I am an anarcho-communist, please don’t insult me with the “socialist” label.
I am going to go slightly off topic here but I think it is relevant to where this conversation is going. In ICS running an additional chain is the same cost as running the Hub. So if the Hub costs $1000 per month per validator, we are talking about 180 validators or $180,000 per month or $2.2 million per year. Obviously the Hub has enough AUM and generates enough activity to justify that. But does ever additional consumer chain? Stride is getting very close to that level of activity if not already there. Neutron clearly isn’t. What happened with Neutron is what happened at Polkadot. The validators made a bet that there is big demand for WASM after all the bitter political battles over WASM on the Hub in 2020 and 2021 as Terra (LUNA) was going gangbusters. Well… since then Solana has emerged as big WASM developer honeypot and Neutron can’t attract the usage. Neutron is not the only chain losing to Solana. The Polkadot parachains lost out too. Bad bet by the validators who are fighting the last (2021) wars. Not going to be the first time such a thing has happened.
The question here is one of strategy - are validators Venture Capitalists who are investing in unproven products hoping one of them will compensate for all their losses or are they Private Equity honchos at KKR where they take a widget manufacturer from Germany who has a nice local business but who really doesn’t want to deal with a global distribution network, buy him out and take his business global and make a ton of money? Listening to all the griping about Neutron, it sounds to me that Cosmos Hub validators want to be in the Private Equity business - get projects with proven product-market fit (ie proof-of-revenue and economic activity) and then mainstream them (because obviously that is how you make a lot of money).
The other question is - does an empty chain deserve $180,000 worth of security every month? Probably not. Getting the big decentralized security that Cosmos Hub validators can offer makes sense for bigger chains that support larger amounts of economic activity.
I think up until Neutron, most validators operated under a VC strategy. Then they realized that not everybody can be a VC. You need deep pockets to be a VC. And so now there is a pivot in strategy. It is all good. People made a mistake, we’ll fix it and that’s that. Obviously the economics of the big validators vs the small validators are dramatically different and that is why I think it makes sense to target the stimulus to the small validators. The small validators is what makes the Cosmos Hub quite decentralized. Our business - as it were - is decentralization. And as such it is important to treat them fairly. In this case “fairly” means don’t stick them with losses while the community pool is rolling in dough.