Feature suggestion: allow stake consolidation

[awmacpherson]

One of Swarm's large node operators has requested to be able to move stake from one node to another, consolidating his fleet.¹ It seems like a reasonable and probably low-risk stake management feature to add, complementing the overlay change and height increase functions.

It does not require stake to be withdrawable, so it doesn't necessarily have to block on the withdrawable stake SWIPs passing security review. On the other hand, it still makes sense in the presence of those changes — consolidating stake could have a much lower wait period than withdrawal.

Potential use cases:

• After the network radius decreases, a node operator who was previously operating in every neighbourhood now operates 2 nodes in every neighbourhood. Part of the intent behind the design of the elective stake system was to allow operators to scale their revenue in a single neighbourhood without running multiple nodes. A stake consolidation endpoint would allow the operator to merge the stakes from the 2 nodes and turn one off.
• Similarly, some operators are interested in increasing their height (a.k.a. reserve capacity doubling) to manage costs. If the bee client starts supporting heights greater than 1, then operators running fleets of nodes at height 1 might wish to consolidate to a fleet of half as many nodes running at height 2. This consolidation would be more capital efficient if the operator could move stake from the nodes being retired to the scaled nodes.

Footnotes

1. https://discord.com/channels/799027393297514537/811553590170353685/1500952986984255494 ↩