I’ve written a draft, but would like confirmation before putting it in, since I feel it doesn’t alleviate the ‘painting a worrysome picture’ of centralization.
Proposed bit to add for ‘Mining Centralization’: New proposed addition in post 34 below
There’s an interesting mechanism to balance the resource availability of the network, which relates to the ‘safecoin farming speed’, ie how rapidly individual vaults can farm safecoin. We already know that safecoin is awarded to individual vaults based on how much resource that vault provides. But to minimize the impact of giant vaults, the reward is balanced according to the average resource provided across all vaults. The ‘optimum’ earning rate is achieved when a vault provides 20% above the network average. Providing more than that results in rapidly diminishing returns. This sets a very interesting consideration to farmers when provisioning resources. Read more about safecoin farming speed on the MaidSafe blog, and the farm speed algorithm discussion on the forum.
I have my doubts that this algorithm will prevent centralization. This algorithm incentivizes big farmers splitting their resources into many smaller ones, which does not affect centralization. It also encourages continual growth, seeking to always be slightly above average, thus continually raising the average eventually pushing the small players further down the sigmoid curve away from optimum earning. It’s easy to imagine that eventually the average will be so high that no small farmer will have any chance of ‘climbing the sigmoid’ to viability.
The farm speed algorithm is a good one, but only manages the size, distribution and structure of resources supplied to the network, not centralization.
If there’s no clear errors or concerns, I’ll add this to the 'Mining Centralization section. The ‘20% above average on the sigmoid curve’ idea is not trivial, so I want to check I have interpreted the consequences correctly.