Excellent point. Those of us putting this together definitely succumbed to the curse of knowledge here -- we just had an extremely in depth conversation about masternodes so it did not even cross our minds to put a synopsis in this article!

I will see what I can do about adding a short description of masternodes before the end of the week. In the meanwhile, feel free to take a look at the at length discussion from last month here:

https://cryptocurrencytalk.com/topic/90700-gridcoin-future-technology-base/

The proposal was already turned down, however we do not want to completely dismiss the idea. It might be explored further in an open-source arena as opposed to an extremely centralized environment, which was a major complaint with regards to the original proposal. There are also many serious concerns with regards to masternodes expressed on that thread, including that once we implement masternodes, it will be incredibly difficult to implement any other technology base in the future (blockchain tech is still gestating!).