I believe there is a need for everyone in this conversation to clarify what constitutes a side deal. For instance, does running a Jito-client count as a side deal? If not, what does?
Please note that I have not declared whether I will vote in favor of this proposal; in fact, after consulting with my team, I am likely to abstain. The mention of the “charity” was intended to clarify that validators operate as businesses and have expenses to cover.
When a validator above states “charity” you need to look in the mirror because you are the charity with peoples delegations, honestly the networks users owe you all absolutely nothing. If 75% of validators are not profitible that is your issue not the users. Ironically this is also being pushed before firedancer which negates your stances on incentives. Everyone knows the bottleneck is hardware requirements.
I think many seriously underestimate the potential monthly costs for a validator. Infrastructure is expensive to maintain in order to fulfill validator duties effectively. This includes not just running a basic server but also managing failover infrastructure, upgrade-servers, Jito-relayers, private RPCs - for monitoring solutions, among other things, and I’m not even staring to mention DevOps and labour cost. Additionally, during the bear market - not long ago, an average validator (with an average stake of 100K SOL, for instance) encountered enormous costs compared to the inflation rewards received for performing their duties partly due to the costs of voting, and when priority fees did not exist. During these times, most validators suffered losses and covered these expenses with cash if they had it, or by taking out loans. Now people think validators should run on tiny margins and forget about previous challenges. This above not really relevant to the proposal, but just to explain what validators do, and what challenges they face. For example, If you had used the profitability calculator six months ago, it would likely show a profit loss in most cases, unless you were running an under-spec validator with no failover, etc., which is harmful to the network.
Our position on this proposal is clear—we do not see the benefits for the network, but we do see benefits for both stakers and validators, as mentioned in the above post: doubling the priority fees will help us maintain a 0% fee plus 0% MEV fee for much longer and therefore stakers will continue to receive all the MEV profit share.
The end results will be validators shoving blocks to create fake high PFs for users since they stand to benefit exponentially in this circumstance.
Why don’t they do it now? its only 50% fees burn now.
Not essentially stealing a deflation aspect people bought into solana for, every user will suffer with higher inflation, doesnt matter how much you undermine the amounts, it still remains a fact.
I believe the change will not significantly impact inflation figures, as the amount of fees burned is minimal compared to the inflation rewards from the total stake.
@brian.long, I don’t understand how a validator can control PF if this setting is on the client, and the validator does not even know the list of transactions it receives in the leader slot under normal circumstances, it cannot choose, unless running some sort of modified software.