Your language is not quite right. Delegating and staking are the same thing. Running a stake pool, for others to delegate/stake via, is different.
The information you want is not yet available. When it is, I’m sure videos comparing running a pool yourself against just delegating to someone else’s pool will appear pretty quickly.
I’m not sure whether you understood, so I’ll say it again more clearly:
It is not yet possible to make these comparisons because the information on which they would be based does not exist. For instance, the factors mentioned in this tweet are very important:
you’re right @CreekWalker it would be helpful. i think there’s a number of people who’d like to know that as well.
i think it’ll be possible to have a decent answer once a number of things are know. things like how many pools (1,000? 2,000?) is optimum for the network to run efficiently and securely and profitably/sustainably. that would then affect the pledge amount as well as the costs cause these two aspects closely affect each other. then lastly - the level of hardware/knowledge needed.
if raspberry pi will be capable, and technical knowledge to start a pool would be at a level that many could start one following a tutorial - this would also mean more pools which affect the rewards, paying out less to more pools - so even though the hardware in this scenario would be cheap, the rewards would be low as well.
the opposite (expensive hardware and high technical knowledge resulting in fewer pools with higher rewards for fewer people) would also be true.
Personally i see it landing somewhere in the middle.
what we do know (from what Duncan has said) is that if you have a lot of Ada (in the millions) it would most likely make sense for that person to delegate than to start a stake pool themselves cause it won’t be profitable for them and worth their time.
either way good question @CreekWalker , would make for a good video topic to make, which i might do at some point!
The title of the forum “Staking and Delegation” is intentionally somewhat misleading because we often see this wrong and we want to attract all search terms. Technically the term “staking” refers to the whole process of both delegating and setting up a pool. But “delegating” only refers to “delegate” your stake (=your amount of ada).
Of course it depends - but think it through for yourself: if you have so much stake that you can fill for example two pools. You could:
1.) learn all the technically details, rent servers, update software, spend a lot of time to run your own two pools and hope that everything goes well
2.) or you could just delegate your stake to a few of the other pools that know what they are doing and just enjoy the daily/weekly notification of the @Pegasus app.
I have been looking at this today. Both Google Cloud and DigitalOcean.
And i also looked at some setup videos.
But it does seem very hard to even start a pool (tech wise) i’m no coder and never used Linux. And i might be to old to learn. I have been talking with a younger brother to run one because he is a coder/gamer. But he is not that interested. Not even interested enough to learn all you need to learn just to help me set it up.
I would like to see more “plug and play” or i mean a way to just simple install a program that has everything you need and an nice interface to just put in some numbers and boom your done.
Or a Synology application, that i have been posting about here: Synology pool package to be able to run a pool in a simple way
If your wanting to setup a pool I recommend @bigpey as his approach can be more enlighting as to how you can accomplish your goal and great support too.
Is there any work being done to make it easier for people to run a stake pool?
Like just installing 1 program and input a pledge in an easy way (ledger support would be nice) and some other variable numbers. Because this is not for the beginners.
Well i did code some websites and forums for a few years (a long time ago) so i’m not 100% new to this. But that was too long time ago and the more i watch these videos the more i feel i can’t do it anymore, it’s too much.
Yes, it is intended to be as easy as possible eventually, but that means more work for the developers, you can’t expect ease of use to come before basic functionality.