HIP 44: Witness Reward Decay

[hiptron]

• Author(s): @abhay
• Start Date: 2021-10-07
• Category: Technical, Economic
• Original HIP PR: HIP draft: Witness Reward Decay #292
• Tracking Issue: this

Summary and Motivation

As Proof-of-Coverage continues to be improved, the community has proposed several improvements to continue to incentivize wide rollout of new Helium Hotspot coverage while addressing over-rewarding due to density and or arbitrage. One effective way to address over-rewarding is create soft limits on witness earnings through decaying witness reward units.

Rendered view

https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/master/0044-witness-decay.md

[PaulVMo]

As mentioned on Discord, you may want to consider scaling the decay function based on the actual length of an epoch. The target length of an epoch is 30 blocks; however, in practice it varies considerably due to failed elections.

[vincenzospaghetti]

The discussion channel was closed in the Helium Discord, but this HIP remains open for authors to come back to. Once it is revisited, we will open a new discussion channel.