Decentralize Cosmos

1. Decentralize Cosmos
   At block height 272187
   14 validators control 2/3 of the stake
   5 validators control 1/3 of the stake

2. Help small validators
   As I said here: [Proposal] [Draft] Suggested changes to a few cosmological constants :

Now the last 30-40 validators are not so big to be self-sustaining given the number of atoms they own or which they have following the delegation. I think that after a while they will close their validators if is not a good business for them.

Today I’m reading on Riot:
“I think I may have to shut down as a validator, being one and running thing correctly is not profitable and I do not like being faced with the fact that I am incentivized to run a less secure configuration.
profitable meaning participation is not being rewarding as to fund raising for piggy-coin”

So AIB , ICF will do something about those 2 problems or big validators will become even bigger and the small ones will close their validators?

Thank you!

I don’t see how small validators like us can be incentivized by the protocol. The danger is that bigger validators could have more incentives to split up their stake and therefore occupy more validator slots. Also, their chance of getting more delegators would increase…

Dokia has lost the first position to help the decentralization process and to help Cosmos Network. Their model must be followed by other big players.
“Winning does not mean to be number 1!” Every validator must win! So support small validators.

I wrote this out in a separate forum post here but now I think it’s worth revisiting. You have to incentivize diversification for the Delegators: Right now there are theories of there being benefits to diversifying, but little to no actual evidence of the benefit in diversifying because there’s no difference between systematic versus unsystematic risk, since most Validators seem to be doing fine and dandy with regards to uptime. I’d suggest we create an additional staking rewards formula so that diversified Delegators receive “extra rewards” on top of the normal staking rewards for Delegating Atoms to a diversified group of Validators. Example: if the Atoms in your wallet are diversified more or less equally to at least 50 active Validators then you get 50% extra staking rewards. Initial questions: -What’s a “diversified group of Validators” look like? Hard to say, but a perfectly distributed Delegator wallet with 100 Atoms in the wallet would have 1 Atom to all 100 active Validators. A sliding scale for these extra rewards would also make sense; ie- an ideal diversified wallet would have to see the highest “extra rewards” possible but a somewhat diversified wallet would…

Excerpt (1198 of 2755 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Tldr: the more Validators you’re delegated to, the more rewards you get above and beyond just the current rate of inflation.
Even just using a simple gini coefficient calculation to figure hours much extra a Delegator should earn would work. The closer to 0 for a gini that a Delegator has, the more rewards.

We may have some distribution of atoms from community pool to small validators.

No. We may not.

The community pool is not intended to be given to validators to make them more profitable. It’s up to validators to streamline their own operations and to set their fees appropriately.

I do not like the idea of incentivizing people to do something they would rather not do. For example, I dislike the idea of delegating to a validator for the sake of forcing “decentralization”. Somehow that just can’t be a good thing to do.

There must be a better way.

Is the risk that the biggest validators end up with the majority of the voting power which then turns the project into their own personal vision?