Cyber Republic Weekly Update 23

CYBER REPUBLIC Weekly Update/Issue 22
If Yipeng Su was really interested in hosting 10% of all nodes in total, would it be detrimental
to the ecosystem?
Cons:
Being in a leadership role, as someone close to the design of the DPoS process, makes running
10 nodes seem like a potential conflict of interest. Someone who understands the inner
workings of a system is more likely to be able to manipulate the system. Thus, running
supernodes, especially so many, could increase concerns that his actions could hurt the entire
ecosystem’s reputation.
Another argument against, is that decentralization would reduce significantly. Since people
from different countries and backgrounds would be available to run their own nodes, taking
these opportunities away from them and leaving more power in the hands of the CR leadership
would make all connected projects to the CR seem manipulated.
Essentially, the damage to trust and unity within the ecosystem could be harmed.
Pros:
Yipeng Su is a trusted member in the Cyber Republic ecosystem. He is personally vested in the
success of the ecosystem and the assumption is that he would never intentionally harm the
ecosystem as few people would be harmed more than himself.
The fact is that anyone can run as many Supernodes as they want, if they can obtain the votes.
Just as Alliances have accumulated nodes and agreed to vote for each other, decentralization is
the ability to form and create organization in whatever form the community is willing to
support. If one individual person obtains the votes needed to run 10 separate individual nodes,
in the spirit of decentralization, this could be seen as a win because something unlikely has
happened: the majority of the community has agreed to vote for an individual to run 10 nodes.
Con:
But what if it isn’t the majority? What if a small number of whales have enough votes to control
the entire ecosystem’s consensus? There are three ELA wallets with 1+ million ELA in them.
There are 17 six-figure ELA wallets spanning 100,000 to 612,000 ELA in each. What if these wallets
collaborated to vote for their own Supernodes so that the entire rest of the community’s votes
mean essentially nothing? Is this really how the CR Consensus was designed? These addresses
make up approximately 7.6 million ELA total. A mere couple dozen wallets could shift the votes
in any direction, especially if they were unified.
Let’s move from the pro versus con model into discussion:
So, when such a small population of individuals hold so much control, how can this type of
manipulation be prevented? The point of the Cyber Republic is to be community run and built
on community consensus, but if the balance of power is that a couple dozen own 23% of the
entire supply of ELA, and 50% of the circulating supply at this current time, isn’t this similar to a
51% attack? Isn’t this frightening?
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