Latin America and Spain should also be part of the consensus


Although I am quite active in the forum, I try not to express myself publicly, and let the community express itself based on its collective wisdom. But at this moment, as an ambassador dedicated to the hispanic community, and as an SPO with almost a year of experience, I need to make a simple petition to the main actors of the ecosystem, about a problem that has been worsening for many months, and with no solution in sight.

Since the beginning of ITN, we created a very active community of more than 100 SPOs. Many people dedicating hours learning, and giving support. Since my role has to do with the adoption and expansion of the community, I focused with others on encouraging participation. Unconvinced people were joining in this adventure of being an SPO. But Shelley arrived, and with it, some problems. From the first day the Daedalus ranking did not contribute anything to the decentralization, we were forced to define a minimum high fixed fee, and the ADApools ranking used this weakness (with the concept of ā€œcostā€) that took away the little protagonist we could have. In turn, this was deepened with the incorporation of the ADApools ranking into Yoroi, which although EMURGOā€™s idea was to include other options, in practice time is pressing and the hispanic pools lost a lot of traction against other pools that were capturing more market. Today, Yoroi still has only one ranking, by ADApools. With this I am not trying to point fingers, but to describe a reality. But if this were not enough, a few days ago IOG launched a functionality in Daedalus where it sent almost all the hispanic pools (except one) into exile (literally).

The hispanic community has shown a great strength and resilience, by continuing to support despite the continuous obstacles imposed by different influential actors of this ecosystem. For my part, as an ambassador I have decided to retire as an SPO, not only because of indignation, but also so as not to compete against Hispanic SPOs and focus entirely on supporting them. Many are not lucky enough to reach the global community, and our ā€œworkā€ as SPO is not about being excellent communicators or influencers, but technicians capable of building a solid infrastructure around the node, being very aware of the difficulties of being an SPO, and with the necessary hardware to support the processing volume that will come with Goguen. The reality is that there is an abysmal difference of stake between Hispanic pools and the rest, when the difference in operation capacity and solidity of the infrastructure is not so different (I would dare to say that there is no difference). Currently, Hispanic SPOs with great skills only receive a handful of stakes from delegates who are aware of the centralization problem that exists.

From my point of view, Cardano cannot be proud to call himself the most decentralized network in the crypto industry when a community as vast as the hispanic one (Latin America + Spain), has very little participation in the creation of blocks:

Of the total number of blocks created by the community, ~0.16% were created by hispanic pools.

My petition is if you, as influential actors of the ecosystem, can take into account the different realities when making your decisions (or at least not making THESE decisions), and if IOG can avoid imposing on the only official full node wallet that the delegates have to vote for their choice, which pools to show and which not. Decentralization begins at the wallet. Daedalus currently dictates which pools are shown ā€œonā€ and which are ā€œoffā€.

Letā€™s try to be broad when proposing ā€œsolutionsā€, and avoid imposing conditions according to a personal vision (or convenience). The concept of decentralization implies NO imposition of conditions (except those dictated by protocol), and fair play by influential actors.

So, in conclusion I ask you, from my humble position, not to help us, but not to hinder us either. You have been systematically harming the hispanic community with incomprehensible decisions, and this is not the first time I have mentioned it. Please let us apply decentralization as a philosophy of life and a vision of development, not just as a slogan. And donā€™t put obstacles and discourage those who try daily to take Cardano to Latin America and Spain. Please :pray:

Thank you :ok_hand:

@IOHK_Tim @SebastienGllmt @yosef


Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion where the Cardano Foundation and my role as ambassador have no relation.

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thanks @rodri - itā€™s requirements like this, as well as the stake centralisation problem in general, that I had in mind when drafting the current Cardano Improvement Proposal for user-generated stake allocation portfolios:

ā€¦ with these benefits for each part of the Cardano staking ecosystem:

  • communities of pools : i.e. special interest, self-organising, union-formed, or democratically established peer groups, with any of these criteria and more:
    • ā€¦ community-based (geographical, technological, or other affiliation)

Many other geographical / ethnic / philosophical / technical interests remain fragmented with low stake in their representative pools, and there is enough Ada stake for them all to be competitive without having to combine their pools (a half measure that would work against decentralisation).

IOG and Emurgo could assign a much greater priority to multi-pool wallet delegation, as well as this CIP itself which has had very little official recognition and support so far. Perhaps if more people posted comments supporting that CIP then its priority would be escalated.

A usable Community Portfolio of the 100 pools that you have already curated would go a long way towards fixing the problem you have pointed out, since sympathetic users could delegate to that pool list directly. As documented already in the Github discussion, the proposed Stake Pool URI Scheme would be able to support twice that number of pools.

With proper support for crowdsourced delegation portfolios, Iā€™d like to think that their total percentage of block production would line up more with their percentage of total pools, as we all proceed toward a generally more even distribution of stake. :sunglasses:

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Rodri.
Spanish community should be proud of having an Ambassador like you. You have the knowledge and the necessary skills for representing us, and you are a humble person wich opinios are quiet often fair and right. Maybe not today, but with your help at some point spanish community will grow enough and you will return as a SPO.

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Hello, I am the SPO of GenkiPool, I started GenkiPool at the beginning of the Shelley era in time 208. I joined Cardano for its technology and its philosophy, I have been informing myself about Cardano since 2018 and one of the things that it boasts the most is due to its desire to achieve the largest decentralized network in the crypto world, however, since the beginning of the Shelley era I only see measures that increasingly support centralization, such as not taking any measure that prevents the same person or company create more than one or two pools.

From the beginning, Daedalus showed a random raking and with the passage of time the ranking turned in favor of pools with a higher stake, even saturated pools appearing in the first places, thus fostering more and more a centrality network, so much so that Today 54.7% of the distributed stake is dominated by 12 pools.

Despite everything, the SPOs have continued to support the Cardano project and do our best to manage our pools, thinking that in the future measures would be taken to support the decentralized network that they promise so much, however, a few days ago IOG launched a new one. Daedalus update that far from improving the ranking to favor a decentralized network further encourages the choice of pools that have a higher stake, since not only the pools with the highest stake always appear in the first place regardless of the amount selected with the slider option, but small pools about 800/1146 appear in a gray color and without a ranking number, which seem to have been withdrawn or are out of operation, so much so, that I had to notify my delegates to not to think that GenkiPool had retired.

We are many SPOs that support the Cardano project and this functionality makes us feel excluded, therefore, we would like at least an explanation of what the objective of this functionality is, which does not favor at all to achieve a decentralized network and that It will be explained to us why we are going to do marketing of Cardano to help its adoption if Daedalus is already going to decide which pool is the ā€œbestā€ according to them.

I hope that these inconveniences that create great discontent in the community are explained and solved, the Cardano community would not like to see how Cardano is one of many that promise a decentralized network of words and then see that it does not even make the minimum effort to be achieved, which is to help the SPOs that support the network.

Thank you so much for your attention.
Greetings Genki.

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I totally agree on this one. Is sad to see the whole Hispanic community of SPOā€™s being force to retire or just hang on our pools just because we want to support the network, but as we already know supporting the network by just having a pool that canā€™t produce a block is not supporting anything at all.

The amount of blocks produce by those clusters pools and all the IOG and Emurgo pools are ruining the ability to our community be part of the decentralization of Cardano.

And of course, as it mentioned, the new ranking from Daedalus is like the last nail in the coffin for decentralization. Adapools.org, which is present on the Yoroi wallet provides a ranking that is also misleading delegates in some kind of way.

Thereā€™s parameters that need to be change but if things still going this way, parameter arenā€™t going to do s****

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We should have more rankings in Daedalus, with other characteristics. Yes the ranking does not promote decentralization.

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I second that.

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Thanks for sharing this Rodri, although it is sad to read it. You are kind of a ā€œrobotā€ ambassador who is everywhere, all the time, translating, answering community membersā€™ doubts with high degree of technical details, sharing a lot of knowledge, since a long time ago. If this is your situation, what should we expect for the rest of the SPOs?

As per @CODSpool message, it seems to be an even broader issue affecting not only hispanic pools but also pools from other communities.

Hope for your voice to be listened and for a solution to be provided.

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Thanks Rodrigo by exposing your opinion. If Cardano can make some changes we will celebrate them. But if not happens, As Latin American I think we need to join forces and empower SPO one by one. It depends only in us. What do you think about?

dear @CardanoCastellano, if you think the Stake Pool URIs would help, then please comment at the above thread for that CIP and tell all your ā€œbrothers in armsā€ to do the same. :slightly_smiling_face: Itā€™s astonishing how long this proposal has been ā€œin the worksā€ without a single supportive comment or analysis from any other SPOā€¦ especially the ones who have complained most bitterly about stake centralisation.

Since SPOs (Hispanic or otherwise) arenā€™t insisting on this feature, theyā€™re not getting itā€¦ the proposal for user-created delegation portfolios remains on ā€œwish listā€ until further notice. Unfortunately, until we have documented popular demand for this feature, weā€™ll be expecting that notice to come from the Cardano development agencies who appear to benefit most from the stake centralisation.

A stake pool link protocol was proposed 2Ā½ years ago and remains unimplementedā€¦ which means at the rate weā€™re going now, finally with official acknowledgement but little else, we might not expect community driven delegation until Cardano / ADA sinks or swims without it.

Now that the recent (2.4.0) Daedalus ranking adjustments are reported to have a stake aggregating rather than decentralising effect, a means of identifying pool collectives in support of user centric communities (Hispanic and many more) is the next most viable option. As Iā€™ve written in the proposal itself, work can continue on this while everyone goes on bickering about the protocol parameters and ranking algorithms.

And about all issues above: we have been told outright that the escalation point for SPO complaints is through the IOG Marketing team. Iā€™ll bet we would see some real progress if the forum contributors above, if not every one of Cardanoā€™s 100 Hispanic SPOs, would directly contact the IOG Marketing representatives listed in this concluding comment, and present their demands for community stake pool links and a fairer system of pool rankingā€¦ :sunglasses:

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Join forces without losing decentralization. That is, empowering them in positioning to be visible to the global community, without each operator losing its autonomy. It does not depend on a single person, but on a group of people who join forces towards this common goal. Count on me. I will make my contribution from CAZ.

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Thanks @COSDpool
I took a look at your CIP, but sorry, Iā€™m not a tech guy, so it is quite difficult for me to give any kind of opinion. @Rodri, thoughts on this?
I was about to recommend you the Catalyst project and then I saw a comment from Sebastien stating that you already have something there, I made a search at Ideascale with ā€œURI schemeā€ but I was not able to find you.

wowā€¦that is a long time

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No problemā€¦ but I do I feel bad that people are not getting involved in the belief this a ā€œtech issue.ā€ Itā€™s a feature that can be understood & used by non-technical people. For instance if you wanted to make it easy to delegate to a list of 100 special interest pools you could write a link from a pool list like:

web+cardano://stake?SP001&SP002&SP003...&SP100

ā€¦ with plenty of space (within the maximum length for a web link) to also add numbers, to divide in unequal portions if needed (if you felt the smaller pools needed more help to get up to minimum stake):

web+cardano://stake?SP001=10&SP002=3&SP003=1 ...

Then when people click on that link, it delegates as such in their wallet(s). Simple, but not easy (to implement) as any of the developers will be happy to tell you. And vitalā€¦ because without integration between web & wallet I donā€™t see how we could ever have community delegation portfolios (e.g. Hispanic) because weā€™d have to rely on a centralised source to generate them.

The technical detail is there so the developers can have some direction about adding this feature into the wallets & related delegation tools. But you donā€™t need to be technical to read down to the Rationale section to see & support the reasons why the CIP is there, who it would help, and how. You can comment in support of any of these reasons (or suggest changes) without being involved in the details or technical things.

BTW I heard from Sebastien today that theyā€™re having CIP meetings and are looking to move this along, particularly in conjunction with the related CIP for adding web links for payments & payment addresses. This is good news that the proposal is getting positive attention, although we will need popular interest in order to keep the priority high.

Here is the Ideascale link: Community

Here is the first appearance of the idea (also in the CIP history):

It may be too late to comment on the Catalyst project, but itā€™s the perfect time to comment on the forum page for the CIP, so please post there what you think & get all your friends interested in this issue to chime in :cowboy_hat_face:

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@COSDpool Your proposal was shared with some of the hispanics SPOs, some of them mentioned that they already know it and were also pushing for it. Did you have the chance to share it on Discord? I also tried to find you there but I was not able to do so.

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thanks @CardanoCastellano, Iā€™m happy for all our sakes that people are independently pushing for the stake pool link proposal, which I work on somehow every day. It might be half way through getting accepted, based on a very welcome private call this week with @SebastienGllmt at Emurgo, in which he requested delaying the multi-pool aspect of the proposal in the interest of getting single pool links implemented ASAP (along with Daedalus payment & address links).

Iā€™m on Discord as rphair [COSD] and I havenā€™t sent the proposal to SPOCRA by that means, although I tweeted it via #SPOCRA on Twitter, and posted it on the SPOCRA forum a month ago, where it was generally ignored:

https://forums.spocra.io/t/internet-links-for-stake-pools-pool-groups-delegation-portfolios/134

I have no real interest in, or currently any time for, social networkingā€¦ but if/when a discussion on stake pool links emerges on Discord please let me know somehow so I can help the discussion along & answer any questions. I would like to get email notifications of a direct message or user name reference on Discord, but thereā€™s no way to turn email notifications back on, so please contact me by Forum DM, Twitter DM, or email.

Personally I would rather see 100 personal requests from individually affected pools directly submitted to the relevant people at IOG Marketing, and whoever else might care how the stake centralisation is making Cardano look to the rest of the world, than support a single request through a union representative.

However the person they designated as the ā€œconcierge to the stake poolsā€ (@benohanlon) hasnā€™t yet been responding to individual requests (of mine, at least) and seems mainly to be creating more opinion polls and suchā€¦ it would be much more reassuring to see the marketing people posting on the forum in response to SPOsā€™ already urgently expressed opinions.

In the meantime, what Daedalus (2.4.0) did to the small stake pools was like something out of Game of Thrones ā€¦ I am still trying to figure out if theyā€™re really trying to kill off everybody but the pool conglomerates and usual favourites. So if I could get one honest answer from IOG to one single question today, it would be about the ranking devastation rather than the pool links.

Although the ā€œblackoutā€ itself seems more important now, it also makes the pool linking issue even more urgent than it already was. If practically all the small pools have been literally blacked out of Daedalus, weā€™ll need to provide delegation links directly via our web sites. So I would recommend to everyone:

1 - make a Github comment in this thread, indicating how/why/when you feel the single-pool stake links are urgent, in a place where the developers will be forced to look at it. Note this ā€œpull requestā€ is being edited down this week so it only includes single stake pool links, so those changes can ride in with the Daedalus payment link scheme in a related CIP, which will merge with this one:

2 - watch this forum thread, to be notified when a second pull request is created, some time after the merged CIP is accepted for the stake pool links, to include all the changes necessary to support multi-pool delegation portfoliosā€¦ which will most likely depend upon protocol support for ratio staking and therefore may be a little further down the road (only Sebastien could say when)ā€¦ and which will eventually address the need for community delegation portfolios as identified in the OP:

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Just showing my support for this CIP. Itā€™s good to see thereā€™s already progress on the PR on github.

Iā€™ve also posted a reply on the original thread for this CIP [here] where I think further discussion on this topic is more appropriate. The title of this thread here is very far from the CIP.

1 Like