There is difference (but not sure if it has economic consequence).
More sections means more hops so more overall work
More sections means more elders so better distribution of consensus and workload (assuming elders is constant and not proportional)
More sections means less coins reside in each section so is safer from attack and less need to expand
More sections means more total age (more events to age from) which affects security and reward distribution
There is a difference between total nodes and total sections. I think in reality this won’t be significant due to the rules for splitting (all sections will probably have pretty equal number of vaults). So I think it’s worth retaining the distinction for the purposes of reasoning, but the eventual consequence will be hard to notice.
Seems very nice. I like the intuition behind how it moves as each parameter changes.
Good to also account for splitting the reward among several vaults and weighting reward by age. Both make the reward even smaller. I think probabilistic rewarding is a good idea.
It would be fun to model how many nodes would be possible. I’m always amazed at how big the bitcoin hashrate got. If you’d asked anyone from 2010 to predict the hashrate in 2020 I doubt they’d have predicted such rapid growth. So yeah, I think it’s worth testing the best/worst in these models. For example, what if 90% of all hard drive manufacturing ended up being used for SAFE? What if hard drive manufacturing increases tenfold to account for the new demand? That sort of thing…