I agree with pretty much everything you said @intutionismRus . I think the main advantage in increasing K seen by most, is that it will push delegators to reassess and maybe some will shift their delegation.
However, I think this is largely unrealistic for another reason you didn’t mention. The pools that are over 50% saturated likely have a few whales delegated to them with 5-10M Ada and these whales may even be known to the pool operator. Therefore the pool operator can simply spin up additional pools and inform their whales to shift to the new pools in order to re-balance their multi-pool operation. This way the disinterested delegators don’t even notice any change, and they stay “sticky”.
Small pool operators are basically frustrated for the following reasons:
- Pledge doesn’t matter
- Even the 170 Ada minPoolCost is a barrier to fair competition (because they need to grow their pool to around 5M stake before they can be competitive)
- There is no clear mechanism to disincentivise multi-pool operation except through community social pressure (and CF just weakened this mechanism with their recent actions)
- Running a pool is supposed to be about faithfully implementing the protocol and contributing to decentralisation. With decentralisation being about resilience and censorship resistance, which means we also need geographic and local government “decentralisation”.
In general, I think most pool operators view running a stake pool as some sort of gravy train to make money. This has been made worse by confounding the reasons for staking with a pool to whether the operator builds tools or produces podcasts, rather than what the staking mechanism was intended for which was to ensure faithful non-censoring operation of the protocol and decentralisation (in it’s full meaning).
Currently the incentives support multi-pool operation with co-location in data centres owned by Amazon where the operators of the pools make some tools or podcasts that the community likes.