It has been running now for 2 months without being on the leadership schedule even once! At a cost of $75/month to run the servers I fear that even when I eventually do mint a block it will not be worth it at this point and I may have to shut the server down and delegate elsewhere sadly.
I have 250,000k delegated to the pool which I thought would be enough to at least mint a block once a month but apparently not… unless I’m getting really unlucky?
How many blocks can I expect to mint with this amount?
Also to be clear, I’ve minted blocks plenty of times on the test network so I know how to do it, it just doesn’t seem to be happening at all on the live network.
I am checking the leadership constantly every day and the next leadership schedule as well, nothing ever shows up like it did when on testnet. If you read my post you will see that I checked the leadership schedule. Simply it’s always empty.
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How often should a pool without my amount of cardano staked mint a block?
Here I was thinking 250,000 was a lot to stake =P, should I give up then given my server costs?
At $75/month (for 3 nodes, 1 bp, 2 relays with contabo) x a year = $900 cost to run staking pool, each minted block will probably not be worth that, with the exception of cardano really going up in price.
340 + 100 (lets say for reward) = 440~ x $1.00 cardano would be $440, for a significant loss not to mention not staking during this time on another pool. Cardano would have to be at $3 I believe to be worth it at that point.
In the end, you have to decide. Personally, I don’t run a stake pool.
I’d say, operating a pool makes sense if you either have the plan to do enough marketing to get millions of stake delegated or want to do it out of technical curiosity as a medium expensive hobby.
The case of GNP1 seems to be either a very rare case of bad luck or a very rare and up to now not verified case of badly biased VRF keys. So, don’t take that as the average case.
Some remarks:
MinPoolCost is now 170, not 340 anymore, but you can, of course, leave your poolCost at 340 if you want. It is a competitive disadvantage for external delegators to have a higher poolCost, especially at rather low stakes. If most of the stake is yours, it doesn’t make a difference.
Your calculation is for one block. Even GNP1 with that exceptionally long streak of no blocks got three in a year.
If you’re not allocated slots, then it just bad luck unfortunately. I run on baremetal, so I don’t have the hosting overheads. It’s another way to consider running a pool. There’s risks you need to manage running baremetal, but all set ups have risks.
When did the minimum pool cost drop to 170? (that makes it even worse ouch if so). In light of this news I’ll probably disband the pool unfortunately. Have to find some staking pool I want to stake to now.
Reducing the minPoolCost was demanded by a lot of SPOs, especially the smaller ones, for ages. And it was a huge discussion the whole last year with a poll among the SPOs etc.
Finally was enacted 27th October, Epoch 445:
The discussion leading up to this has been, for example, summarised here:
And it doesn’t make it worse, really.
The minPoolCost doesn’t force individual pools to go down to that value. They can set their poolCost freely, always could. They are just not allowed to take less than minPoolCost. Hence the “min”.
It’s also not directly reducing the block rewards. Really not. The poolCost is only what is taken from the block rewards for an epoch and given directly to the pool operator before the poolMargin is taken from the rest which is then shared among the delegators (the pledge of the pool operator among them).
If you are your only delegator it makes no difference at all. You get the whole block rewards either as poolCost or as poolMargin or as rewards.
But it makes small pools less competitive because if you only mint one block in an epoch a large part of that is taken and not distributed to the delegators while that part is a lot less relevant if a pool produces many blocks per epoch. That’s why small pools wanted that parameter to go down.
It can be super tough to attract the delegation. I’ve been running for nearly 2 years and only just got over 1M. The delegators joined just recently to get me there. The lowering of the minFee has helped me I think, because the block fee has dropped down a lot and so the 340 taken from the first block (and often only block per epoch) took so much from the delegators thst I wasn’t competitive. Even at 170 minFee and just over 1M I am still not that competitive. But, like I said, I’m running on baremetal with much lower overheads than running a hosted setup, so I’m still net positive.
If you do chose to retire, I’d welcome your delegation! And hopefully you’re able to work through the retiring process easily enough.
Otherwise, keep holding on checking the leaderlog each epoch with fingers crossed.
Funny thing is tomorrow I’m going to mint a block guess I needed to just 1 more epoch haha
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---- --- - --- UTC
Hopefully nothing goes wrong minting that.
I’m running the 8.1.2 node so hopefully that will still work fine. Excited to hopefully mint my first mainnet block!
I may still wind up joining another pool like yours though based on what the rewards wind up being. Still it’s exciting to finally have myself show on the schedule.
I wasn’t aware that can happen. Would other pools do that just to increase the chance of winning? Also my block producer node is hidden behind the relays, so you are saying they would denial of service the relays? I wonder if it’s possible to create a hidden relay for the pool?
Unfortunately you never know. There are malicious people out there and you don’t want to run the risk of giving anyone the opportunity. They could doa attack your relay and overload it right at the time it is trying to propogate your block and cause an issue.
But yes, you can make a hidden relay, but with p2p they can’t be hidden and the only way they xna operate is having trusted other SPOs adding your hidden relay to their topology.