The plan for allocating genesis nodes is flawed

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1

Let me start by saying that I don’t believe there is bad intent on behalf of the Enigma team but I have some concerns about the genesis game as it stands.

The genesis game is designed to identify 30 out of the 50 planned nodes for Enigma’s network. The other 20 nodes are reserved for allocation by the Enigma team based on “worth contributions”. There is nothing stopping the team (or perhaps one bad actor on the team) from allocating all 20 nodes to a single person or group. That means that this person/group could control the network with as little as 6 additional nodes won via the genesis game.

Taking this a step further - there are less than 250 wallets allowed to compete in the genesis game due to the token snapshot last August. It stands to reason that the Enigma team owns many of these wallets since they have the resources (ENG) and were prepared for the token snapshot. This means there is a high likelyhood of the Enigma team winning more than 5 nodes in the genesis game.

I’m not saying that Enigma is planning to control a majority of the network but it would be exceedingly easy if they wanted to.

I think a more robust solution would be to add the 20 nodes back into the genesis game AND make them attainable by anyone participating regardless of any ENG they received in the token snapshot. This will remove the risk of centralization with manually allocated nodes and reduce the possibility of a powerful group winning a majority of nodes simply because they had a lot of ENG during the snapshot (distributed among different wallets).

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Does anyone have any thoughts?

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@DontCallMeLarry,

Thanks for raising these points. We hear your concerns. We committed no not staking more than 20% of the network. This is our way to limit our involvement.

Having whitelist spots help us reward activity that supports the network such as participating in preliminary testings.

Regarding your concern about Enigma controlling the network, we can still participate in the Genesis Game and get a top spot if we were to act maliciously.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have other questions

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Will nodes run by Enigma count towards the 50 nodes that are selected by the Gen Game?

Will nodes run by Enigma earn fees/rewards?

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@MrGarbonzo,

  • Enigma is currently running nodes in the testnet and will continue to run nodes through out testnet and mainnet. Whether these nodes will be part of the genesis game scoring or not is not a concrete decision. However it’s important to highlight that we do not aim to prevent successful actors from participating in the network

  • Enigma run nodes are identical to other nodes in the network. They will earn rewards and fees - we probably will re-invest those fees to network development. We may think about creating a dao which receives the rewards and lets the community vote on it. This last part has not yet been finalized and is an idea I have…

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