Agree 100% - every small pool cannot survive but at the moment with the min pool fee and lack of mobile stake there is little chance for anybody to enter this system and even cover their costs. I remember years ago with POW mining you never made much but a least you could see some returns. With Cardano at the moment I have around 300k and have been allocated 3 slots out of the last 58 Epochs. That cannot be justifiable in anyone’s thinking process.
All I’m saying is that we are in the path to centralization, where a few entities become block validators and the fact we can’t agree over that is disturbing.
I’m sure there are thousands of ideas out there, and here’s mine. What if we feature creep a way to join pools? Is that possible in the current state? I mean, multiple SPOs could work together, join their stake and essentially become a sidechain.
I’m just shooting arrows, don’t impale me for a brain fart 
I don’t see that path to centralisation, just because very small pools are not sustainable.
Just think about it, a small/medium pool needs somewhere around 2 Million ADA staked to that pool to have the chance to be maintainable. That’s somewhere around $650k at the current price during a bears market, you can triple that amount during a bull run. Not even think about it with ADA price at $3 (Let me know if I’m wrong)
If you live in the US or EU that could be somehow achievable at around 10k ADA per person right now, but what about 2nd and 3rd world countries where $10k could be the annual income of an individual. All of this is during a bears market where people are depressed and you can buy tokens for cheap.
Just like Bitcoin where all the mining power is condensed in one country and a few players, this will inevitably be the same issue in the future.
I would like to add to what @COSDpool wrote on the cost side of this. (which was true) but there are also other reasons.
The conclusion is understandable: “you have shortlisted 70 pools, and you delegate to 45 why not just increase to for example 70?” - It’s worth mentioning that there is a requirement to have about double the amount of pools shortlisted (If doable) that we can delegate to. This is to make sure that the team who works on the evaluation does not have a direct influence on the delegations. (Random draw is done by a different team) So increasing the number of packages to 70 would also increase the number of shortlisted pools to 140. (At the moment, we would not be able to deliver 140 pools. We already can’t find 90 pools in each round that contribute enough to the ecosystem in terms of delegation strategy to justify a delegation.)
This is both interesting and somewhat concerning. There is obviously a basis on which you make this selection (through your delegation strategy) but how well is this managed? There lies great responsibility when delegating 15M ADA to 45 pools (675M ADA or 202M USD) and I would hope that there is a rigorous operational risk management framework in place to protect against a number of compliance risks including a conflict of interest. Are you able to elaborate on what internal controls are in place and if there is any kind of internal audit process that takes place? Does the CF employ people purely for compliance purposes or is this responsibility being taken on by other roles without the specialist knowledge?
I think it has become quite obvious in recent months that even the largest of crypto organisations have had severe compliance issues and the management of these organisations have fell well short of the expectations of their customers. Now I understand that the CF is in a different place and it may be difficult to compare such issues but surely narrowing the delegation down to 90 pools out of a potential 3000 pools which are all contributing to the eco system is fraught with compliance dangers. There surely needs to be a degree of randomness with selection and selection should come from a larger reservoir of pools to eliminate the risks of favouritism or those pools that are considered ideologically similar to those of the foundation. In which case the whole idea behind decentralisation is being turned on its head and the success of pools is again being influenced by a centralised body. Yes I know there are voting systems with the CIP process but this is not what is at issue here. If we really want to have a decentralised system then funds that have been made available to help grow the eco system need to be distributed on a basis that has a much wider scope than the current delegation strategy.
The random element is certainly popular in the blockchain world: for instance if one has a 60% chance of winning 1000 units of cryptocurrency, it’s considered by many to be no different than getting 600 units. But this rationale falls apart, as with other financial arrangements (e.g. insurable losses), in contexts that lead to risk and exposure.
I’ve identified this issue to CF agents before: Since their goal is apparently to cultivate a group of Cardano ecosystem and CF project contributors— who volunteer their efforts as much as their time and livelihood permit— many of these will only be compensated by the income from the stake pool. This is particularly true of those pools who haven’t been able to sustain delegation beyond the large CF delegation itself.
Our own pool is in this category, and our inability to attract more diverse delegation is a direct result of having only enough time to focus on either community contribution or marketing… and consistently choosing the contribution. Because of Cardano’s unique economics and the CF’s unique means of supporting these pools, they are mainly paid through the blockchain’s minimum fixed fee (or maybe someday a proportional minimum variable fee if and when this part of the protocol is ever updated).
For these contributors, a quarterly 40% chance of that delegation being pulled out (assuming another quarter of outstanding contributions) keeps alive an alarming probability that such a pool will be wrecked by that withdrawal. This would mean either facing a quarter of running the pool at an operating loss— while still contributing in hope of being selected again— or looking back at a quarter of high-value contributions that have gone unrewarded… depending on whether one is looking back or forward in time.
It would therefore be hard to commit to keeping our pool alive if our delegation application were “shortlisted” but not selected. If that were to happen, it would probably make more economic sense for us to finally shut down the pool and try to find another reckoning of contribution: with a mixture of volunteer activity & material reward not subject to such a huge random element.
In general, the existence of these boundary cases suggests that the committee choosing the “shortlist” is not actually free of the consequences of the other committee’s “random selection” after all. 
I’m not completely sure the random element is needed here. Who decided when that it has to be?
On the one hand, the evaluation team still generates 50% to 60% chance of getting the delegation, which is still a lot if the fear is that they me biased or bribed.
On the other hand, what they are doing is quite public and could be scrutinised without the random draw at the end.
Is this still being finalised?