Divi Beta Notes: 5-tier Masternodes

Divi has entered the home stretch with our limited beta next week.  Since I finally have some breathing room, I thought that I'd share some of what we've been doing and where we're going.

One of Divi’s most progressive features is our tiered masternode system, which enables five levels of affordability:  

• Diamond - 10,000,000 Divi
• Platinum - 3,000,000 Divi
• Gold - 1,000,000 Divi
• Silver - 300,000 Divi
• Copper - 100,000 Divi

Note:  The Divi community has voted to have a 100:1 split as part of the final release of our main net.  With today's Divi price of ~$3.00, this means that a copper masternode will require ~$3,000 -- a very reasonable masternode entry price with even lower tiers possible in the foreseeable future.

Masternodes were originally created by Dash to incorporate additional  functionality ("InstantSend" and "PrivateSend") to their network. These  days, Dash masternodes are virtually unaffordable due to the coin's  rising price; new users are therefore locked out of increased returns  and voting in Dash's ecosystem. We have many ideas for new functionality that masternodes  could provide – and will be announcing some of the most exciting  possibilities shortly (think artificial and collective intelligence).  The fees for this new functionality will not only fund the increased  returns of masternodes – but will also drive increased purchasing of  Divi, thus advancing the overall network value for all participants.  PIVX’s see-saw algorithm has been enhanced to adjust the relative  populations of the various tiers of masternodes as necessary to support  the demand for each tier’s added functionality. In addition, we are introducing the opportunity for multiple people  to fund a given masternode, with the rewards being distributed according  to their relative funding percentages. However, the see-saw algorithm  can temporarily disable this for new masternodes of a given tier if its  relative population becomes too high. Unfortunately for us, the code relied far too heavily on the assumptions of:  

• A single type of masternode
• Funded by only one wallet
• With a hard-coded value of 10,000 (in two different forms in a half-dozen places)

Fortunately for everyone, we radically rewrote the code for core parts of the masternode system:  

• Massively simplifying the set-up procedure and removing activemasternode.cpp & .h;
• Refactoring masternode.cpp & .h, masternodeman.cpp & .h and  masternode-payments.cpp & .h to roughly one-third their previous  size and an order of magnitude faster speed
• And making minor but critical changes to init.cpp, main.cpp and miner.cpp.

Our plan is to conceptually simplify Divi and further optimize our code for speed, maintainability and future enhancements.   

This post is also published on the Divi blog (obviously ;-)