Infinite is such a large number to grasp 
But imagine cardano has 50.000 pools. Now also imagine that 30.000 of them are not high quality pools not being operated properly. In de coming months P2P is being released and from what I learned (correct me if I am wrong) the āhottestā nodes will be added to a list that others will be able to use as relays. The nodes that do not perform move to a ācoldā list. So in that sense the 30.000 bad nodes will not be bothering the network at all since they would just be servers hosted somewhere mostly. Again correct me if I am wrong.
On the flipside Cardano would be having 20.000 good nodes what would be incredibly good from a decentralization and geographic distribution stand point. Also with the upcoming hydra the speed of the network would be very high.
Finally, one could even argue that currently quite a few SPOās start with a pool with low pledge (say 1k) believing/hoping they will succeed to get 30m of delegations. Well by implementing this proposal they know they wont. since the max they can get with good returns would be 20k stake. So I wonder even if the number of pools will increase that muchā¦
What risk? There is no slashing. You can sell your pledge any time. I donāt get that āskin in the gameā mantraā¦
Loss of corresponding pledge rewards is the risk here.
This āriskā (opportunity cost) is quite neglectable if you look at the calculator or all the saturated pools out there.
Everyone has a different version of āquiteā 
Great point. I am a recently new small SPO (who cannot secure delegators) and while I donāt want to agree with you, everything you have said here makes perfect sense.
Whats your pool Ticker?
Can anything be done to help small pool operators as the ADA price drops ?
Yeah Iām also in the same boat .Itās incredibly difficult to attract delegators with a smaller stake. Iāll be operating at a loss until I get more traction 
Donāt worryā¦ itās hard also if u have 14M stake 
Lol, want to switch places ?
I am thinking Hydra will bring opportunities to earn by providing compute services to projects. Take WMT for example. They require āEarth Nodesā who must buy-in. Well, compute is the scarcity, so I am thinking they should be paying us. It would be quite silly to think SPOs have infinite funds to pay/stake for an opportunity to provide compute services to every project. At some point there must be either a reckoning or a rebalance. 
Hi,
I have read this thread yesterday and to be honest I was surprised that so many people try to solve the same problem. How to run their own small SPO. Not for a greed or moneay. Just as a passion. But this kind of passion should be rewarded. If I get 0 because I get 0 slots, whole Cardano does not make sense.
I was thinking about it all night. And so far the idea about connecting people into one pool with specified rules of spliting when it grows reasonable big, was the only one which made sense to me. I am not sure if you still have this idea but I am OK to join this initiative with my coins. So if you know where this is happening, let me know.
I shared my coins with big pool because it is operated by people from my geographical area. But as I see it right now it was a mistake because I am supporting centralism. I have to rethink my decision and put it to a smaller pool.
Etoro and Binance should not stack at all. That is the reason why we have central regulators, to protect the market. Did I say central? Ehmm ā¦ something is wrong here. I need another day of thinking.
Same here - just read thorugh all this and actually there is an easy solution:
Dash does it.
I hope that you wonāt just laugh it away because it is Dash - but in their masternode system you need a minimum amount (call it pledge) of 1000 Dash (currenty also almost $200k) and ALL masternodes get a share. The interesting part is that one masternode needs exactly 1000 Dash - not more, not less.
Currently there are 4500 MNs (same order of magnitude as here).
This would really help battling against the Binance pools, as they would need to setup and maintain thousands of pools in case they want the same stake in the game.
So, combine the ADA algorithm with some of the Dash MN requirements and you would definitely improve this issue here.
My suggestion would be a minimum of 50k ADA. Not the amount that is in my pool right now, not an amount that is impossible to get and also not an amount that enables setting up 100 pools per person.
There is no reason to laugh. I do not know Dash as I know very little about Cardano.
But your suggestion implies the change in protocol,infrastructure, the code, the philosophy.
My suggestion is doable without it. Just a change in organization of pools between us.
What pool do you run?
Hi supiik,
this is mine:
Humulusluculus [Cul0]
can already be found on Adatools and other sites, but really fresh and hence no results yet.
I think that the DASH example can easily be applied. It caps the size of pools in a different way, it ensures that everybody that is serious about operating a pool (minimum pledge of considerable but realistic amount) will receive something to keep motivation up and cover costs.
I need to double check your proposal then and I will. I have - my main question is now: this requires a lot of trust from all parties. How are you going to get that from people that do not know each other whereas a lot of money is involved?
Wrt DASH I darego even further: DASH was designed to allow for anonymous transactions - not traceable in the blockchain. To make sure that this could work, they needed decentralisation - else still one party would know all.
One of the main reasons that DASH is not the #2 coin now, is that they could not prove that all MNs are really decentralised, i.e. that not one party owns half the MNs.
This is the same risk with ADA weāre talking about right now. If you stick to 500 pools that can get so big that others cannot come close anymore, ADA will soon be controlled by Zug and Binance alone: if Binance, currently at 90 large pools, gets to 251, they own ADA and could even rewrite the chain, within the limitations of KES.
But Dash is proof-of-work, isnāt it? Thatās not really comparable.
In addition: Why shouldnāt the Binances of the world be able to setup and manage thousands of virtual machines?
In the end, both, proof-of-work and proof-of-stake try to protect the network against takeovers. When a currency gets larger and more important, proof-of-work leads to more computing power invested into the mining and proof-of-stake to larger stakes (measured in ārealā money). In both cases, it gets harder, more expensive to take over the network. Thatās wanted. But due to exactly the same mechanism, it gets harder for small miners/stake pools to get their piece of the cake. Thatās not really wanted, but inevitable.
The only difference is that proof-of-stake is not burning the world to play with cryptos.
Hi HeptaSean,
no, DASH has both. I can be mined (PoW) and the other half of the network is PoS using Masternodes (MN). They just use a first generation PoS - not as sophisticated as ADA, but the pools / MN are fairer.
The wallet is the best I know, but if you want to be an anonymous coin, you need to prove decentralisation. There is a unclarity there.
I see the same happening here, based on this thread/discussion and therefore I use this as an example.
I think ADA could do better, using them as an example, taking the best of both.
Of course, Binance could set op 1M pools, but the upkeep would become much higher (hiring a lot of independent servers and maintaining them) and it would be more difficult to combine the data again.
Ok, what with the following?
- if ADA wants to rule the crypto world and be the #1 for all transactions, 500 pools will not be enough. Will not be able to handle it.
- More pools is better decentralisation
- you donāt want every fool to have a pool, so there will be a minimum pledge of say 50 kADA - or 100 kADA
- lower pool maximum or fixed one like DASH.
- pool operators should be better off than delegators. You want more and more serious pool operators. So say 6% for pool operators and 4,5% max for delegators
- total ADA earnings (because of transactions) are shared over the pools. This way, the amount of pools is regulated: too many pools, and earnings per pool will drop. Delegators go down similarly. This means that the 340 cost that was talked about already needs to be flexible, lower AND higher.
- With earnings in ADA, stake pools will become more profitable in time, when ADA rises. This will make up again for lower percentages when there are more pools.
I think that with the current formula this will be possible, tweaking the parameters a bit. Iāll look into that.
The above is not a huge change, but it will really help the network and ensure that there will be less big parties and more small SPOs and that you can handle more transactions.