Not a tech savvy person, but couldn’t Algorand decentralize the network by making or having a dev make a node wallet like Daedalus on Cardano?
Algorand states that you don’t need much computing power so what if they struck a deal with a computer maker to pre-install nodes on their computers.(Microsoft, Apple (doubt it), or Lenovo, HP or Dell (since those 3 hold the top 3 spots in market share)
Maybe the deal would be one of them would be allowed to run a relay node and then they would allow preinstalled participation nodes for Algorand on all their computers. Maybe money has to be involved to get them on board.
Or Algorand Foundation could team up with a VC to try to acquire a small computer maker.
preinstalled nodes running in background would help with people who want to run nodes but wouldn’t have to set it up. this would help with decentralizing network without having to incentivize.
This this this this. Maybe not relays, but I’m honestly baffled why we don’t have at least installers with a GUI for participation nodes. Really, how many more nodes would pop up if installing them would be noob proof? I bet that many of us have capable hardware laying around, but just lack the know how to install one on an OS they never used using only the command line. I know it because it took me hours to set it up even following the excellent guides since I had no clue what command inputs would do.
Please, consider making at least installers for linux/windows/iOS.
One important point to consider is that while participation nodes do not require a lot of computation power, they need to be online 100% of the time and to be connected to a reliable Internet connection.
In addition, there is still a need for maintenance.
I’m afraid most users would not be able to handle this properly.
If too many participation nodes are not working as expected, this can unfortunately have consequences to the network.
I concour. I can absolutely make sure that my node stays online, but it would be harder to understand and resolve a problem if my node missbehaves for some reason as it is right now. One simple examole, I could not make my node be able to restart if power went off, no matter how many hours I tried and how many guides I followed. I always had to manually restart it (I only did tests, my power never actually went off but I wanted to be prepared). If the only thing that I would need to do was toggle some “start on power off” icon, I bet that my node would restart as soon as power went up again very quickly in case of a blackout.
I think you might be undervalueing the community here by assuming people would start to missbehave just because they are not tech savvy. On the contrary, I think that it would guarantee more nodes being installed properly, auto updates and whatnot.
I think before such validator node operation can be rolled out on a large public scale there needs to be some QoS service running on the network that’s constantly checking validator enrollments and their respective connection quality and uptime statistics so misbehaving nodes can be automatically unenrolled from validating not to cause any adverse effects.
I’m not sure what a node wallet is but it sounds like an interesting idea. I’m sure someone could just containerize a configured node and make it really simple to deploy one on AWS or Azure. You would still have to maintain it, keep it online, update it, and pay for it though. The setup isn’t too difficult once you run through it a few times, it’s pretty basic, but I can see where an installer or some front-end software to configure and manage it would be a nice touch. Maybe it’s a good hackathon idea for someone to try.