I’m fully on board with KYC and IDC up to Tier 3 and 4. What feels unfair, though, is changing the terms of the 4-year rewards contract and downgrading nodes—just like @snoopy mentioned.
Staking 50% of rewards or tying rewards to staking just doesn’t work, especially for APAC regions. Let me explain why. Importing and shipping alone adds 30–40% to node costs in places like Colombo. On top of that, proper Tier 1 internet (not your mom and pop cafe WiFi) costs around $1,000/month for 100Mbps in places like India, South Korea, and Colombo.
ICP originally rewarded based on real Opex costs based on country, which encouraged global decentralization. That worked—unlike some chains that ended up centralized in Hetzner or Contabo. If decentralization is still the goal, you can’t ignore geopolitics and expect to cut down rewards for staking.
Most of us aren’t here to run nodes at a loss. And with AI ramping up, future nodes using H100s or H200s will cost ~$900K - retail. Why would anyone run that kind of hardware on ICP for just for 50% of ICP rewards, when there’s massive demand elsewhere in Web2 and AI?
Let’s focus on the real problem before reshaping the whole ecosystem.