One of the oldest problems for the cryptocurrencies, and peer-to-peer networks in general (see e.g. MojoNation and BitTorrent) is the lack of incentives for running the nodes.
For Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies, the only rewarded activity is mining.
When we are talking about rewarding the nodes, the main question is which activity exactly is about to be rewarded, and then for any option it is possible to come with a lighter
client which is getting the same rewards as others but carry less burden.
Altruistic nature of activities like storing blocks and sending them over the network to help new nodes to bootstrap is a critical limitation to real scalability of p2p network
based blockchains, as with increased requirements less peers would contribute, with just few datacenter based validators in extreme case observed for some blockchains (which is extremely insecure option when it comes to possibility of censorship or network shutdown by authorities).
One of the earliest known attempts in Ergo research to incentivize storing historical UTXO set snapshots as well as suffix of the blockchain is Rollerchains scheme
(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07926), a mining algorithm which is enforcing miners to store said data, as Proof-of-Work solution contains elements
of a UTXO set snapshot some number of blocks ago. This Proof-of-Work scheme wasn’t implemented as storage vs computations tradeoffs were unclear, and big Proof-of-Work solution was required likely for security in this regard. Later on, there was a plan to implement a similar scheme as a smart contract, which is more flexible option, but not clear how to reward participants when all the ERGs are locked in emission contract.
Another observation is that most of DePIN (& AI) blockchains which are trying to reward participants for sharing some resources (storage, bandwidth, GPU or CPU time, etc), have issues with tokenomics, which is quite expected, as rewarding network peers with speculatve asset has multiple issues which are hard to resolve.
I dont think any new tokens are needed for rewarding activities in Ergo network as well as other p2p networks, agent-to-agent interactions, and so on. We already have smart reserve asset, Ergo, along with trust-minimized derivatives (stablecoins etc), and this is enough. The solution is to use Basis based micropayments. It would allow for:
- provide some amount of services in credit (similar to BitTorrent, where you can download some data before the need to share it). For example, a new node joined the network may
have credit limit enough to download blockchain, but then it has to pay (maybe by earning via sharing) - do mutual credit clearing offchain
- redeem from on-chain reserve only when enough collected (but pay offchain immediately)
- not hard to make payments private (like done in Chaumian eCash)
In this proposal, nodes would get paid in form of micropayments for serving API requests (e.g. nodes with extra indices providing data to wallets) or p2p activities (including optional additional services on top of Ergo p2p network). There is no any token issuance, so no issues with tokenomics etc. The same solution could be used for other p2p networks, agent-2-agent payments and so on.
Contributors to Basis are still needed! Please join the chat https://t.me/chaincashtalks !