POS Delegating your stake VS Staking it your self

Developers
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There are 21’600 slots per epoch (5 days), and there are 73 epochs per year. It gives us 1’576’800 slots per year. To have a chance to win on average at least one slot each year a node needs to stake 1/1'576'800 share of total stake in the system. If we assume the total stake to be ~20 billion ADA (might be reasonable, knowing the details of how transition to Shelley is planned to be performed) then a node would need (1/1'576'800)*20'000'000'000 ~= 12'683.92 ADA.

~12 thousand ADA coins to have an average chance to win a slot per year, and average means that ~50% of the time there wouldn’t be a slot for more than a year. And each slot would give you, maybe, like a 500 to 1000 ADA.

With the same assumptions to have an average chance to win a slot each epoch - node would need to stake ~925’925.92, so roughly a million.

I think it’s fair to think that anyone with less than a million of ADA would rather delegate it to someone, cuz it’s easier to pay a small margin to the pool operator than run your own server at a loss.

If we assume that someone has a zero-cost server than difference between running a node and delegating would be the scarcity of the payouts. Pool would give you stable stream of small revenue, while running a node with a small stake would make payouts extremely rare and scarce.

Anyone with an ability and will to run a Cardano node at a loss is welcomed to do so. Anyone who does not have such an ability or does not want to - is equally welcomed to delegate.

  1. Node does not receive the rewards for missed block
  2. If a node controls multiple slots in the same epoch - missing one of them might cost him more than a cost of a single slot. Meaning that producing 5 blocks will give you 5X the reward, but producing 4 blocks and missing one might give you in the result 3.8X or something like this (work in progress).
  3. If a node misses all the slots in an epoch and also have missed last N slots - node address will get completely excluded from the staking in the future epochs (blocked). This is a protection from suddenly dead and unresponsive nodes with a remained stake. Exact N is work in progress.
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