This dramatic change in rewards would stomp out independent node runners IMO. Chain nodes are becoming increasingly more expensive to run (Harmony has doubled in storage size in a matter of months) and from my napkin math, 80% barely covers the growing expenses of node running over the course of a year with the cloud… unless you have a lot of POKT nodes.
Ultimately, the cost of trying to run your own nodes will not be worth the time and resources, sending even more folks to the huge node providers. Not to mention the rug pull effect it would have on node runners that are just gotten started in the last few month. I think that kind of dramatic changes would be a stain on our project. In all of POKT’s economic models there were curves… I’ve never considered an economic model with immediate drops of 70%.
We’ve marketed this phase as our “Growth phase”, so I suggest we have a model that can begin to tapper the growth phase, not cancel it over-night. This could be a great marketing event as well, encouraging folks to jump in with node running while this growth lasts for the next 10 months, or something of that nature.
One real fact is that right now we don’t have ways for apps to practically stake POKT for relays, so there’s no reason for apps to purchase POKT right now. Node running is the only economic incentive to buy POKT. Cutting the rewards to where your essentially forced to use a large node provider, or be an independent whale, will take away some of the natural fire that is in our community IMO.
TLDR: The huge node services can easily absorb this dramatic of a reward change as their margins are astronomical, while this could essentially illuminate the small (but growing) community of independent node runners if enacted with this kind of drop-off.