Increase pool margin effect period

Developers CIPs
1

Hi everyone,

I would just like to gather some feedback whether this would be a worthwhile CIP or not.

As many of you will be aware there is a pool with ticker IOHK which has recently increased their pool margin from 2% -> 100%. (I would prefer if we didn’t discuss whether this pool was a scam etc, just using it for illustration purposes)

This lead to a delegator essentially asking me how this was possible and it got me thinking, when a pool increases their margin, should the effect period be increased from n+1 epochs to a longer period of time? I appreciate there is not magic bullet here and that we are only talking about rewards and there is no harm to there staked amount.

But worst case scenario we are expected delegators to be aware and change pools within 5 days. I can personally see many scenarios where a delegator might not check up that often ie if they were on holiday.

I do not see as big an issue for margin decreases (however there is a case potentially if a delegator didnt want too many rewards, perhaps tax reasons?) or for pool retirements as I personally feel these scenarios are less likely to occur with malice intent.

Thank you in advance

2 Likes
2

the free market is the greatest regulator

is it perfect? no - but those they don’t figure it out and suffer will even learn from the experience and develop as a consequence

but fixing issues that one might think is easy and worth fixing, like the one you listed above, almost always leads to unintended consequences that results in even worse consequences than those that we try to fix

this notion is embodied by government decisions that plagues our lives every day and it always stems from one thing - wisdom of the many is always superior than the wisdom of a few, there is always a group in the larger population that think of something that the few never anticipated, no matter how smart they are

we even have a history of this with IOHK and trying to remove 0% pools after the ITN by setting up a minimum epoch fee of 340 ADA per epoch on mainnet

0% pools still exist except now those small pools can’t compete in terms of ROI since the epoch fee of 340 takes a substantial slice of rewards when they manage to make a block, in the end all they managed to achieve is to make it more difficult for small pools to survive