This is amazing, but somewhat terrifying. What’s been nice so far is that as a community we haven’t had to vet node operators ourselves. I have been assuming that the ICA/DFINITY has been working very very closely to ensure a trustworthy set of initial node operators.
At the end of this process, the flood gates will open and the community will be in charge of ensuring node operators are honest. Because incentives are much more different on the IC than on Bitcoin or Ethereum, I’m concerned with how well they will work.
How will we ensure that node operators are incentivized to be honest? And how will we verify their honesty?
Is there any type of staking?
Can we force secure enclave attestations of the replica, combining it with consensus, so that we can verify the replica has not been modified?
Should we look into more automatic ways of compensating node operators? A fixed fee determined by vote seems much more subject to manipulation than a fee model that pays node operators in cycles, in addition to burning cycles.
I just want us to set ourselves up very well for a much more permissionless system, and I’m not sure we’re there yet.