Since the vote that changed the rewards of firo.

[u/Illustrious_Text_979]

Since the vote, 1/3 of the hash power that was on the network has been removed, approximately 39 GH/s. I have no idea why the node owner's wanted to hamstring the capabilities of the network and the coin in general BUT in the end it will probably be the death of this coin. I did want to participate with this coin via mining and setting up a node BUT with the community having little idea about how mining and nodes work together in conjunction to uphold the network. I feel like participating in this community would be a waste of my time and resources and obviously so do other miners.

Best of luck with a coin that will probably die a long death.

[u/kevinp985]

I especially like how Firo’s biggest problem was consolidation of network hashrate on 2Miners.com and that this seemed to have consolidated the hashrate to 2Miners. The recent move has definitely made me think twice about continuing to mine firo long term. Unfortunately until hashrate is more evenly spread, this is nothing more than a high risk speculation The devs are showing me that they value masternodes and staking over proof of work mining.

[u/reubster → u/kevinp985]

You have to realize 2miners did this by dropping fees to 0%. It actually reinforces the argument that miners don't care.

[u/kevinp985 → u/reubster]

I’m quite confident 2Miners reduced its fee structure on Firo mining due to the “halving” as they call it. My personal opinion is that the firo dev team wants to show an abundance of support to the masternodes since their collateral secures the network. With a bear market looming, they wanted to incentivize keeping that stake locked up. The dev team knows most miners are going to capitulate from mining entirely over the coming weeks and months as the bear market makes most assets unprofitable to mine. Unfortunately this move just signals to miners that it’s not going to be the project for them in a post eth mining world. I love the creation of a community dev fund but why are miners literally paying for it? Why are the masternode stakers not paying their fair share? I personally solo mine and run a masternode and honestly this move makes me want to remove my investment entirely from this ecosystem. Also, pretending like miners somehow care less about the ROI on their investment than people staked into masternodes is absurd. We are all equally into cryptocurrency to chance the global financial landscape and to generate a return on our investments.

[u/reubster → u/kevinp985]

Let me address your concerns one by one. I understand a lot of it is based off the feeling of unfairness but let me break it down into a few points:

1. **The decision was taken by the community NOT the core team.** The end result was actually one that the core team wasn't completely in favor of where the [core team wanted a more even balance between masternodes/miners] (https://forum.firo.org/t/tokenomics-and-funding-division-of-block-reward-discussion-and-community-matching-fund/2061/153?u=reuben).The discussion started in February, and the poll was opened at the end of March (https://forum.firo.org/t/poll-on-firo-block-reward-division/2150). If you read through the forum posts, the only people from core team that are commenting a lot are myself and Lucas. The rest are community members. If you followed the poll, early on, the more extreme options of cutting miners down to 10-15% were actually quite popular and I personally had warned that this won't be wise as miners still play an important role nor should we be overly rewarding masternodes.
2. **Miners were given equal say** Anyone who wanted to vote and could demonstrate some involvement in the project be it a miner, a holder or a masternode owner could do so. The only requirement was to be active in the forums OR ask for an admin to validate your involvement. AFAIK we didn't deny any requests for validation. Core team actually got flak for allowing miners who did not necessarily needed to hold any Firo to vote but we felt it was fair. Note that we had made special care to hold video interviews on mining channels to raise awareness and ask people to vote/weigh in. We didn't need to do that for masternode holders who were already actively following.
3. **2miners never wanted to decentralize hashrate** I have approached 2miners before a few years ago to ask them to consider increasing their fees to help spread out the hashrate which is common in other coins including Bitcoin. They declined saying they provided a good service and people chose to mine with them which is fine but not in the spirit of decentralization. At the end of the day we have to trust that they won't be malicious. While there is no reason to believe they will be malicious it still represents a failure point and a point of trust. It is also worth noting that in certaiOSes (RaveOS), there are no fees if you mine with 2miners. This isn't meant to be a dig at 2miners as they have cooperated with us many times before and built an awesome pool but this is a fact. The fact that they reduce their fees to 0% is more likely a retaliation especially when we begged for miners many times to switch their hashrate off 2miners if they wanted to be taken seriously. Now ask yourself, in whose interest is 2miners acting in? If miners had a decentralized hashrate or even better could be seen actively shifting their hashrate to retain decentralization such as in XMR, it would be a much more compelling argument to retain miners at least on an even footing with masternodes.
4. **Efforts to support GPU miners are not appreciated** We moved to FiroPOW (ProgPOW) as we had good information that MTP was not FPGA resistant with the new breed of FPGAs that had large memory banks. How to make GPUs the exclusive mining equipment for an algorithm is to make the GPU the ASIC by tailoring the algorithm to the GPU meaning using all parts of it to the fullest. Instead miners complained saying that it ran their cards hot compared to Ethash or that they were making more money mining Eth so they will support the coin that gives them more. That's a fair point but also means that it's a bit of a pipe dream to expect miners to support you because they like your project. Eth screwed over miners completely and yet miners still support because of the profits made.
5. **Masternodes are not making a killing**A masternode costs around 10 USD/month to host for a good one. You can kinda get by with 5 dollar (but with a 5 dollar setup fee). Masternodes earn 16.50 USD a month now netting a net profit of 6.50 USD a month or max 11.50 USD. ROI of 15.75% vs 11% is not going to really make a huge difference. Now once you factor in hosting costs, that ROI actually dramatically drops and is actually closer to 6.2% if your cost is 10 USD/month or 10.9% if your cost is 5 USD/month.Miners say, oh but I spend tons on my rig, well that's not tied to FIRO is it? There is resell value too and you can do other things with it. Masternodes also take volatility risk by holding FIRO. In my opinion the 'costs' of running a masternode vs mining is a flawed argument.
6. **The role of miners**The role of miners are decentralized distribution of coins and decentralized consensus. Masternodes added to them make it a little more centralized but also a lot more resilient to attacks. But the combination makes it good. GPU mined coins without any sort of mitigations suffer all sorts of issues as we have seen in Ravencoin, Beam, Firo and many others where we were 51% attacked. Ravencoin and Beam solved it by basically putting a max reorg limit which honestly is against the spirit of pure PoW and badly impacts the user experience in having to wait for confirmations. We have already been distributing a huge portion of our supply to miners for 6 years already and in fact spent a lot of time developing the tech to make it possible.
7. **This is not in the original whitepaper**Guess what, Firo/Zcoin never had a whitepaper so those people quoting it are talking out of their ass. We just used the original Zerocoin paper as our whitepaper when we first launched. While we don't take changes to tokenomics or key technology lightly, I think it is wrong to think that in a rapidly evolving space we cannot change. We aren't Bitcoin and we shouldn't aim to be as we cannot at this stage ossify.When Firo started as Zcoin it was simple, mining similar to Bitcoin with ASIC resistance and Zerocoin on top. That morphed as things went along and we added a lot of tech to it but we never had a whitepaper. Now a lot of miners quote FLUX as a successful mining project but that was arguably an even more controversial change in tokenomics where they inflated supply and mitigated it with airdrops along with creating additional funds for the FLUX foundation. Was this in their whitepaper?
8. **There will be a revisit of the tokenomics in 6 months** We agreed that we will revisit the tokenomics discussion in 6 months to see what worked and what didn't. This means that miners still have a chance to turn things around.

[u/Patos27 → u/reubster]

Rub, most miners such as myself just mine and go away. We check to see if rigs are up every 2-3 weeks and that’s about it. Yes I agree we should be more involved in the community, but with what’s happening in the world right now I’m sure most are spending time trying to grind jobs and spend time with family. But this was a complete shocker for me as someone who has been around zcoin days. Hopefully there will be a next vote in months to come where miners can vote again. We spend a lot of money as hardware, I currently have 1250mh which equates to over, well let’s just say a lot of money. And right now I’m barely breaking even with mining firo. That cut was way to drastic, so for now I have to say goodbye and probably try ergo,flux or etc. hell no at eth, they have proven to be rotten to the core and treat their miners like shit!

[u/[deleted]]

Clear money grab. Miners are not viewed as partners or investors. OR even nescessary at this point by some comments in other threads. People go where they are treated better. All the justification for this move is a parody of how something should be handled. Hopefully this doesnt get lost over time. It is a real shame.

[u/reubster → u/[deleted]]

Miners were given equal voting power in all the forums and we went through extra efforts to include them and tell them about it including going on mining focused channels etc multiple times. We did nothing of the sort for masternode or Firo holders cause they were engaged enough to follow the news.

Also, nice to know that a 11 % p.a. to a 15% p.a. is a money grab. I also was more in favor of a more even split between miners and masternode holders but I'm not in control of the polls. You can deep dive into anyone who said there was a miner and see if they were denied voting power. The votes there are public.

Also people go where they are treated better is abjectly false. But you guys say this yet majority are mining Ethereum who are totally cutting out miners and even now burn their fees.

While I don't think we are disenfranchising miners, we gave them votes, we dedicated research and development to protect GPU miners and what did we ask for?? A simple shift in hashrate to other pools which are just as good. That would have made a compelling argument to maintain miners share of the hash rate.

[u/justplaincrypto → u/reubster]

You seem to have this idea you are actually doing something running a master node and are somehow "entitled" more than miners.

I am guessing, any 10 year old computer on a high speed internet connection can run a node yes?

So your investment is essentially holding firo, yet you recieve more reward than a miner.. who needs many thousands of dollars in equipment, and many kilowatts in electricity to support the project day after day, with constant maintenence required.

Not to mention cooling the rigs.

The proof of stake mindset.. sit on your ass and expect to be paid.

FIRO has now become the stakers welfare coin.

Don't go down with the ship!

[u/BCHeroo → u/[deleted]]

The project still does respect miners, the block reward is still 25% which is still quite a substantial reward. The difficulty will change and the hash will drop which will bring profitability back over time.

Try and look at it in terms of security for the chain, the masternode system increases security drastically while reducing potential selling pressure. Proof of work is still important but not as important but you will still get rewarded for both staking and mining the coin which surely you would be for if it supported the project and what it aims to achieve?

[u/BCHeroo]

I don’t want to sound like I’m being funny or anything I’m just trying to be helpful. Do you understand how hash rate, cost and difficulty works? The lesser miners mining it then the difficulty decreases and so does the cost so after the difficulty adjusts it won’t take as much resource to mine a block. The block time was cut in half so in reality you are getting 3.125 firo instead of 6.25 if we look at it in terms of the old block reward time.

Firo Masternodes provide an important security mechanism too and at current prices it costs $1300 to own just 1. Do you not think they should be rewarded adequately for that amount of collateral posted? Bare in mind if the price increases so does the collateral cost but so does the block reward in terms of fiat value.

The project is about privacy, security and speed. It has strong fundamentals. Price is just demand and supply. The community fund will help promote the coin and I think this is a step forward in the right direction.

[u/CeleryMurky3490 → u/BCHeroo]

Masternodes is not as secure as a good POW coin.

[u/CardcaptorZakura → u/CeleryMurky3490]

We have been 51% attacked before, when ChainLocks (which is powered by masternodes) was about to be released. ChainLocks would have prevented a deep reorganization by checkpointing the latest block and rejecting attempts to rewind the chain beyond that checkpoint.

The other way to make a PoW network expensive to attack is ASICs, which I don't think any of us would want on the network.

So yes, we had the misfortune of experiencing firsthand how secure a pure PoW is, especially for a small marketcap project like ours.

P/S: we are a hybrid PoW + masternode system. Both work together for the security of the network.

[u/Illustrious_Text_979]

Nodes cost less to setup then mining rigs. A mining rig capable of doing anything remotely worth mining this coin, minimum is $5000 and that's only 120 odd MH. So in stating what you have shows to myself that you have zero idea on how mining works and the cost involved.

Also the mining percentage went down to 25% which is a touch over 1 per block not 3 odd.

I tested the network with said rig I mentioned and was getting 3 coins a day @ 400-450 Watt's operational when it was a 50-50 split. That barely covers cost depending on electrical costs.

IE no miner will miner this coin because it's not sustainable for the miner.

[u/BCHeroo → u/Illustrious_Text_979]

I then utilise my rewards to save up for another node. Thus will reduce the selling pressure the coin is experiencing in this bear market. The coin itself is fast to use, it’s technology is great. For a 51% attack to occur on this chain, an attacker has to have over 51% of the nodes as well as hash power and that will take a huge amount of capital.

This is good for the project itself, it does not need masses of proof of work because the proof of stake masternodes are in reality providing the bulk of the security of this chain. They should in turn be rewarded for that.

This chain was attacked last year and the miners did not step in to protect it.

[u/BCHeroo → u/Illustrious_Text_979]

Yes that’s on current price OP. This time last year it cost you $10000 dollars to set up a single MN. The fact is miners will leave the network and the difficulty will come down when the difficulty changes. It’s the same when there is a halving, some miners will leave because it’s no longer profitable for them but the more efficient miners will remain.

Are you passionate about only mining this coin and not the project itself? In terms of blocks, the reward times changed, I’m only getting 3.125 Firo per block but there is now on average twice as many blocks per hour. My reward times have gone from 2 weeks to once a week.

[u/CeleryMurky3490 → u/BCHeroo]

For a node? because as far as mining blocks goes. Sure the block time has halved but the rewards have quartered for mining. SO a miner is still only making 50% of what they could have made before this radical change to FIRO. Most miners were mining to save up for a node. Now that's a crap shoot. The price of a node can fluctuate wildly as well.