Following on from a number of posts which are speaking about so-called official staking pools, we wanted to clarify the situation.
There is no official information on staking or staking pools at present. There are also no official partnerships, nor endorsements with any third party.
IOHK are going to be setting up an official staking pool website in the future where you can register your interest for staking. Please note, this is not live yet and so anything purporting to be official is not official.
Lastly, there have been no official details released on rewards or incentives for staking.
We hope this clarifies the current situation. We will of course keep you up to date on information as and when its released by IOHK.
Thanks for this very important update!!
I thought everyone who joined this community, understood that it is a long-term project. It seems to me that a lot of members are in it to make a quick buck. Saddens me to be honest…
You can run your own full node at any time. It’s just that it most probably will cost you a lot, and there will be no profits. If you have a very large stake yourself, so that interest will cover costs - then no problem.
This is great info. May be an official person to respond to some misleading info would be more helpful. Please hire a full-time team in charge of that. You know, if many people have bad information on ADA-it would be a recipe of more misinformation, which could destroy the good intent of ADA.
I think, that is Cardano’s most significant downside at the moment. You may have brilliant scientists, cryptographers and programmers in your team, but your communication afaik just sucks.
Building a software product is not just about development, but also about communication!
I like Charles on the stage, but he is not comparable to a Steve Jobs relating to the “show”.
Now, to say there’s no profit for running our own full node doesn’t make sense. Hopefully that’s not true. I can tell you I’m not a fan of pooling due to some of the issues. I understood there are benefits, like there’s no point for ppl with 10 ADA to be running its own node, and it allows more mass adoption by having pools.
However, as I brought up in the past pools have the following issues to be considered:
delegation made to bad behaving pool have potential impact to delegates opportunity cost
although there’s a cap of max reward for pool, there’s still potential of less decentralized solution as well as increased chance of 51% attack as pools would be easier to collude to impact the network more so as individual nodes
one pool down will take the rest of the passive delegate with them
Again, I’m not disagreeing of the benefit of pools, but to say there’s no benefit of running own node is absurb, just like me saying there’s no benefit of running a pool. There are pros and cons like everything else in this world.
Hopefully the team would consider a fair solution where the reward probability of person with X amount of ADA running their own node will be higher than others with the same X amount that do passive delegation thus creating a little incentive to run its own node instead of killing that. Granted as I mentioned earlier, person with 10 ADA doesn’t make sense to run node, but person with 10000, 100000, 500000 ADA should be given a fair chance to earn reward to run their node.
Team already considered the fair solution - and that solution is that anyone is having equal chance of creating a block if they have equal stake, irrelevant to the fact whether they run a pool or not.
Seem to be the most fair solution to me. You or anyone else can run a node with (almost) any stake and you will have the same chance to win a block as any node or pool with the same stake as you. Or you can easily additionally register as a pool and start having people delegating their stake to you to help you mitigate the the costs of running the node. How is this not fair?
You can read this comment (or the whole thread) where I describe in some details how a stake will be roughly related to the profits of an individual node:
I’m just commenting on your previous reply “You can run your own full node at any time. It’s just that it most probably will cost you a lot, and there will be no profits.”
One can read that comment that you are insinuating there’s no point of running your own node.
And your other comment is incomplete " If you have a very large stake yourself, so that interest will cover costs - then no problem."
What’s consider a large stake? 10000, 100000, 500000, 1 million ADA? As far as cost, it is relative and different in each country, from server cost through electricity cost.
I don’t disagree that the team has considered all of this, I’m not questioning that, I’m just saying that since no details have been given as to what’s consider the most optimal number of ADA to stake your own, I’m paragraphing the “hopefully” in my statement.
Again - you can see this comment, where I specifically addressed the question of what is “a big stake” and how we can try to estimate it:
The system is heavily optimised toward an efficient and convenient utilisation of pools. The team is realistic about the industrialisation of both mining and staking, so instead of just dumping a staking option on the free market - that would kill any decentralisation in a couple of years or probably even faster - they decided to be grown-ups about this and to fine-tune the whole thing and to get the maximum good for the system out of “the poolisation”. It’s obvious that having some free-roaming personal nodes is a good thing, but it is also obvious that because of the specifics of how the Ouroboros works - leaving the whole network (or even its majority) in the hands of a barely-reliable weak personal nodes would be a disaster comparable to leaving it in the hands of a few.
This is why:
Anyone is free to participate.
Anyone is free to run a node.
Any node with not a significant enough stake - will not win any significant amount of slots, because he does not show “an incentive” big enough to prove it cares enough. (See the link above to a separate comment about what is a “significant stake”, yes it’s probably hundreds of thousands of ADA in order to barely get any regular reward, and this is good.)
Anyone is free to run their own node and to only participate with their own stake - but they will participate on the same conditions as pools.
Anyone who is running a node is free to register a pool, almost irrelevantly to the amount of stake they own.
Any other user is free to “vote” on good pools with their stake.
Pools are restricted in their actions and profits by the protocol itself.
Seem like an awesome solution to me. Anyone can run a node, but everyone should also look honestly on how the system is constructed. The basic rule is very simple:
If your stake is big enough, so that paying a fee to a pool would cost you more, than running your own servers - then running a node would be more profitable for you. And that is the only way how it may be more monetary profitable. Not by “honor and nobility” of free nodes )
That’s what I expect, that’s why on my previous comment, For example, Bob owns 10000 ADA and Alice owns 10000 ADA, but Alice choose to stake its own node (assuming it covers the server cost), I would hope that the system would give Alice a better chance / reward than it would reward to Bob (who’s just the passive actor).
There’s a tradeoff between true decentralization or not. You are assuming that the non pool nodes are weak hands (heard of torrent) I wouldn’t labelled running a single node is automatically considered weak hands, I am assuming person that will run node on its own has similar technical skills as the one running on a pool, with only one difference that he didn’t want to be burden by the administrative part of maintaining pool membership.
Also, on the other hand, in my original discussion, I highlighted some drawback of pooling that you didn’t address. Like I said, both solutions have pros and cons, it’s key to achieve the balance between these two.
I am wondering . . . why can’t nodes elected to write blocks just simply be done in a random order where everyone is then rewarded by the same percentage of the stake they hold?
