As a pool operator I am still a little confused on whether I should put my investment as a pledge or a stake. At the moment I only pledge a small amount and stake the rest through the Daedalus wallet. The only reason being is that its a lot simpler to stake it on Daedalus and I was under the impression that the chances of minting a block only depended on your overall live stake. Am I correct or should I be putting more into the pledge?
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When I set up my pool I was asking myself the same question.
For the rewards it hardly, if at all, makes a difference the way the protocol parameters are currently set. A pledge signals that a SPO put their own money at stake and delegators might use this information to decide which pool to delegate to.
Another question that came up was how to set the fixed cost and margin if you are solo staking with your own pool. My conclusion was to go with 340𝔸 and 0% because I run the pool for myself anyway and I have no additional cost if others delegate to it, so there is no need to take a cut from other delegator’s rewards other than their share of the minimum 340𝔸 per epoch, which is more than enough to cover my hosting cost.
Some people claim that 0% margin pools are somehow bad for the community, but I have yet to hear convincing arguments supporting that view.
Thanks - yes that is my understanding. At the moment the pledge only provides an indicator that the pool owner is delegating their funds and yes this may indicate more of a commitment but as it stands there is no rewards benefit to do this until the pledge is given more priority over the stake.
Without looking into the source code to really see what it does I have a strong feeling it was just one of their bullshit lies and does absolutely nothing. I had my pool with zero stake and about 50 mill staked on it at start and was making blocks just fine.
However IF you set a pledge and the pledge does NOT met then you will produce no blocks.
I would say you stake em all instead of pledging anything because if you don’t have a certain amount of stake right now you will also NOT produce any blocks.
If I am correct there is a discussion whether to put more weigh on the pledge factor. To demotivate creation of x pools by the same owner. So I guess pledge will be more of importance in the (near) future.
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Yes - I think I heard that recently. May have been the IOHK monthly update - can’t be sure, as I read and watch a lot at the moment, being new to pool operation. It may be to prevent Sybil attacks, that the Ouroboros algorithm takes the Pledge into consideration at some level.
It’s been a couple of months since the last response. Has anything changed on this front? If so, what’s the latest thinking? More specifically, has the idea of the pledge playing a bigger role become a factor?
My understanding is that you need a minimum amount of pledge to be considered for random delegation by the CF so in that sense the pledge is important.
there are a lot of binance pools that re staking with 0 pledge and they are minting blocks just fine
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Further more, wouldn’t that drive potential new SPOs away?
If the protocol favors - let’s say - pools with at least 10k pledge more than mine with only 100. That’d be quite unfair and to be honest a reason for me to not even start a pool on my own.
Getting 10k was easier half a year ago than it is now. The whole idea of decentralization through independently run pools must be in that sweet spot between hurting enough financially to take it seriously but also doable as a side project.
I for example don’t have 10k € laying around which I could throw as a pledge to my pool.
Where as 500-1000 would be doable.
All with the current exchange rates in mind.