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

[vantuz-subhuman]

@ZCryt0Knight

Anyway, in PoS I don’t think you have this dynamic network flexibility unless you let the market dictate the pool fees. You can set the validator reward as a decreasing 5% or whatever else you decide, but you would have to let the market decide if a 10% or a 1% pool fee would be enough to cover its costs. That percentage would depend on the cheapest configuration people can come up with to satisfy the needs of the network.

Yes, this is completely right. And the pool fees, from what I know, will exactly be allowed to be decided by a free market. And this fact will provide a double solution:

1. Pools can set and adjust their fees in order to cover their expenses
2. The lower the price of ADA gets - the higher pool fees go, which makes delegates receive lower dividends from pools, which - in turn - lowers the supply flow and makes price higher

If this was your main concern initially - then I have misunderstood, yes )

So the pool fees provide the external “lever” that may be adjusted as price fluctuates.

@ZCryt0Knight

The point I am making is that PoW algorithm dynamically changes to encourage the nodes to mine the coin. So if today, say all the powerful miners left, their space will be filled with smaller players mining away on their laptops as the algo would reduce the hash rate to accommodate the capacity of the network. But even then the mining should at least cover the electricity costs of an individual miner.

The point I was making is that there’s no fixed intrinsic cost for a coin, so that miners have to receive more coins if price changes. This logic is a bit backwards, since as people join the bitcoin mining - the complexity goes higher and miners start to receive lower amounts of coins, but they don’t leave since this fact itself causes the cost of the coin to go up, since it becomes harder to acquire.

In the PoS the same thing is represented by the amount of total stake - if staking gets less profitable - there will be less stake locked in staking, since it would not be as profitable, but as the amount of total stake gets lower - the staking itself gets more profitable. So the system as a whole will tend towards an equilibrium.

Total stake is another “free market” variable that also will converge to a somewhat stable value as time goes by.

@ZCryt0Knight

If, however, there are no specs from Cardano and I can effectively run a pool from the comfort of my home with two servers, then the cost structure would be quite different. My costs would be equal to running two TVs 24 x 7.

As soon as the decentralisation is fully released - anyone would be free to participate with any kind of a node that would physically be able to run the software. So I’m pretty sure as time goes by we will see all kinds of pools - from professional companies with datacenters and redundancy, to a “notebook on a shelf” pool And pools of different quality would set different fees in order to cover different costs.

As price goes down - all pools would be forced to raise their fees, and if the dip is significant - there prolly just would be a dip in an average pool quality over the network as a whole, because a lot of people would gladly move stake to a lower-fee pools.

But then it gets mitigated by the dip in the total stake and the rise of profitability and greater opportunity for new small pools to appear and start competing in quality.