suppose that right now there’s 10000 nodes belonging to 1 big miner, and 10000 nodes across 2000 miners. If a minimum token holding of 250 NKN was required then each side must pay 10000*250= 2500000 NKN. I expect the centralized miner would struggle less than the decentralized miners to pay for the 2500000 NKN.
NKN is special because the bottleneck isn’t electricity, it’s network connectivity. This ultimately leads to it being unprofitable to buy hardware specifically to mine NKN. Bitcoin miners are in an arms race to produce the most electricity efficient mining hardware to squeeze less efficient miners out of the mining pool. There’s no such arms race in NKN because the electricity costs are negligible. Comparisons to Bitcoin are invalid for this reason; studying the Bitcoin mining centralization levels is useless because NKN’s mining economics operate under a totally different dynamic.
Once the price rises, the network will become more decentralized because the big miners cannot expand by buying more hardware to mine it because doing so isn’t profitable. That’s the genius of NKN’s mining economics. The big miners will reach a capacity limit then that’s it… no more nodes from them. All the while more and more people around the world join in using their own hardware to mine it.
I envisioned a world where almost every network connected device was acting as an NKN node. This stake change would make that reality impossible. There’s no way any software or hardware would come preconfigured with an NKN node option if it requires staking. NKN can’t conquer the world if a requirement is added to setting up nodes.
If you make it more expensive to setup a node, then not only will you have fewer nodes in the network, but the nodes will be more centralized as the wealthier people are more able to afford nodes. It would be a disaster.
The best way to improve the mining situation isn’t tweaking how NKN works, it’s improving marketing and getting the message out to more people.