It would be unusual for that to be the case. But I suppose not impossible. I believe there are benefits. Of course if you don’t value those benefits, then yes, they may appear purely harmful. I don’t mean to suggest that any of the following are straight forward or currently available.
No. Far less melodramatic:
Say, anything that results in a DOT value (mkt cap) of zero or the neighbourhood of zero. It could be as trivial as someone inventing a better chain, offering the same guarantees as Polkadot at a fraction of the cost, offering the same costs as Polkadot with superior functionality, etc. etc. You could even think of this as the blockchain counterpart to the $5 attack in traditional crypto analysis - something that is assumed away because it is too inconvenient.
Again, to my mind, that is by assumption. That there are benefits, but they may be outweighed by the costs, is a categorically different position.
I believe a more reasonable statement would be that relay chain accounts have costs. Whether those costs outweigh the benefits depends on how you value those benefits. As I understand things there are two benefits to relay chain accounts:
- they open the door to developing escape hatches and life rafts for the event a relay chain fails for any reason: Foreseeable and unforeseeable.
- they make it far more difficult for cartels/oligopolies/monopolies to emerge, by one relay chain (and/or it L2’s/parachains) capturing any network effects. The network effects of course still will exist, so the benefits are there, but a rent seeking model would be far more difficult. But as I warned at the outset of this post my perspective is considered mistaken at the highest levels of the project.
I agree if you assume there are no benefits, or they are insufficiently valuable to you, then the 10% cost makes little sense.
Others might consider 10% a price worth paying if we all we do is avoid cartels/oligopolies/monopolies forming. The possibility of your wealth surviving the failure of another L1 or relay chain might also be attractive at 10%. If both benefits are available there may be a considerable clientele for such networks?
It maybe true that there are more efficient abstractions through which to implement such universal functionality? So I should point out I did pose the question about whether all this is best handled in BEEFY or some such additional abstraction: