I really like the economics and computer science of masternodes — anyone can put up sufficient stake to get the “master” flag on their full-node and then we can do more efficient and reliable distributed protocols with this smaller number of higher-quality full-nodes.
What I don’t get are the computer security of masternodes — there’s no way for the consensus algorithm to verify that the masternodes are performing their job correctly and reward them, so that means it would be possible for someone to cheat the masternode system and get more and more of the reward without actually providing more and more of the service.
Since the consensus algorithm can’t detect this, then it would be up to some organization to watch the masternodes and that organization would have to have the power to kick out masternodes who it thought were cheating… Overall, not the direction I want to go.