Can I Take My Pool Offline For 2 Weeks Without Punishment?

Staking & Delegation Setup a Stake Pool
1

I just finalized my pool, it is currently online under the ticker “MBX.” After over 100 hours of work and troubleshooting through the CoinCashew guide, this is very exciting!

However, I built my block producer on a PC I need to use daily; so I have purchased the parts I need for a dedicated node. The parts are scheduled to take roughly 2 weeks to arrive.

My plan is to now take the block producer node offline until the PC parts arrive for the dedicated system. I will then transfer the SSD (with the BP node pre-built on it) from my original PC to the dedicated one, update the IP address in my relay’s topology file, and hopefully be good to go. Can it really be that simple?

ADA does not appear to have “slashing” for pools that miss blocks, but can you forsee any other issues with my plan? I don’t want to risk losing my stake and having to start all over again. I just got my pool online and haven’t even hit the first epoch yet.

2

as long you don’t have any block scheduled then should not be any problems. (if you have any block assigned you will lose it)

3

Hey Alex, thanks for your reply!

Can you tell me how to see if I have any blocks scheduled?

4

you can’t see for the next 2 weeks… only for the next epoch but not earlier than 1.5 days before the epoch’s start

5

There are probably 2 parts to this:

  • taking your relay node down for a long time
  • taking your block producing node for a long time

Taking down the relay for a long time is not a good idea as you will lose all the incoming peer connections when you decide to turn it back on, and it will take you at best 4 hours to get at least one incoming peer and significantly more to get more than 5 peers connect - so you relay will not be well connected for a while when you turn it back on. I would not do this regularly.

Taking down the block producer. If you are a small pool and produce blocks rarely you can check at the end of each epoch if you have any blocks scheduled for the next epoch and if you don’t then just turn your block producer off for 5 days. How to check if you are scheduled to produce blocks: 18. Operational and Maintenance Tips - CoinCashew
Your bock producing node only comes into action for a second when producing a block and otherwise is pretty much idling, I personally don;t see any issue turning it off to save some energy as long as you are confident in your slots schedule :slight_smile:

6

if you dont have millions of ADA, you can be offline 5 years or forever. You will never get a block