25% of delegates don't even publish price feeds
29% of the 100% pay rate delegates don't publish feeds
That really sucks!
Three of the 100% pay rate delegates ranked in the top half run software at least 2 revisions out of date
If that was the case, they wouldn't sign blocks at all. I guess they just forgot to publish their new version.
I for myself updated the version of one of my delegates just yesterday ..
Ten of the 100% delegates have questionable reliability (less than 98% reliability rating)
That measure might not be fair at all considering we had some outages that were
not the delegates' fault (e.g. last december). Hence, delegates that are longer
part of the top 101 necessarily have a lower reliability.
I think a reasonable "reliability" measure should consider a moving average
over the last x weeks. (reasonable value for x has to be determined)
80% of the top 10 delegates (see below) earn 100% pay rate
Isn't that obvious? People working hard for the ecosystem get the most votes?
I have to ask, do BitShares delegates take their role seriously? Do the
shareholders? On the positive side, we have seen action taken rather quickly to
remove poorly performing delegates, once they are brought to the attention of
the community.
Let's do the math: 3% of 50 BTS per block signed is about 130 BTS a day and
gives rougly $40 a month.
That hardly pays for
a) the machine
b) the time you need to for updates
c) the stress involved with running a delegate 24/7
d) the time you need to keep yourself up to date
e) the time and resources you need to maintain your feeds, payouts, reliability
... not considering the fees you need to pay for feed publishing.
So, now I have to ask you: Are you not satisfied about how awesome this
community is running their delegates despite the fact that it is by far not
profitable for them?
However, the math above holds true for 3% delegates but I am too no so
impressed by the performance of most 100% delegates.
I am rather concerned however of the very limited discussion surrounding the
heart & soul of the BitShares ecosystem, DPoS. Although full disclosure of DPoS
2.0 has yet been revealed, neither have the details about BitAssets and yet
that topic is being discussed at length. Why?
This leads me to believe the majority of our community is focused on trading
and profit rather than the underlying facilities that allow that to occur.
Trading is important .. very important .. it provides liquitdity!
It makes me wonder if the voter apathy and overall lack of concern about the
fundamentals of DPoS indicate an inherent weakness in its viability as a
mechanism to sustain an effective and efficient crypto ecosystem.
... remains to be seen. BitShares is still an experiment ... though I would say
it is on it's way to succeed.
I am however grateful to BM & the dev staff for their dedication to thinking
about the underlying infrastructure and the innovation that will hopefully
balance out the tradeoffs between a reliable and high performance blockchain
network and the elements of it that will attract people to use it. So I remain
cautiously optimistic.
And that's your right to do.
Thanks anyway for your analysis.