Apologies for asking a very similar vein of question to the one discussed here: What makes REP tokens a critical component of Augur?
However, I am still slightly confused about the necessity of REP coin to make Augur function. For example, I could imagine a design as follows:
- ETH is used to buy the registration token every reporting cycle.
- The reporters then report on a subset of markets.
- If an event is challenged, then a much wider number of reporters (potentially all of them) are asked to report on this market.
- The market then resolves itself to the majority decision, paying ETH back to the reporters who made the 'correct' decision, and I guess say redistributing ETH from the 'wrong' reporters to the 'correct' reporters.
To me the fallback of a hardfork in REP seems like a slightly overkill option to solve this problem. Presumably under the current design you would only hope that a hardfork of REP happens rarely (> every 2 months?) anyway?
Clearly the option of a hardfork adds some utility to the system; I am just concerned that this benefit does not outweigh the complexity of adding a whole new token.
Please tell me where my logic is wrong!