I would prefer one day.
+1. Week maximum
I tend to agree with this. With k=1000 in mind, 10M for 3 months gives enough of a boost to have a chance at attracting delegators. Extra marketing can have an effect that way.
Anything less than a month gives you nothing when it comes to convincing delegators. You as an SPO have no chance of an influence that way, it’s just lottery then, with some short term ada prize.
Also agree with people thinking small pools can benefit from lower amounts than 15M. The goal should be to give a chance to all the viable smaller pools, with enthusiastic yet skilled SPOs behind. Spreading the delegated amounts thinner would help that. How thin we may go? Based on comments above, 10M looks about right.
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I think the new delegation strategy is super! (Is saw the Blog Tim Harrison 24-11). Helping the little pools and the ‘charity’/purpose driven pools is making the world a bit better.
I m not an spo, just an delegator.
First question: i think at 10 million stake, otherwise the pools become too dependend on that stake and the fall after IOG leaves the pool is to big so delegators will also leave.
second question: stay at least 6 weeks/2 months… a shorter period will not pay attention to the pool and it is to fluctuous. A longer period gives confidence to the delegators.
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By IOG’s example quarterly delegation would be more meaningful for small pools to show the Cardano community a history of performance.
The chicken and the egg is the lottery to get into block production range at all and the 340A cost to get into reward range for delegators.
Perhaps:
~7M delegation
3 month rotation
Do you have a list of criteria of how you would be selecting the pools?
If history of making a block (confirming configurations) is a criteria, those below this threshold technically need this boost the most.
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Is why we are here asking dialogue it finally came to fruition in as fast fashion 
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I would prefer 6 weeks period so the SPO have the time to plan and execute a marketing campaign.
Maybe 10M like less ada and a long period of time to work on delegations.
Thanks for all the hard work to re think this delegation strategy. Hopefully we will find consensus.
Maria
I really like your ideas it really helps we share the pie.
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I choose 15M but I believe this value can be lower and for a longer period of time.
I believe that our main goal is to help as many of possible at once (that’s why a lower value then 15M) and still pool can produce blocks consistently.
For a longer period of time so when new delegators come ( in the next few months there will be a big movements) they can decide a pool based on pool mission or purpose so small SPO can grow organically after CF delegation leaves.
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s
No, I did not forget it, conveniently or otherwise, I left it out intentionally. I was referencing a 0% margin and the operator paying themselves. The fixed fee, as you state, is meant to go to pay for operations like web hosting, DNS, cloud servers, colocation and to repay expenditures in bare metal, colocation setup fee’s, etc…
Paying for costs is NOT paying yourself for operating a pool the same way that paying my gas costs and car payment to drive to work is not the same as receiving a paycheck to do the work when I arrive. As fixed fee’s are meant to cover infrastructure costs, not pay the operator for running the pool, I intentionally left them out of my comment because I was addressing your statement on supporting pools with 0% margins, which is regardless of the fixed fee everyone must charge per epoch. Until we make a change and remove fixed fee’s then:
- Fee’s are for infrastructure and repayment of expenses
- Margin is to pay the operators for their time and energy
Also the fixed fee in many cases either does not cover the monthly infrastructure costs, or with initial expenditures does not repay the operator for 6-12 months, or even longer, for their investment.
If an operator put so little infrastructure into the pool, for instance hosting it from 1 RaspberryPi on home internet without using relays, the operator is leaving single points of failure and not providing adequate resources for internet outage, hardware failure or other events. While this might allow them to turn a profit from the fixed fee alone the delegators will be the ones to pay the price for an under provision pool when issues occur.
Another issue is that multi pool operators can also afford to set 0% if they make enough off fixed fee’s and spread their costs over multiple pools.
So I stand by my statement that I do not support delegating to a 0% pool as it tends to point to 2 cases:
- SPO under provisions resources and 340 actually makes a profit
- SPO has multiple pools to spread out costs and earns multiple 340 fixed fees per epoch
Please read up on how delegation works, what an epoch is and how rewards are calculated.
There is no 1 day delegation lengths. CF moving their delegation around once each day will help 1 pool only, the one where the epoch snapshot was taken, the other 4 pools would receive nothing. Therefore pushing for a 1 day delegation is the same as saying 1 epoch (5 days).
Thank you for your note.
And please be a bit more careful with jumping to conclusion. Having a certain opinion does not correlates with having a lack of knowledge.
I am familiar with the delegation mechanics and I know at this moment there’s no option to redelegate within that period of time. However, the longer the redelegation period the higher the risk the staker undertakes. Rewards should be distributed more frequently, like in case of Algorand.
Currently, if someone delegates into a wrong pool then first, they won’t realize the pool does not generate rewards, unless doing detailed analysis, like checking on adapools.org or the like. So, if someone uses Daeadalus for example 2 epoch is gone plus one due to redelegation.
Maybe later there will be an improved section within the wallets where someone can check at any moment how the stake pool performs where they delegated.
I stake since the beginning of the testnet and I hope this will not evolve into a walled garden for the stake pool operators. Shorter redelegation periods means tighter competition. If the stake pool operator has a guarantee that the stake is there for 3 months, why would they make efforts to perform better then the others?
Your statement would then be specific to changing the cardano staking protocol. Not the length of time “Cardano Foundation” should delegate their stake to a small pool to help the ecosystem. These are two different things, and the first is not the focus of this thread.
This discussion is not talking about delegators being restricted to delegating stake for 3 months (or 2 or 1 month). This is specific to ONLY how long the Cardano Foundations stake would be left with an SPO to help bootstrap them into producing blocks. This would have ZERO effect on the length of time you as a delegator would be required to leave your stake with a single pool.
Why should they perform better than others? Because, in your example, after 3 months Cardano Foundation moves their stake, and the SPO no longer has that delegation. They should perform well:
- To show other delegators they are a good place to delegate to
- Attract more stake over the 3 months CF is delegating so after they still produce blocks by having enough stake.
- Convince delegators not to move their stake after CF delegates to a new pool.
Thank you for the clarification.
I agree with you partially.
Maybe not the time should be the factor. Maybe some performance indicator or the results of the stake pools achieve compared to those pools which are new or don’t have enough stake. I mean, it is important to aid the ecosystem and improve decentralization, but what if the Foundation’s stake is distributed within a week and the other pools which would need this help should wait 3 months?
What if the delegation is redistributed by algorithm from epoch to epoch checking which stake pools need this stake the most. What if the Foundation’s stake is not a binary distribution as in “they have it or not”, the pool could get certain amount and if they perform well, then the Foundation’s stake is lowered gradually. And somehow also factoring the time as well, not to support pools which cannot achieve a certain level of performance even with this extra stake.
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I love your ideas in these regards and it is pretty well known that the Daedalus rankings, although supposed to consider delegator rewards, are also supposed to consider pool performance. However the current algorithm I feel is lacking when it comes to focus on performance vs. expected rewards. Hopefully the December wallet updates even the playing fields among the SPO’s.
For real consideraion of your above suggestion I would suggest starting a fresh thread to outline your idea’s. I think this might get more attention from the community as well as the Foundation themselves. This thread has been narrowly focused for the question/poll presented. Your ideas, as good as they are, I don’t think will gain enough attention in this thread alone. However they should be taken as a serious option for CF to consider.
On the 1 day delegation. If you really feel that the 5 day epoch is hurting not only the delegators but the SPO’s themselves by not fostering enough competition, then maybe a full blown Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP) is warranted? Which I feel would draw in a much larger audience and have serious review and consideration about changing the protocol. I think the work it takes to perform a snapshot and calculate rewards on a 24 hour basis is more than needed, but that’s just my opinion and doesn’t stop me from wanting to read this written up as a full CIP with real consideration.
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I think there should be a “trilateral” discussion about this. I mean from point of views of the delegators, stake pool operators and the Cardano Foundation.
Obviously, there are technical limitation which has to be observed, and there are business/investment interest present, and all solution has to follow the “Hoskinsonian disciplines”.
I will take your advice and I try to distill my thoughts on this, and you are more than welcome to review that before publishing.
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I’d love to review when you feel it is ready.
I agree with this approach. But I would also add that the redelagation period be 3 months. Give some longer term support to smaller pools. Its not like CF will loose any rewards. They will always receive the average returns if they are spread across a large number of stakepools.
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Sorry can this discussion be split to a seperate post, the topic requires explaination of how protocol works and reason for decisions (and risks of what you propose), not something that could be handled or resolved with the current thread.
First of all I fully agree with you that SPOs of course need to be compensated for the work they do.
That out of the way, I admit that I fail to follow your reasoning. Are you saying that infrastructure expenses are fixed cost and operator salaries somehow are not? How so?
You also say
Let’s run some real numbers. I run a pool on the minimum required fixed fees of 340𝔸/epoch. That’s about 2’500$ per year if the price stays at 0.1$/𝔸. Hosting and traffic cost an estimated 500$ per year (in reality it’s way less), leaving 2000$ to pay myself. Assume I earn the median salary, which would be as high as 35$/h where I live, then I could afford 57 hours of my own work per year. Not much, granted, but absolutely doable given that the pool runs unattended for almost all of the time.
Of course the fixed fees would not earn the pool enough to pay a full-time salary even in a low-income country, but running a pool isn’t anything close to a full-time job either.
All that said, I do see the difficulty attracting enough stake as a pool to even make at least a block per epoch and therefore I totally applaud actors like the CF and IOG for kickstarting pools by delegating large amounts for a limited time. However, if the criteria are not well chosen, it is easy to create the wrong incentives.
For example It would cost a SPO very little to set up a second pool with a small pledge and 5% margin, hoping to collect a subsidy from CF, which in turn maybe even attracts other delegators who don’t mind parting with 5% of their rewards.
If the CF doesn’t want to incentivise such behaviour, the only way I see is to take the subsidy element out of the equation and delegate only to pools that don’t collect a margin, effectively giving only delegation and no ADA. Do that long enough so the pool can attract sufficient stake to sustain itself and afterwards the SPO can do what they think they need or can get away with.