When you say one time delegate fee of 2.17. Do you really mean one time never to pay again or just one for the pool you are delegating?
It would have been super helpful if this one time fee would have been in the delegating process. The way it is right now is a hidden (oh by the way) fee that you get find out about after you click confirm.
I just waste a few hours trying to figure out what this ADA Sent was of 2.17. I thought it was a dont tell the delegate how we really calculate our fee.
2.17 ada is broken down as follows:
2 ada = one-time cost for acquiring delegation certificate for your wallet
0.17 ada = transaction fee*
*A fee of about 0.17 ada is charged for any transaction operation in Cardano (like sending ada or delegating to a pool). Likewise, changing pool delegation of your wallet is also just an operation of delegating to a pool, so you are only charged the 0.17 ada transaction fee (no need for the 2 ada cost as your wallet has delegation certificate already from your previous delegation).
@Ahmad_Alkilani , thanks for detailed explanations here. What if the pool was not able to mint even 1 block / epoch, where would that 340 ADA be deducted from?
No blocks = no rewards. Similarly pool fees are only ever deducted from rewards so if a pool doesn’t mint blocks it can’t get fees otherwise everyone would be going crazy creating pools just to collect fees from the treasury or worse yet, from delegators. Rest assured that’s not how it works. Minting a block and getting rewarded on that is the only way a pool can get fees paid.
CPX Pool
Thanks again for the help!
Ahmad, thank you for the time you have put into answering all the questions. I’m new to the community and only have a few ADAs. Not much to save from unfortunately. 4 kids, wife, house etc have fees attached to them, just like crypto 
But what I’ve understood so far is that decentralization is the key to longevity for Cardano, and by staking in smaller pools you support that. So all this to say, I’ve staked my few coins in your pool. The return on them are so small that it doesn’t really matter if I get 4.xx or 5.xx % returns. So I’m with you and the best of luck with your work and life. Thanks!
سلام
روزتون بخیر
من چند تا سوال داشتم در خصوص استیکینگ اگر بتونید راهنمایی کنید بیار ممنون میشم
سوال اول؛ تو کیف پول yoroi که با لجر نانو وصل شده از کجا بهفمم که استیک کردنم تایید شده دو تا ادا به همراه کارمزد از من کم شده ، اون دو تا کی و چه جوری برمی گرده بهم الان که انتقال ادا رو می زنم ، اون دو تا رو به حساب نمیاره و از موجودیم کم کرده
سوال دوم؛ سلام اگه اتصال استخری که ما توش هستیم به نت قطع بشه یا مشکلی براش به وجود بیاد همه توکن ها از بین میره؟
Many thanks for your very easy-to-understand but still keep the original scenario accurate and clear. Best.
So cool, thanks!
سلام
للاسف لم افهم سؤالك. اذا استطعت الكتابة في اللغة العربية الفصحى ممكن يكون في مجال للمساعدة. شكرا
Let’s say I’m a new Operator and I only mine 1 block in an epoch?
So, my reward would a small loss, correct?
For example, 1 block for 340 ADA - 340 ADA Cost - x Amount in Fees
No. There is no “loss” ever. Think of it akin to interest on your savings account. The bank doesn’t take money out of your account if they don’t make a profit. Same thing. Your ADA is always your ADA. Staking it means participating in the PoS protocol and for that you get rewarded but your ADA never leaves your wallet.
Ok on the operator side, if you are a small pool operator and let’s say the block reward, just for sake of the example is 100 ADA (it’s actually closer to 1000) so pool fees are 340 then pool gets the full 100 and there’s nothing else left to pass around. Pool fees go to pool owner, not the treasury. So as the pool owner you’d get 100 and your delegates in this contrived example would get nothing because you didn’t even recoup your fees.
So rewards → pool fees-> pool margin → delegates
CPX Pool
I’m so glad you are here. 
many thanks.
I just now made this forum account specifically to say thank you! I was looking for the answer to this same question all over the internet and finally found this. Clears things up perfectly!
Awesome! Glad I could help. The community overall is pretty awesome to be honest and lots of great people.
I’m also delighted and humbled that CPX Pool was just chosen for IOHK’s next round of delegation so our delegates will receive consistent rewards moving forward once IOHK delegate end of May/early June. CPX has been performing really well for what we have.
Hello! I’m a newbie small investor planning to co-own a pool (with a tech guy operating it). What’s
the ‘realistic lower limit of pledge’ today (I know that your post was from last year, and we now have about 2,600 pools) that can have a fair chance of chosen to mint a block and thus returning the delegators / pool operators the ‘typical’ reward of ~4-6% APY, (1) in each epoch, and (2) on average over a certain period of time?
Thanks in advance!
Realistically, you’ll need about 1.8M - 2M in total delegation including your own pledge to successfully and almost consistently mint blocks.
In terms of pledge alone, I don’t see too much difference in performance numbers if you’re anywhere less than 2M in pledge. So I’d say anything goes. It’s up to your delegators to trust you have enough skin in the game, expertise, long term interest etc… Some pools are getting away with as little as 1K, 10K etc… Others pony up over 500K and still can’t attract investors but in terms of returns… 10K+ up to around 2M is too close to call today. The luck of the draw and randomness in the algorithm at this point has a bigger impact.
a0 might change in the future, but this is what it is today.
Good luck!
CPX
Thank you @Ahmad_Alkilani for giving these real world figures. They are most valuable for assessing the challenges in running / owning a new pool.
(1) Where can we from time to time derive that latest figures, by analyzing data from pooltool.io, adapool, etc.?
(2) In order to encourage decentralization, such total 2M total delegation (~USD2.8 M as of writing) is not a small sum in developing countries.
(3) So, until a pool attracts sufficient delegation (say 2M ADA by your suggested), would this mean the pool rewards and delegators’ staking rewards will be unavailable in many epochs (not lucky enough to be chosen to mint any block), and overall outcome the delegators are disencouraged to stake these small pools by the algorithm?
I’m going by my own numbers and what I saw historically for my because I’ve seen everywhere in between 800K to I think around 8-9M and everything in between so didn’t have to do much of any calculation but I’ve seen folks around here that have spelled that out.
In the 1.2 range you have realistically about 50/50 chance of minting a block. This goes up significantly in the 1.8M - 2M range. In the 800K -1M range probably a block every 4 epochs. Lower than that and your chances keep going down quite fast. I’ve seen the “randomness” aspect of the protocol tend to hurt smaller pools the most because you getting a block vs not getting any blocks is a big deal when you’re small.
Ideally, you’ll want to get in the 2 blocks+ per epoch territory because of the protocol mandated minimum 340 fee.
Running a pool isn’t for the faint of heart but can also be rewarding. I will say that CPX just received IOHK delegation so that’s awesome for us and encouraging for the community to see this continues to happen.
Best of luck
No really, thank you Mr. Alkilani… That was such a well-thought and clear explanation!