Thoughts about validator licenses

I have largely sat out of conversations concerning validator licenses because I simply cannot afford them. However, I have often wondered what the fuss is about them and if they are actually worth their weight in gold.

On the surface, validator licenses were created to decentralise the governance of Splinterlands. The idea is that as an owner of a license, you own a piece of the Splinterlands governance share through the minting of SPS tokens that in turn gives you extra governance privileges.

Licenses can also be seen as tokenised versions of nodes or witnesses like we know them on Hive. Unlike Hive where I presume you need to run a virtual server of sorts, with licenses, you simply buy an NFT that gives you that same privilege.

Now, I'm not conversant with the details about licenses, so it is important that you take my opinion about them with a pinch of salt. I haven't owned one but I have had interactions with individuals that bought them, so I don't have any personal experience of owning or running a node.

Over my head

One thing that has baffled me about these node licenses is their price and actual purpose, in the grand scheme of things. Now, like I said at the beginning, I know that their purpose is to lead to the decentralisation of the game and at the end of the day, the people who mine SPS with their licenses have the right to do as they please with their tokens.

At the same time, I like to think that licenses in Splinterlands and GLS for that matter, contribute to an unusual amount of inflation. I can't remember the details of the whitepaper but I know there's a mechanism in place that ultimately reduces inflation when the circulating token reaches 1 billion.

In any case, I still think that validator licenses contribute to a decent chunk of the inflation that has led to 1 Billion tokens in circulation. There's nothing new here, seeing as this was always expected from the beginning and documented in the whitepaper, but I wonder what could have been.

Right now, SPS is still a governance token with a maximum supply of 3 billion. At the time of writing, we are 1/3 of the way with around 1 Billion tokens available(including staked), I wonder how much longer it will take to reach the cap and what that could mean for the price of the token.

Considering how much inflation that licenses contribute to the game, why wasn't governance just left to SPS stakers? What I mean is, other than adding to the crazy inflation that has played a role in dumping the price of SPS, what else have licenses actually achieved?

At the time of writing, one license costs a bit over $695 on hive-engine, yet, in-game, a license is worth around $5000 if you choose to buy without a voucher. What is the reason behind this price difference?

Are the licenses in-game different from the ones you buy on Hive-engine? So assuming I had the cash to splurge and bought say, 10 licenses off the secondary market, I'd run them and start pumping more SPS tokens into the system.

I don't think licenses are bad because like I said, I know their purpose, in the grand scheme of things. However, at the same time, we have to look at it and think about how we could make things better, moving forward.

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