Make the token staking and incentive system clear

[mhluongo]

[mhluongo]

Staked providers

• Lock up funds with a minimum 2-week withdrawal time
• Can participate in random beacon for chance to operate a new keep
• If chosen, can operate a node in a new keep, making money per-block as well as per-operation for their unused compute and network capacity
• Can receive any "burned" funds from bad shutdowns

Providers operating nodes

• Put up a security deposit
• Lose the deposit in case of losing a correctness challenge to tattle-tale peers
• Lose the deposit in case of proven collusion to tattle-tale peers
• Lose the deposit in case of downtime to tattle-tale peers
• Lose outstanding payment in case of an abort (whole-keep)

Paying clients

• Put down a deposit for a keep's service for at least X blocks in advance
• Can pay more per-block to require larger security deposits from nodes

[mhluongo]

We have some other tools to punish misbehaving providers, including requiring a larger deposit from them than the rest of the nodes in a keep (using their stake public key as identity to attach reputation), as well as "kicking them out", meaning they are removed from the pool of candidate operators until they withdraw and re-stake. It's not yet clear where / how those punishments should be deployed, since it's already incredibly expensive to try to cheat.

One interesting angle would be to give each node's operator in an aborted keep a "black mark". When that operator next joins a keep, the black mark requires that they pay a larger portion of the total keep deposit.

That way, even if we can't always tell which node led to an aborted keep (open problem), we can still punish those that are statistically inclined to downtime.