Hey, crabman! Thanks for your comment. Our primary market is individual node runners. As Shane mentioned, one of the biggest problems in the Pocket ecosystem right now is wasted resources. Every node runner runs their own set of chain nodes and what we end up with is tons of money being sunk into infrastructure while each chain node is highly underutilized by anyone except large node runners. This favors big node running outfits dramatically since they run at scale and have enough pocket nodes to fully utilize their chains and justify the cost of their chain node infrastructure.
Community Chains is primarily about providing a way for existing node runners to make better use of their chain nodes by providing access to others in the community. Individual node runners are hurting extremely bad right now and are being priced out of the market. In order to remain decentralized, Pocket must retain these individual node runners. Community Chains allows them to run the chains that they can afford while also being able to serve relays via other chains that they cannot and in whatever region they need. This will allow individual node runners to not be priced out of node running. Lean Pokt went a long way to help node runners and this takes it the rest of the way in terms of reducing costs for node runners and providing a way to better utilize existing chain infrastructure in ways that benefit the whole network.
Our primary business has always been about empowering individual node runners and providing tools for them to do that. That is why we created Node Pilot. But, the rough crypto market has made individual node runners need more than just tools to run nodes, they need access to solid RPC infrastructure that they can choose by chain and by region in order to remain viable in the pocket ecosystem. We cannot let the entire node running community get swallowed by a few huge node running groups. Even now, I have heard people in the pocket community suggest that individual node runners should move their pokt to hosting services since running their own infrastructure is too expensive. But, as far as I am concerned that is the worst thing that could possible happen to Pocket.
We were already building community chains as a community service before anyone brought up the possibility of handling altruist traffic. Our primary business is helping node runners, not running altruist traffic. But, at Pocket’s recent state of the union gathering, they said that they wanted to find ways for the community to handle altruist traffic, since the community already is running the necessary infrastructure. It makes no sense that pocket run all the chain nodes necessary to handle all traffic in the case of a chain halt when the pocket network already has all that infrastructure there, distributed among node runners. Community Chains can provide that. If there is a chain halt, the existing chain infrastructure within the pocket network can continue handling those relays. Same goes for rollover traffic until Pocket releases their node-level solution for that.
As for where PNI gets their authoritative chain heights from, that is up to them and as far as I’m concerned that is a question for PNI, not us. We are a providing a network which allows existing node runners to further utilize and monetize their existing chain infrastructure in ways that benefit the community as a whole. Whether or not Pocket takes their authoritative chain heights from us is their decision to make. We just provide the pipes.
Regarding centralization, Pocket has been on a steep slope downward into centralization and the worst thing for the network in my opinion is for individual node runners to be priced out. Rewards are going down while chain node requirements and server costs keep going up.
Finally, I completely agree with you that ideally PNI should not be relying on altruist for much of anything. Its primary purpose is to handle rollover traffic (for the time being) and allow relays to continue to be served in the case of a chain halt. But, in the meantime while they work to solve those issues via pocket v1 and portal v2, we can handle that RPC traffic by utilizing RPC infrastructure that already exists within the network without pocket needing to spend time, energy, and money running their own nodes or building their own Community Chains type network.