After reading through the proposal document, the basic thesis of @RawthiL’s argument is actually quite simple. I’ll share a summary that I wrote for myself to help my understanding, in case anyone else finds it useful:
At the beginning of any given pocket session, high QoS nodes will lose some relays to low QoS nodes, as it takes time for the cherry picker to measure latency and gradually allocate more relays to the high QoS nodes.
Now that PUP-21/22 is active, a 15k node needs to attend far more sessions than previously to earn the same reward. If you’re operating a low QoS 15k node, this is a good thing - more sessions means more relays gained at session beginnings. If you’re operating a high QoS 15k node, you lose more relays for the same reason.
This issue is reversed for 60k nodes because (pokt-for-pokt) they earn their rewards over 1/4 the sessions. A high QoS 60k node loses less reward to lower QoS nodes, and a low QoS 60k node gets fewer opportunities to scavenge relays.
It’s important to understand this in the context of a total POKT daily mint rate that is fixed by FRENS. So the higher reward given to low QoS 15k and high QoS 60k nodes must come at the expense of the rest.
I have no idea if this thesis is correct or not, but I do think it’s worthy of investigation. I’ve read through all the comments listed, and thus far I don’t see anyone refuting the thesis. Nobody has proven it wrong or explained why it is invalid. Closest I’ve seen is @msa6867 acknowledging the effect may be real, but that it is likely only causing a ±10% variation from before. This may be true, but needs to be proven.
Is it possible for the Pocket team to release relay data from the portals which we can then use to independently and quantitively determine the true scale of this effect? Back at InfraCon there was a lot of talk of postgres database dumps, which would be invaluable in resolving this debate. I completely understand we wouldn’t simply want to take the data provided by Poktscan at face value.
Couple of side points:
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Given this thesis is completely valid and has not been discredited, ad-hominin attacks are totally unjustified in my opinion.
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IF this thesis is proven to be accurate and the level of disadvantage can be determined quantitively, we should address it. I have total faith that all of us only want a genuinely fair and level playing field for all node runners, big or small.