Validator role
Validators help establish consensus on valid ledger updates. They do not gain authority to spend user funds, create arbitrary supply, ignore invalid signatures, or redefine protocol rules simply because they participate in consensus.
Stake as economic bond
The proposed design uses stake to make validator influence economically scarce and to resist one-identity-one-vote attacks. Minimum stake, delegation, validator-set size, concentration controls, and stake lifecycle are not yet final.
Proposal and voting
A validator or validator subset proposes candidate ledger updates. Other validators independently verify them and exchange signed votes. A protocol-defined supermajority is intended to produce finality. Exact rounds, thresholds, timeouts, and leader-selection rules remain part of implementation design.
Provable misbehavior
Version 0.1 contemplates economic consequences for objectively provable validator misconduct such as signing contradictory histories. Slashing rules are security-critical and should not be finalized without formal threat analysis and extensive testnet operation.
Incentives
Potential validator compensation may include transaction fees and protocol-defined network allocations. The final model must preserve supply transparency and avoid making undocumented issuance a hidden operating mechanism.
Measure decentralization
A network is not meaningfully decentralized simply because more than one server exists. eCoin should publish metrics that make validator concentration, stake concentration, infrastructure diversity, client diversity, and participation health observable.
Why this is not mining
Validators are not proposed to compete by repeatedly hashing block headers to satisfy a proof-of-work target. This changes the network’s security assumptions, incentive design, failure modes, and developer terminology. eCoin documentation therefore uses validators and consensus rather than calling the process mining.