kianenigma
commented
3 years ago My short answer is keep an eye on these PRs and how they are deployed:
https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/7908 https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/7909 https://github.com/paritytech/substrate/pull/7910
These works will optimize the whole process, allowing potentially many times more nominators to be active. Moreover, I was planning on tweaking some parameters to see if we can allow more nominators (similar to this one) for the next release as a temporary mitigation in favour of Polkadot's stakers.
If you are interested in the matter a bit more:
You might ask why we have this issue in the first place? The answer is that nomination is different from (so called) delegation in the sense that you are not merely replicating/supporting/backing the behaviour of someone else, but rather imposing your own direct opinion on the system as well. This is why typically when you delegate, you name 1 entity (e.g. a validator) whom you wish to support. Whilst in nominating, you provide a list of preferences, and an election process needs to process all of these lists to come up with an optimal set of validators that optimizes a set of goals (which course, serve toward decentralization). At this point it should be clear the supporting an arbitrary large number of nominators is simpy not trivial in a system with constrained resource like a blockchain. This was explained in the original blog post here.
The good news though, is that with Polkadot's sharded design, we are very likely to be able to radically change this, and improve the standard of nomination in the ecosystem, in the foreseeable future. The truth is, as long as the relay chain is busy doing everything for everyone, it is unlikely to be able to allocate a lot of time/blocks to the election processing. The long term vision, however, is to move the entire election process to a separate system parachain. Then, we can safely process a massive number of validators and nominators directly on-chain. Until that happens, we are limited to optimizations such as the above PRs.
As a side note, we've also considered adding the ability to delegate on-chain, as well, next to nomination, to allow smaller staked people to replicate the behaviour of other nominators and still share their rewards. But this will add a lot of complexity, and feels more like taking a step back rather than forward. Moreover, given the plan for a system parachain in the near feature, and other easier optimizations being possible, delegation is likely to be an approach that will neither benefit nominators, nor be reasonable to implement in a timely manner.
But a more worthwhile effort is to move everything toward multi-block processing, and this is indeed the direction of our efforts at the moment. A system parachain that only does election-related work has all the time in the world (quite literally) to process a large number of nominators, it just needs to be smart enough to split the work into multiple blocks. It is very likely that we will start experimenting with multi-block elections even on the relay chain in the future, but that will partly depend on when parachains become available.
This was a brief overview of the technical side of things. Lastly, I want to clarify:
This is becoming a very serious issue because it prevents a lot of people to stake DOTs because the minimal amount has become about 2,500 USD - I am afraid this makes Polkadot almost a "permissioned" network.
I don't expect everyone to know the system in such detail, but since you've asked:
If you nominate with a small amount of DOT, your opinion is actually reflected on choosing the final validator set. The election process is done offchain, and sent back to the relay chain by validators with a set of validators that reflects all of the nominations. Once being sent back to the chain, for the purpose of rewards and slashing bookkeeping, we only trim the smallest staked nominators, to make the solution feasibly processable in one block. Nonetheless, the winner validators do not change based on this trimming, which effectively means from a "centralization of power" point of view, Polkadot is utmost decentralized (even in its rather unoptimized, novice form right now).
Furthermore, recall that all democracy operations are open to be participated therein, without any minimum DOTs (other than existential deposit needed to have an account in the first place).
With that, I want to emphasize that this "minimum DOT to stake" is about reward and slash only, not the actual nomination power that influences the validator election, which is what nomination is all about, from a governance point of view: choosing trustworthy validators based on the average network opinion.
Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that with all the plans noted above, Polkadot will allow more and more (reward-able) nominators as it grows. Again, keep an eye on the above PRs and I hope improvements come soon.
paxelpixel
pmensik
Benny739
andr3
yuzmemak
horaciob
xlc
davidurco
aelesbao
hirschenberger
I am creating this issue because I asked multiple times in various chats, unfortunately without any reply.
I would like to ask what's the status with fixing the off-chain nomination distribution so there's no minimal stake for nominators (it's a bit above 100 DOT at the moment). This is becoming a very serious issue because it prevents a lot of people to stake DOTs because the minimal amount has become about 2,500 USD - I am afraid this makes Polkadot almost a "permissioned" network. I created this issue as a "last resort" since I couldn't get the answer anywhere else - if this is being worked on and when we can expect it to be done. Thanks a lot for the insight!