Went digging into why Dusk specifically rewards voters for backing candidates from earlier, already-failed iterations — and the mechanics behind that incentive go deeper than the basic three-step description suggests.
The three steps themselves are simple on paper: Proposal generates a candidate, Validation checks it, Ratification confirms the check was real. What's not obvious is how Dusk gets later committees to actually bother reviving an earlier iteration's candidate instead of just waiting for a fresh one.
Do the math on the reward split specifically. Dusk's own engineering notes describe the Block Certificate paying generators 90% of the previous block's reward, with the remaining 10% split across voters — divided into 64 quotas, one per committee credit, so a voter with more stake-weighted credits earns proportionally more of that slice.
Here's the part that actually surprised me. That 10% voter-reward wasn't always paid out this way. Dusk's own update explains it was added specifically to encourage block generators in future iterations to vote on previous-iteration candidates — meaning the system needed a deliberate financial incentive before committees reliably bothered recovering an already-timed-out block instead of just letting it die.
So a failed iteration on Dusk isn't a dead end by accident. It stays recoverable because Dusk built a specific payment into the protocol to make recovery worth a committee's effort, not because committees would naturally do it for free.
Paying committees to salvage failed attempts, or quietly admitting the first try usually needs a financial nudge to get finished properly? Still chewing on that one.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
The three steps themselves are simple on paper: Proposal generates a candidate, Validation checks it, Ratification confirms the check was real. What's not obvious is how Dusk gets later committees to actually bother reviving an earlier iteration's candidate instead of just waiting for a fresh one.
Do the math on the reward split specifically. Dusk's own engineering notes describe the Block Certificate paying generators 90% of the previous block's reward, with the remaining 10% split across voters — divided into 64 quotas, one per committee credit, so a voter with more stake-weighted credits earns proportionally more of that slice.
Here's the part that actually surprised me. That 10% voter-reward wasn't always paid out this way. Dusk's own update explains it was added specifically to encourage block generators in future iterations to vote on previous-iteration candidates — meaning the system needed a deliberate financial incentive before committees reliably bothered recovering an already-timed-out block instead of just letting it die.
So a failed iteration on Dusk isn't a dead end by accident. It stays recoverable because Dusk built a specific payment into the protocol to make recovery worth a committee's effort, not because committees would naturally do it for free.
Paying committees to salvage failed attempts, or quietly admitting the first try usually needs a financial nudge to get finished properly? Still chewing on that one.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
Smart incentive design
Needs a financial nudge
5 hr(s) left