Of course they are. You can delegate to them and get the same fair share of rewards as with any other pool.
On the top exchanges benefit the system by allowing the access to ADA to public.
I carefully follow the above discussions and the various proposals relating to the problem of āsmall poolsā. Beginning with Cardano, it seems to me that the difficulties come from that the Cardano system does not distinguish between block minting nodes (letās call them āmasternodesā) and another category of nodes, whose function would normally be to verify the validity and security of transactions on the blockchain, preparing the work of validators and, for instance, preprocessing the future smartcontracts, but not minting blocks (letās call them āsecurenodesā).
At Cardano, all block producers are validators (relays excluded), which seriously handicaps āsmall poolsā. I will therefore propose the creation of these securenodes not subject to the pledge system and delegations and obviously would not be intended to receive block rewards.
On the other hand, a lower initial stake (than that requested from the validators) as well as a fixed remuneration according to the availability and performance offered by these securenodes should be implemented. A secure node could be promoted to a masternode, at the financial initiative of its owner ā¦
I do not know of course if such a modification of the network is possible, but I wanted to give my opinion ā¦
Hello zwirny, thanks for your thoughts. The need or no-need of small pools is a good point.
What do you think about the idea keep-alive block without reward as described few posts above?
Just took another look on your proposal.
The idea behind it is to make it visible to delegators if a pool is working/configured properly (ot at least good enough to mint blocks, still not knowing anything about security).
Good:
- It is a problem for small SPOs to proof their setup without having a block minted. So delegators are avoiding those pools just to not have un-necessary risk. So it would be kind of a heartbeat signal which would actually also fail if e.g. KES rotation is not handled.
Bad:
- Those blocks still would have power. So in a 51% scenario someone who ramps up (21600+current pool count+1) pools would have a chance to be successful. Well not very realistic but still theoretically possible.
But again. I would agree that having a possibility to validate proper configuration of the pool would help small SPOs to validate their setup and proof to delegators that everything is fine. Wondering if there would be some other way of achieving the same, like a manually triggered test validation which does not create a real block, just simulates it and reports / flags the pool as being successfully verified.
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Thank for pointing aout the possible 51% attack. That is not just theoretical, it is a huge flaw I should have taken in consideration before even writing my proposal.
OK, simple maths 340/3 > C => C < 113 Ada ( $135 ) which is perfectly doable. All good and fair, you are happy, story ends here.
Iām just using my pool to learn more about cypto and sys admin, I donāt expect to mint any blocks. I think at this stage, its going to be hard to get enough delegation to product a block. If I do, thatās a bonus.
Whatever you do, the big SPOs still win this game.
I invited a lot of people to Cardano. I gave them complete information about Cardano. Finally, when they want to choose a pool and ask me about the benefits of my pool, I say I had not found a block yet and well they are doing the right thing and choosing a bigger pool.
Iām in the Middle East. The number of relays here is very small and it causes problems.
Maybe the situation would be a little better if we paid some of the transaction fee to the relays.
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Admittedly it is tough starting up and getting delegation. I think the only way to tackle this is to try and get a pool in a functional state and get what stake you can from your own investment and those of family and friends. It will be hard to mint blocks and you might wait months before you get one. I thought I would never get one but now I have 5 after about 8 months although I have had to invest quite a lot of money in stake. The current price of ADA makes it difficult but having said that we all want a high ADA price.
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I agree, right now the bigger SPO have the advantage. I knew starting a stake pool that there would be a big possibility that I would not even break even but the more I started looking into the current delegation concentration I have to say Iām a bit concerned. Current setup definitely favors bigger pools with 100-500k delegation or more which right now is just not feasible for a small pool operator. Hoping personally that IOG/Cardano network comes up with a solution (easier said than done). Right now there just isnāt any incentive for new delegators to go to a small pool which is what needs to be addressed somehow.
@GrahamsNumberPlus1 thank you . i do my best.
@doc_krieger yes . i hopped they have solution .
in some country 1000$-2000$ The cost of living is one family per year. so think about 100K or more They can not participate in this network . we can see it in this pic
they talk about Africa . how many relay we see there ???
i think we have 195 countries.
we have 62 countries they have relay or BP.
we have 2546 pool
must of them in this country:
United States (1837x)-Germany (1199x)-United Kingdom (351x)-Netherlands (293x)-Canada (230x)-Singapore (189x)-Finland (154x)
68% have 21% of network ,
https://adapools.org/groups
https://adapools.org/relays
https://explorer.mainnet.cardano.org/relays/topology.json
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It is actually logical. Reliable internet connection and affordable hosting are essential. Once there appears a competitive datacenter in those locations, the pools will flow there.
I wasnāt aware that the chance of minting a block relied on amount of stake the pool had, to the extent that a small pool like mine (14k) wonāt mint a block for a least a year.
I really canāt believe that IOHK didnāt have a second thought about giving the rich the power to mint all blocks in the systemā¦and then call it decentralized?
This doesnāt promote diversity or decentrilliaztion. All nodes will be centralized around the datacenters the big players either run, or have the rest of their servers on (aka binance).
A randomized way to spread the blocks where you reward things such as uptime and quality of service, nodes on edges of network etc would make much more sense.
Maybe also divide the whole network into divisions by stake size, and mint block for each division, size of block dependent upon what division you are in. Maybe even by region also?
We donāt need big players to run the nodes. They will only misuse their power once it is necessary for them to keep that power.
We need the network to be supported by many with little, not few with a lot.
I run my node on a server at home, with no cost. It can be hopping along, but Im losing stake every month waiting for my minted block, which will come when? And if Im unlucky and my server is down? Another year? Yeh. This wasnāt well thought through.
Iām really disappointed. I thought IOHK ran proper scientific processes. I canāt believe you had full consensus on this.
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Your 1 block per year is proportionate to 1000 block per year for a 14M pool. There is nothing bad about being rich and nothing noble about being poor. Currently in cardano neither of those is preferred nor punished. The system parameter asks for 500 active pools, there are 2500 operating already, the competition is hard, but life is too.
I am writing this as an operator of similarly smallish pool.
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Yes it is. Because my block comes once a year. My risk of not having any coverage is 1000times higher than the 14M pool. And that is bad design. The risk should be the same, or close to.
The rich is preferred in this system.
If the goal is 500 active pools, and thatās it, then so be it. Then they should thank everyone for their participation right now, and cut away the remaining 2000.
Stop pretending they want the network to grow further and āsupport the little guyā.
I still think Cardano is the most interesting crypto to date, but this is just either naive design or badly communicated design.
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On the other hand if you are lucky and get to mint 1 extra blocks, your rewards are 200%, if they get 1 extra block their rewards are only 100,1% higher. Or you can get your block after 6 months and then stake your ADA to other pool. That way you get 150% rewards.
So there is a decent balance between risk and potential reward.
Cardano is the best crypto-project in my opinion, amongst other reason because every ADA has exactly the same weight regardless of the holder being poor or rich. By the way, what is rich and what is poor.
Even though my pool is small I consider myself rich in comparison to the majority of people on the planet.
Your argument is itās fine that the nodes owned by the massive corporations get the biggest share of the rewards, because other people on the planet are less fortunate than you?
Well ok. I guess you are entitled to your opinion.
Iām also a small SPO [MADA1] https://www.myadanode.com
Iām really doing it with a a mate because we absolutely believe in the decentralization model of Cardano. Without a lot of serious pools, this is not achieved sadly.
-
Serious pools is important here, I know I will not make a lot of friend by saying this but Iām just being honest. Too many people want to run a pool, use someone else scripts, but really have barely the skills to run a production stack (of any sort). So as long as it works itās all good, but when the problems happens, we will see big outages and cardano would be impacted. The question is, would you let those people handle your own company servers? do you trust them? Are they skilled?
ā Having a rating, and benefits, related to your relay availability would makes a lot of sense. And could only server serious, decentralized single SPO (I donāt like the small term, I prefer single). Itās easy to check and can bring some block assignation, if you are always up, that is only fair. -
a lot of pools, thatās also very important for having an efficient mesh and good resilience against the 51%. A lot of pool not owned by the same people !
ā Is BNP a nuisance because they have 63 (63 !!!) full pools, yes, but that is only the byproduct of the issue. They have this firepower since they are staking for their own customers. Iām not even sure those customers got the reward for the stake that is happening in their name (I donāt use binance). So either they keep the benefits, and that is just fraud, either they give them back (Binance pools are 6% profit +345), so thatās pure scam. This is a major threat imo ! not to SPO but to ADA globally, thatās about 13% of the ADA network. If that was spreaded back in the network, more SPO would be rewarded for their work.
Now, do we do this only for the money ? Absolutely not, the adventure is fun, we can also use our professional skills four ourself and run a very efficient pool technically.
Do we think/hope that one day we can be self sufficient or even to benefits, sure we do, and we are putting all our heart in it. Money isnāt a bad thing when it is deserved.
Lastly, we have to stay real, IOHK is doing what they can to deal with this, itās hard for them too. People offering simple solution as an obvious way out are just dreamers, and it would harm cardano more than helping it (@Bees_Project first posts are quite remarkable in that sense lolll)
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Hello @kaverne ,
I disagree with you about binance. They are neither saint nor evil nor nuisance, they are a mirror. A mirror that reflects what cardano users are like.
I see this. 13% ( 63*64m) Ada holders either
- do not care about security and lets asset sit on an exchange or
- goes for higher interest % offered by exchange or
- are speculators, for whom Ada is like Doge, just few letters. They have target and stop loss set =>Ada is locked on the trade book waiting for next moon or
- do not care about governance
- do not care at all
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Funnily enough, you disagree we me but I agree with you 
What I was trying to say, might have missed, it that this problem should be addressed sooner or later (rather sooner) by IOHK.
13% is 1/4 it takes to take control, that canāt stay in one delegation hands in term of votin power. Or we are not any better than BTC or ETH.
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