Official Position on Staking and Staking Pools

[vantuz-subhuman]

@fxlprasetyo

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.

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:

[Question] Running a node while joining a staking pool?

Absolutely no problem whatsoever, this is exactly what forum is for Just wanted to make it clear in my answer that I am not sure that I understand the question completely Great question! So, here’s how it works: Anyone who runs a full-node - will get the right to create as many blocks as much relative stake he has. So whether it’s you or a stake-pool operator who runs a node - there must be a relatively big stake for this node to be able to make any blocks. You do no…

@fxlprasetyo

One can read that comment that you are insinuating there’s no point of running your own node.

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:

1. Anyone is free to participate.

2. Anyone is free to run a node.

3. 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.)

4. 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.

5. Anyone who is running a node is free to register a pool, almost irrelevantly to the amount of stake they own.

6. Any other user is free to “vote” on good pools with their stake.

7. 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 )