Only 8 operators might be controlling 88% of the network

I suggest you open a new convo if you want to get more informations regarding that specific topic. Or may be look for similar convos in the forum. I would not be surprised if that point was already discussed.

Cheers

Thanks for the suggestion. But if you take a closer look, I wasn’t asking for more info. :point_up:

You don’t know you’re still looking for them. That’s the problem.

See here

“In Ouroboros Praos, deciding whether a certain participant of the protocol is eligible to issue a block is decided via a private test that is executed locally using a special verifiable random function (VRF) on the current time-stamp and a nonce that is determined for a period of time known as an “epoch”.”

Definition of private: belonging to or for the use of one particular person only.

Cheers,

A much better reply! One that I would expect from an ambassador.

You think someone has a mistaken understanding of how something works, you tell them why. You don’t tell them to open another thread and ask for more info. That behavior is a problem also.

As to your quoted excerpt, that alone still doesn’t make my assumption wrong. It only describes how the protocol determines if a pool can issue a block at a certain timestamp.

I’ll just assume for now that the rest of the paper goes on to prove my current understanding wrong, until I get the time to read it.

Still, going back to our main subject, this is only one of my example filters. As I’ve said above, if this filter cannot be used, it doesn’t mean the suggested mechanism will not work. We can just use other available filters. Whatever ones are relevant and usable.

But anyway, I’ll give this a rest now. I rest my case for this particular suggestion.

I asked a few month ago a question about geographical decentralisation which from my point of view is the basis of power (and real) decentralisation.
And It does not seem technically hard to add an ip based parameter (of the relay node at least) in a ranking algorithm.

It would also have the advantage of making the network more resilient to political or governmental attacks which by essence are still defined by geographical borders.

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Just replied to the other tread that we are currently shifting from the centralized (development) phase to the decentralised (‘final’) phase. Live Stake Control Over Cardano Network Today - Stats & Visuals

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Having an IP based parameter could lead to people hiding their pools behind a vpn with the proper IP.

I think we move towards decentralization at the moment, while the endless cloning of pools might actually pose a risk to real decentralization. Like the multiple binance nodes - I’d not want to put Cardano into the hands of Binance :frowning:

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The ideal solution to avoid groups of interest controlling the Cardano network would be to have a bullet-proof solution to detect them, so we could just add a factor in the reward formula to negatively impact it.

There doesn’t seem to be such a way available right now, since it’s quite an easy task to just create multiple stake pools.

But there are a number of factors that could be used together (with some kind of ponderation) to intelligently determine the probability of a stake pool beeing in a group. Pushing such factor will make the work complicated for group operators. For instance:

  • Website: it’s easy to detect stake pools that refers to the same website
  • Similiarities in titles/descriptions (for instance: using levenshtein distance to detect similar title/description/ticker)
  • IP ranges
  • port used
  • Pledge amount / fixed fees / variable fees
  • language
  • IP address from which the stake pool is declared
  • etc.

If you’re a group operator, you don’t want to have to manage your multiples pools in different ways, on different hosts, setting different websites, etc. Maybe we should use that to design a solution.

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to eliminate the incentives of having multiple pools by one entity.:slight_smile: Otherwise you cannot do anything (waste of time as it’s like symptomatic treatment) does not matter how hard you would try it.

It is similar with the elimination drugs as an example (just for simple model for analogy) what the governments are trying to do for almost a century. And now where are we at?

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Not that I would disagree with that, but thoses are essentially the same as for operating one pool. If you have concrete ideas in mind, i’d love to hear it.

Play with this, what I just created in the last couple of days, and you will see, what is the issue.
Not the a0, not the RSS function, but the reward distribution /w cost and margin.

Originally, cost was not considered, but margin which had some slightly bad impact in rewards, but /w cost it’s accummulated a lot.

Nice work you did there.

It seems indeed that margin has quite a significant impact on reward distribution (PO versus members). But i’m still not seeing how this relates to the current discussion.

AFAIK, Group operators declare multiples stake pools to work around the saturation limit, and it’s hard to prevent. I don’t believe they are really incentivised to do so before reaching this limit, am I wrong?

No it’s not. If you understand the math and those graph, then you can see that the issue is that the pools with pledge before the turning point (when d/dx f(x)=0). This causing that all pools (small or large pledged) are incentivized to split their pledge to smaller pools to maximise their profits. Which is a rational behavior, as we can see with pool groups (more than 1 pool /w the same entity)

In simple words:
If you can earn 33.8x (assuming full saturation) with 2x35K (average pledge of the Cardano network) pledged pools, and only 32x /w a 70K pledged pools, or more realistic ones with the current settings, as 1PCTs with 50K pledge each /w ~50M stakes

  • 1x50K pledged pool can earn 50K+ a year, therefore 10 pools 500K ADA (sorry, this is the correct as I left the margin at 3%) in a year.
  • 1x500K pledged pool can only earn 103K ADA in a year.

So, what do you think would incentivize the 1PCT only having 1 pool instead of 10?

In the weekend I just sit down and grabbed a pen an paper and went through all of it (and during and after that I created the graph in desmos), it was not easy, but there can be some solution but the Pool operators would not like it as they do not want to loose these extreme profits.:slight_smile:

Do not get me wrong I am a pool owner and one of the very first community members.

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Is there no way to prove your geographical whereabouts on internet?

@maliky At least not that I know of. Only the ISP’s can really trace an IP, and then it might also be a fake IP forwarding the packets.

You should keep in mind that not the number of pools are threatening the protocol but the pools with the same entity gained power.

As Cardano can have thousands pools but the total (voting) power i.e. total stakes are still the same. I am happy to see lot of small pools arising but unhappy that they are not incentivised for having only one pool.

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That’s true, the protocol should favor running only one pool, but there is no real way to stop anybody from cloning their pool, except proper community knowledge of who runs which stake pools, or am I missing something?

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Shameless plug regarding pool splitting… An Alternative to a0 and k

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I have read your proposal, but I do not think that the reward calculation function needs to be changed.
The issue seems to me relating to the reward distribution functions and not to the reward calculation one.

I’m afraid I don’t follow. What do you mean when you differentiate between a “reward calculation” and “reward distribution” function? From one of your earlier posts I gather you imply that the reward distribution function = reward calculation function - stake pool’s cut where stake pool’s cut = margin fee + per epoch fee(340 for most pools)?