[Money Supply] Block reward too high?

[ca98am79]

I assume the block reward was decided as a proportion of MAX_MONEY, however over half of MAX_MONEY was airdropped to developers and reserved names, and a majority of this has never been claimed and doesn't appear ever will be claimed.

I am creating this issue because I feel that it is possible the block reward is too high. Miners have an abundance of coins they may need to sell in order to recoup expenses, which drives the price of $HNS down. The price going down could disincentivize other miners and drive the hash rate down and make Handshake less secure.

Maybe the block reward should be lowered ahead of the halvening? I assume this would require a hard fork.

[pinheadmz]

Reducing the mining reward would actually be a soft fork. That's because miners can always generate LESS then they are allowed to (just not more, obviously) note the "greater than" here throws an error, invalidating the block:

https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/blob/03a306b9c9005af94015875d9cb7edff8d401f6d/lib/blockchain/chain.js#L866-L871

This means only a majority of miners are needed to enforce such a rule. At this time, it basically means you only need to convince F2Pool ( 😦 ). Of course we wouldn't want to waste mining effort by invalidating work so we would want 100% miner adoption of this fork if the community agrees with it.

I ran my covenant stats script this morning at height 123841 and this is the current distribution of actions and their values on chain:

123841 Map(16) {
  'unspendable' => 33,
  'COINBASE' => Map(2) { 'count' => 123842, 'value' => 247684000000000 },
  'FAUCET' => Map(2) { 'count' => 1576, 'value' => 238338430918722 },
  'AIRDROP' => Map(2) { 'count' => 6296, 'value' => 26739076200944 },
  'NONE' => Map(2) { 'count' => 7393390, 'value' => 60111419818884344 },
  'OPEN' => Map(2) { 'count' => 5118291, 'value' => 0 },
  'BID' => Map(2) { 'count' => 8025203, 'value' => 334178643396488 },
  'CLAIM' => Map(2) { 'count' => 4404, 'value' => 11686314387577 },
  'REVEAL' => Map(2) { 'count' => 7894987, 'value' => 144466315007434 },
  'REDEEM' => Map(2) { 'count' => 2859440, 'value' => 45177836374368 },
  'REGISTER' => Map(2) { 'count' => 4716950, 'value' => 26163122404694 },
  'UPDATE' => Map(2) { 'count' => 181443, 'value' => 20369639563481 },
  'TRANSFER' => Map(2) { 'count' => 91636, 'value' => 5367740774208 },
  'FINALIZE' => Map(2) { 'count' => 88539, 'value' => 5151173436279 },
  'RENEW' => Map(2) { 'count' => 221452, 'value' => 9749990670878 },
  'REVOKE' => Map(2) { 'count' => 26, 'value' => 37980000 }
}

So this means that roughly the current money supply has been generated like this: Mining: 47.5% Airdrop including sponsor and creator funds: 50% Reserved name claims: 2.5%

Also keep in mind the halvening is only about 10 months away, and miners will start generating only 1000 HNS per block at that point.