It took me a few reads before I felt like I grok’d it, but here was the bit that confused me.
Originally in this bit:
I was thinking about “break-even” in terms of either eth or USD for running the node. You have to pay server costs, there are other ways to invest, you have to pay gas costs, etc. So, after getting your T token rewards, I would expect that you would look at the price oracle for T to USD, and then be able to say “I earned $1200 this month”, and then that would let you know if you were “breaking even” or not. Then, you compare that to other investment opportunities to decide if the T network is a good risk-adjusted place to put your money.
But then, the actual math does all of it’s APY calculation strictly in T tokens. The yield is calculated as inflation rate / staking rate, which further boils down to target_yield * max(staking_rate, constant) / staking_rate
The important bit here is that none of these calculations seem to touch the outside world, or adjust for how I would traditionally account for “break-even costs”.
That said, I can see how, by making sure that rather than giving out fixed token emissions, we give out dynamic token emissions based on the stake_rate, that would help out the little guy, relatively, and thus help with the centralization of capital.
Let me know if anything I’m saying is totally off-base!