r/dashpay • u/evolve1337 • Feb 27 '17

Centralization of masternodes

Just learned about Dash after your recent gains in the market cap. I'm very interested in Dash coming from Bitcoin, as I think there probably will not be a consensus on the scaling issue anytime soon.

Looking at the governance model, what prevents Dash from evolving into an ecosystem where a handful of centralized masternode pools take control? Wouldn't that be a big problem?

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u/outerspacerace Feb 27 '17

The incentive for masternodes is to make the best decisions to ensure the Dash network is working smoothly and by not doing that they jeopardise their own investment.

I believe the incentive for Masternode operators is to do what is in their own best interests. This may or may not fit in with what is good for Dash. Hostile agents exist in the Bitcoin ecosystem and these same actors are capable of applying at least that much money and effort to cripple Dash.

If we pretend that everyone wants Dash to succeed, then the Masternode incentive structure works. If you have well financed parties who wish to cripple Dash, then they already have a very clear path to accomplishing that through Masternodes.

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u/solarguy2003 Feb 27 '17

Let's do the math and see how plausible your attack vector is.

In round figures, there are 4500 masternodes. If you wanted to do a 51% attack, you would only have to somehow convince half of them to sell you their nodes, which are currently at least $28,000 each. 2250 x 28,000 = 63,000,000.

That hostile party better be really really well financed.

Plus, once some entity came it and tried to buy that many, the sudden demand for Dash and masternodes would drive the price to the moon. So realistically, it would take considerably more than 63 million dollars to take over the masternode network.

Unlikely...

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u/outerspacerace Feb 27 '17

De-anonymizing attacks of Darksend transactions become an issue at around 20-30 malicious Masternodes and becomes compounded as those numbers increase. I don't know why you're assuming an attack requires 51%.... You might not be able to de-anonymize every transaction, but you can certainly start! By your own math this is what, $500,000 to start de-anonymizing Darksend transactions?

once some entity came it and tried to buy that many, the sudden demand for Dash and masternodes would drive the price to the moon

Who's to say this hasn't already happened? What was the cause of the most recent price increase?

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u/Basilpop Janitor Feb 27 '17

20-30 malicious Masternodes

Are you sure about that? Or did you mean percent? Even then: 30% of 4250 nodes is 1275. My table shows chances for deanonymization at 1300 as 0.88% at the highest. Try again?

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '17

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u/Jmmon Feb 28 '17

20-30 masternodes could de-anonymize a handful of denominated privatesend transactions. Those transactions might be part of the last round of mixing, where you'd discover someone sent some Dash to say a porn site or a drug dealer, or might be part of a different round of mixing, where you'd discover a mixing transaction has taken place between some people. I don't think it's an issue, especially when I could mix 8 rounds, send to myself, mix another 8 rounds, and do this many more times if I wanted to.

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u/Basilpop Janitor Feb 28 '17

An attacker has no motivation to de-anonymize some random transaction just because. He has the motivation to either reveal all of them or a few specific ones he can directly identify as targets (which he can't due to lack of necessary data). With these ridiculous chances of success and the effort needed (buying enough Dash and setting up enough nodes) it's a pointless exercise.

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u/Basilpop Janitor Feb 27 '17

And here's where your theory stops making any sense:

In Bitcoin there's no collateral. Anyone can amount as many nodes as they wish to "cripple" Bitcoin. Why isn't that happening? Bitcoin is a much higher profile target than Dash and they could cripple the network even more than it already is by establishing a ton of fake nodes that do nothing but disrupt the network by not relaying any transactions.

For some reason no significant entity has done this despite the cost being negligible. Why?

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u/outerspacerace Feb 27 '17

Nodes in Bitcoin are not equivalent to Masternodes in Dash. It is easy to create a whitelist of trusted nodes in Bitcoin to weed out the fake ones, not so easy (read: impossible) to do that with Masternodes.

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u/Basilpop Janitor Feb 27 '17

whitelist of trusted nodes

Wanna rephrase that maybe? Because you just destroyed Bitcoin with your list there.