Fractional pricing makes staking more lucrative than providing

[figurestudios]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When fractional pricing comes around, staking will be more lucrative than providing at some prices. This will change with inflation going down, but it will always be an issue the more you divide the uakt. Here's the example for APR took today against 1/3 uakt:

5 + (0.423 * 12 * 1 / 3)  =  6.692
5 * 1.3397                =  6.699

Describe the solution you'd like I thought about a few different ways to fix this issue:

• Give rewards equivalent to the staking APR to providers directly. However, this makes a loophole as someone could set up their own provider node just to get rewards with no 21-day withdrawal period.
• Have collateral be returned 21 days after the provider wants it to be returned, and give rewards similar to staking rewards as normal on the provider earnings. This has its own problems, as what if the provider wants to close their deployments and get their collateral back, as they can right now?
• Have collateral scale down. This has no issues or loopholes from what I can tell and makes it possible to lower the collateral to make it worthwhile providing for fractional pricing.
• Have collateral be optional. This would change a lot, most notably the total lockup of the entire network. While some people say that collateral implies trust, I personally think that it implies that they too are invested in the project - as there is no penalty for the provider to close a deployment.

[hydrogen18]

Just want to clarify here: the number 5 is the bid deposit in AKT correct?

[figurestudios]

@hydrogen18 yes that's correct. Sorry for the late reply