Upgrade to 2.0.0 will force a minimum active bid of 10_000 CSPR - Why?

Validators
1

I’m very concerned about this change here with 2.0.0:

That affects EVERYONE who has an active bid below 10_000 CSPR.

According to this change the minimum active bid for each validating node must be a >= 10_000 CSPR.

At the current price this roughly equals $150 - this can be more or less, ofc → a few hours ago it topped at ~3.4 Cents so it would have been ~$340).

I also quickly checked active validators and there are a few below this limit incl. “unknown” validators. I’ve also not seen that this IMO big change was published or explained.

I’m also concerned about this part:

Withdrawing one’s bid to an amount strictly less than the value specified will be treated as a full unbond of a validator and their associated delegators

Does this mean that if someone withdraws the bid resulting in an active bid of eg 9_999 or only 1 CSPR it will be equal to withdrawing 100% of the bid with immediate effect which will result in becoming inactive and basically losing all delegators and there is no way of return?

What if someone has automated scripts running or doesn’t know about this change and will lose all delegators suddenly because of this?

That sounds like a horrible idea and I still did not get any explanation why this is suddenly necessary.

I know about the various links and articles discussing the minimum bid of 10_000 CSPR to stop add_bid attacks but I’m not aware of any discussion why this 10_000 CSPR should be the new minimum “forever”.

1 Like
2

Hi!

It’s been communicated by the protocol devs that this is to prevent resource attacks on the auction contract.

It’s been softly enabled with 2.0.0, cleaning the bids only once after the upgrade, and then only applying a deactivation in case of dropping below the 10K minimum bid, to be fully enabled with the next patch release, bringing the behavior you describe above.

Some guards to protect the validators have been implemented on casper-client, to be released in a few days, before the next protocol upgrade.

The full unbond behavior on excess withdrawal is also being reverted with the next patch release at the protocol level. (It will just give an error as before, instead of triggering a full unbond.)

If these seem still not enough for the validators after the release/upgrade, we, the validators, can ask for more guards at the protocol level.