#dusk $DUSK The Cost of Consensus——Is SBA Really the Optimal Solution for Finance?

When the market discusses Dusk's SBA consensus, it often emphasizes its determinism, finality, and anti-censorship lottery. This is true, but I think we may overlook another dimension: the 'cognitive tax' and 'node cost' brought about by this complex consensus.

Deterministic finality is indeed a necessity for institutions; no one wants to wait for 6 blocks to confirm a bond transaction. SBA enhances security by hiding validators through VRF cryptographic lottery. However, implementing this logic requires nodes to run a large number of zero-knowledge proofs and cryptographic calculations, which directly raises the hardware threshold and electricity costs for running nodes.

What does high node cost lead to? It is likely to result in a reduction in the number of nodes and a subtle increase in centralization. Only financially strong institutions can afford to play this game. This creates a subtle paradox: a chain aimed at serving institutions may increasingly depend on a few large institutional nodes for its security. Is this really the decentralized financial infrastructure we want?

I found an interesting data comparison: the node distribution during the Dusk testnet phase was relatively decentralized, but after the mainnet launch, although the total number of nodes is increasing, the proportion of staking weight controlled by the top 10 nodes is quietly rising. This may not be a design flaw, but it is definitely a natural result of architectural choices. When you tailor a set of armor for finance, it may end up being so heavy that only giants can wear it.

Therefore, SBA may not be the answer for general public chains, but it might be a necessary trade-off for the vertical field of finance at this stage—exchanging a certain degree of 'decentralization dilution' for the essential security and certainty tickets needed for institutional entry. Whether the cost is worth it depends on the future scale of truly settled financial assets on-chain, and whether it can nourish and support a more decentralized node ecosystem. @Dusk