I haven’t been active in the forums much but it seems that price action is about to kill this project unless some precautions are taken. I will suggest a few things which I don’t really know how much hard would they be to implement. But I believe if these suggestions are implemented, price action can be brought back to normal without introducing burn. Getting serviced without paying a direct fee is one of the niche things about Pokt and introducing a burn would destroy this aspect. Taking direct fees via burning without being the single largest network of a certain niche like Chainlink (in terms of oracles) would be detrimental to the growth of Pocket network.
My suggestions:
1-Vested Node Rewards
Node rewards should be vested for 30 days, early claims should be penalized proportional to the vesting schedule.
eg: If someone claims in 10th day, they should only get 33% of the rewards and rest should be burned.
2-Stake-weighted job chances
-Current 15k POKT required for a node is too little but it might be too late and hard to change it at this moment. Instead of adjusting the minimum stake required, allowing increased stake is a better option. Stake-proportional chance of getting job according to the stake up to a certain stake limit would be much better. 150k would be a good upper limit. This means essentially that with running costs of a single node, you can mathematically expect to earn 15 legacy nodes worth of earnings. This would allow easy entry with 15k to help decentralization while decreasing overall running costs for larger stacks by a very significant margin.
eg: Kevin currently needs to buy enough node hardware to run 10 nodes, since he has 150k Pokt. He has to pay running costs for 10 node hardware each month so he is incentivized to sell some of his rewards to pay for expenses. After Stake-weighted job chances, Kevin can only pay running costs of a single node hardware while expecting his earnings to be 10 nodes worth of rewards since his single node is 10 times more likely to get jobs due to the increased stake.
Kevin can also now spin up a new node with his earnings and compound his earnings to this new node until it hits 150k stake limit. His running costs are decreased %90 on his first node so he is more incentivized now to restake instead of selling his rewards.
In any way, predictable rewards and easily calculable risk-reward decisions are still a long way ahead since Pocket network is still in it’s infancy. But I believe these suggested mechanisms would be suitable even for maturity phases. Also, I believe stake-weighted job chances would be fair way to increase stake limit without hurting people who already has 15k nodes who can’t afford more.