This is a fantastic thread. I just want to add to this discussion line the Official Cardano Foundation statement that there are no official Ada staking pools.
Here is the link: Official Position on Staking and Staking Pools
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Hello Pool Operators,
I want to give you all a heads up, Ada St can/will be displaying a curated list of all of you.
If you want to reserve your handle/domain name please do so now at ADA.st
Your name will resolve to the following locations:
https://m.ada.st/@<your-name>
and
https://www.ada.st/<your-name>
The latter will allow you to highlight your service on a dedicated page.
Please announce, in the former instance once you signup, that you want early access to this feature and I will enable it for you, soon.
Please use a âDirectâ message, an example of the former @ instance:
Make your description count {; -)
March 1, 2018
We are going to be reviewing all of you, staking pool operators, gathering more info than what is going to appear in the Dadelous wallet, or perhaps even on your own sites; like what locations are you operating in, what VPS/colocation/dedicated systems and transits are you utilizing.
In other words, why choose you and not someone else?
We are giving you all a specific page, enabling you to say in your own own words, why you exist.
None of you have to do this, of course, we will be evaluating you regardless of your choice to get a dedicated page and join in on the federated discussion or not.
We are getting asked already about some of you, who better to tell your story than you?
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Staking pool registration open 
Hey @AdamSabla a team of developers and I just launched what we hope to be the most professional Cardano staking pool community. Please add http://www.adacoinstake.com/
Thank you!
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@AdamSabla - Thanks for putting together this list of staking pools, AdaBlocks is excited to announce open sign ups to join our staking pool at https://adablocks.com/. Could you please add us to your list? Thank you!
sounds fake to me
Ada Blocks guarantees 99.999% up time, the most reliable Ada Staking Pool in the market.
as no pool is live, how is yours âthe most reliableâ ?
Thanks for the feedback! We definitely arenât fake, our staking pool is built on the most reliable and redundant computing available which allows us to guarantee 99.999% up time.
I am sure 100% you will do you best to guarantee 99.999%⌠! Cardano community really needs people with high tech skills being involved in this. I see on your site that the team looks strong , so - Good luck!!!
Anyway, I think the " the most reliable Ada Staking Pool in the market." just canât be correct , as no pools are live and no one is the most reliable or the less reliable
99.999% - isnât that the SLA for VM uptime on AWS?
You shouldnât need to many technical skills to run a stake pool. I hear theyâll be handing out a docker image.
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has some nice info pools 
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I would argue a bit on this. This upcoming official Docker image (in which we could apply different config file to get it became a privileged, unprivileged Relay node or a Core node etc.) just provides an easily configurable and standardized platform to run Cardano nodes as services. But, to protect the privileged nodes the Core nodes which are the only delegates in the Cardano network is crucial.
In my understanding, an Ada Pool can have
- one and only one (stateful) Core node which should or must be hidden and protected, and
- any number of (stateless) privileged (can only communicate to the core nodes and unprivileged nodes) and
- unprivileged Relay nodes (communicate only w/ the privileged nodes and edge nodes) which can be attacked and destroyed any time.
So, relay nodes are the easy examples of using the Docker images in some Docker clustering solutions (Kubernetes or Docker Swarm etc.), but the core must be protected. Means does not matter if any relay node is down we can easily bring up as many relay nodes as we need, but when the core is down, that pool is down and then we are losing money. Thatâs why the Core nodes are not really affected by DDoS from the outside of the world as theyâre hidden and DDoS-ing relays does not really matter.
In addition, as only a Core node can be a delegate (AFAIK currently only ~20 exists, hidden behind a few relay nodes that are managed by IOHK), despite any Daedalous wallet (edge node) can be a slot leader, therefore itâs crucial that the Core must be up when itâs required (at Coin tossing time and at block generation time etc.).
Anyway, as I mentioned it before, the architecture of a pool is one and only one Core node w/ several privileged relay nodes that can communicate w/ that the core. Therefore similar statements that guarantee 99.999% or even I saw 100% uptime is a bit misleading as the pool will be online only when the Core is up because relays are just acting as proxies and a pool only have one Core node which is a SPOF from the Poolâs point of view.
However, AFAIK, a Core must only be available when its required for Coin tossing and block generating, so as an example: statistically, a pool can be up 100% (means it was up when itâs required) despite it was physically up only 97%.
Anyway, I do not know what are the monopoly incentives of having relay nodes and how the rewards and fees can be or are adjusted (as it has operational cost to maintain cores and the optional unprivileged/privileged nodes) as I did not find anything in the source code.
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