Centralisation of importance with major merchants

In the distant future where nem has become adopted by the mainstream and all the googles and Amazon's use nem for all their financial transactions, could they theoretically build up too much importance? Could they do so many transactions with so many people that they become too important? Would it be possible to have a scaling difficulty for importance? Ie. Once you get to say 20% importance, a transaction that would normally give you a gain of say 0.01% importance is capped at a gain of 0.007%. A 30% reduction on gained importance from transactions, and the 30% being redistributed among everyone below the cap. Once you get to 35%, the reduction increases to 50% and so on. A tax of sorts on the elites that is redistributed to the rest of the economy. Not only would this create a more egalitarian economy but it would make 51% attacks magnitudes more difficult to pull off.

As far as I know NEM is designed to make the rich poorer and the poor more richer (as long as the poor are trying hard).  An "Amazon" would in theory have so much money that they would be hurt by it no matter how many transactions they did. 

There is a way to game the system by splitting up their funds into lots of little accounts and having lots of transactions.  But that comes at some expense and risk. 

As far as I know, the best position to be in where you get the most bang for your buck is to be a kind of small account but that has lots and lots of transactions. 

If an "Amazon" wants to do this, well then, the result would be they would be running lots of nodes which would help the network. 

Again, this is just as far as I understand it.  I could be completely wrong.

I hope that NEM isn't made to penalize success like our current system does.  I can understand limiting rewards some but not penalizing outright.

nobody gets penalized.  If you have 50,000,000 XEM in you account nobody will ever take them away.  They will always be yours and you will still get extra POI power for them.  So the rich person is still getting a bonus.  Just not as much as the little guy.     


But if you took the power of 5,000 nodes sending transactions each with a vested amount of 10,000 XEM, those 5,000 accounts will have earned more fees from harvesting then just one account with 50 million.  And rightfully so.  In NXT on whale could run his 50,000,000 NXT on one raspi.  He isn't giving a lot of node strength to the network.  In NEM that same 50,000,000 will give us 5,000 nodes if each has a balance of 10,000. 

It is a very well thought out system.


As far as I know NEM is designed to make the rich poorer and the poor more richer (as long as the poor are trying hard).  An "Amazon" would in theory have so much money that they would be hurt by it no matter how many transactions they did.  ....


How so ?
Why would you assume that ?


[s]As far as I know NEM is designed to make the rich poorer and the poor more richer (as long as the poor are trying hard).  An "Amazon" would in theory have so much money that they would be hurt by it no matter how many transactions they did.  ....[/s]


How so ?
Why would you assume that ?


I hadn't thought that sentence through very well.  Please let me take it back.  :)

Once you get to say 20% importance, a transaction that would normally give you a gain of say 0.01% importance is capped at a gain of 0.007%.


PoI does not work like that, you can't say in any way, that transaction gives you any GAIN. It'll be more clear when WP is out.

On a sidenote... 20% of importance? I doubt something like this will ever happen, for a very simple reason.
Keep in mind that at the beginning, most of people will start with 2.5 ‱ (basis points)... so to have 20% of importance you'd need 400 stakes...

(We agreed on POI, not PoI^^)




As far as I know NEM is designed to make the rich poorer and the poor more richer (as long as the poor are trying hard).  An "Amazon" would in theory have so much money that they would be hurt by it no matter how many transactions they did.  …


How so ?
Why would you assume that ?

Yes, I wonder were that came from. Although it might not be a bad idea…

(We agreed on POI, not PoI^^)




As far as I know NEM is designed to make the rich poorer and the poor more richer (as long as the poor are trying hard).  An "Amazon" would in theory have so much money that they would be hurt by it no matter how many transactions they did.  ....


How so ?
Why would you assume that ?

Yes, I wonder were that came from. Although it might not be a bad idea...


A lot of money hurting your imortance would imho be a bad idea.
I suggested to cap importance for one account but devs didn't like it.


(We agreed on POI, not PoI^^)




As far as I know NEM is designed to make the rich poorer and the poor more richer (as long as the poor are trying hard).  An "Amazon" would in theory have so much money that they would be hurt by it no matter how many transactions they did.  ....


How so ?
Why would you assume that ?

Yes, I wonder were that came from. Although it might not be a bad idea...


A lot of money hurting your imortance would imho be a bad idea.
I suggested to cap importance for one account but devs didn't like it.


We didn't want to cap importance because we want importance to be approximately invariant upon account splitting. Also, once an account harvests a block, it takes time before they will harvest again, so you don't want people with high importance to split their accounts up.

In the distant future where nem has become adopted by the mainstream and all the googles and Amazon's use nem for all their financial transactions, could they theoretically build up too much importance? Could they do so many transactions with so many people that they become too important? Would it be possible to have a scaling difficulty for importance? Ie. Once you get to say 20% importance, a transaction that would normally give you a gain of say 0.01% importance is capped at a gain of 0.007%. A 30% reduction on gained importance from transactions, and the 30% being redistributed among everyone below the cap. Once you get to 35%, the reduction increases to 50% and so on. A tax of sorts on the elites that is redistributed to the rest of the economy. Not only would this create a more egalitarian economy but it would make 51% attacks magnitudes more difficult to pull off.


One of the terms in the PoI calculation is net outflow of NEM. So if merchants collect more NEM than they send out, they will actually lose importance from that, so it should have a dampening effect.

Interesting… Do harvested nen count as part of "net inflow"