Sorry to bother you fine folks again but our pool has ceased to be assigned a block for 7 Epoch now. With only 600k I know we are small but still…
I am at a loss.
Pool has produced before.
KES is valid.
Nodes are online. The Relay nodes are P2P so no topo updater. https://pool.vet/#yyc seems to show ok.
The BP is seeing transactions.
The only recent change was upgrading to 1.35.5
Odds of losing 54% ideal 7 times in a row is like ~0.5% so are we just crazy unlucky or what?
Hi, I discussed this issue in the following thread
Summary of what I wrote there :
My pool had 130-219k ADA staked from epoch 364 until 381 then 1.68M ADA from epoch 382.
Between epoch 367 and 382 included no block were assigned. There was a 1.1% probability for that to happen.
Since then my pool had 5 blocks assigned in epoch 384 and 392. With the current stake, there was a 2% chance for that to be happening for each epoch so my pool has been extremely “lucky”.
Today I calculated the leadership schedule for epoch 398 and… No block assigned… That’s the fourth consecutive epoch without block assigned, there is a 0,3% chance for my pool to have four consecutive epochs without any block assigned…
The current lifetime luck for my pool is 99.6% so I suppose I can’t complain.
I am almost sure that my pool is configured correctly, in my opinion Cardano’s block assignment is not random, it follows some kind of pattern or is influenced by some factors which is a big issue for small pools and causes a lot of stress to their operators.
Edit : this post provides some information about the block assignment probability Slot leader schedule & historical assignments
I also think there may be some kind of bias or factors at work - what and how I do not know - I went 70 odd Epochs with only 3 slots being allocated with 300k in stake. I changed my vrf keys and had 2 in a row pretty much right away - whatever the reason is these kind of variances are unacceptable - proof of stake is supposed to be about that - 300k for 70 Epochs should be around 17 or 18 blocks - this kind of variance from a lottery system is not only unlikely but impossible for small Stakepools to hold onto their delegators. Nobody is asking for anymore than there stake deserves but the lottery needs to be more representative in most cases. Let’s not go into binomial theory and all of that and how such runs of bad luck can occur - of course they can - but why design it this way - proof of stake should be just that - proof of stake and not a gambling algorithm
I wanted to update on this because after changing my vrf keys slot allocation has changed dramatically. After going 70 Epochs with only 3 slot allocations since Epoch 320 I changed my vrf keys around Epoch 393 and have had 7 succesful blocks minted with 1 more on the way - so that is 8 slot allocations in 14 Epochs - whatever the reason was we will never be sure but what I do know it destroyed my lifetime luck pushing it down to 75%. I am slowly picking this up but I have been seriously hampered by some aberation in the protocol - slots were checked manually every Epoch using the cncli commands which confirmed every Epoch with no slots - no changes to hardware or servers or configuration took place after changing my vrf keys so take out of this what ever you think but I can say catagorically that this was not a configuration issue as this has been checked and checked again and if it was a configuration issue I would not suddently get 8 slots allocated in 14 Epochs. Sometimes we have to questions things
