In the past, when applying to become a smartBCH validator, it was possible to stake a certain amount of BCH, but the lower bound of this amount can be as low as zero. At the same time, the amount of punishment for a validator’s failure is limited to the rewards of the current epoch, and additional penalties are set to zero. This low-requirement strategy has attracted people to run smartBCH validators, but since there is no penalty, validators do not incur any financial losses even if they are running on servers that are not very reliable or are not well managed. This led to the instability of smartBCH. So we had to change this strategy. Also, the participation of PoW Hash Power in the election of Validators could also lead to instability because BCH’s hash power relative to BTC is too low, and it’s not hard for an attacker’s validators to take up more than 1/3 of the voting power.
SmartBCH will be upgraded with a hard fork at height 11006000 (around August 15), and the following updates will be activated:
1. When applying to become a validator, it must STAKE at least 32BCH, and now those who are already validators need to increase its staked amount to 32BCH.
2. In case of a double-signing failure, you will be fined 8 BCH and lose your validity as a validator immediately.
3. If the number of signed blocks is less than 4320 out of 7200, it is considered to be an offline failure, and you will be fined 2BCH, and will be immediately disqualified as a validator.
4. Validator can no longer rely on PoW hash power to be elected, i.e. switching to full PoS.
If you wish to be elected as validator at the time of this hard fork, please STAKE enough SBCH before August 15th and contact us. Although smartBCH does not have a block reward similar to the main chain, we would like to try our best to give node operators enough incentive through community donations and other means. Please contact us for details.
This staking strategy is implemented in smartbch’s v0.5.0-pre version. Please help us review the code. If you have any suggestions to optimize the staking strategy or tune the parameters, please let us known. We hope to reach consensus before August 15 and leave the current single-validator mode.
Thank you for your support and understanding, the smartBCH DEV team will continue to maintain and optimize the smartBCH ecosystem.
