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:
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Anyone is free to participate.
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Anyone is free to run a node.
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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.)
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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.
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Anyone who is running a node is free to register a pool, almost irrelevantly to the amount of stake they own.
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Any other user is free to “vote” on good pools with their stake.
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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 )