Small pools are dying...what do you think?

Few or no mistakes language-wise, I would say. :slight_smile: A well-written post, and similar to many of my thoughts in my long post today at Running multiple pools is more profitable than just a single one -> this does not lead to true decentralization! . Since I’m not an ambassador, there’s not really anything to do, there, but despite weeks of work researching, packaging, and testing Cardano Node (including filing debug diagnostics multiple times during build failure issues via Cabal with Cardano Node 1.18.1 (prior to being ‘pulled’) and 1.19.0 (I’m running a patched version, now—almost all I which I feel was unacknowledged by maintainers), and in ultimately open-sourcing my independent take on packaging Cardano Node in Docker specifically from a high-availability point of view (including block-producing nodes), I’m actively considering how much longer I’ll want to stick around running CRAB pool, since it’s so far from profitable, what’s gone to launch isn’t what I understood would happen, and I’m beginning to feel a bit like I’ve sacrificed weeks of full-time work and infrastructure—for what?

I’ve been an active open-source contributor for years, and that’s fine, but often those projects I’ve been involved with haven’t been backed by a huge company, or been explicitly finance-driven. I ultimately am very supportive of the technology behind Cardano, and I agree with many (although not all) of the goals, and I certainly think it and ADA will be around for some time to come. But that is very different to it making business sense to operate a stake pool, since the understanding I had of an experienced devops/programmer/architect with all the ‘required experience’ checkpoints and far more, being able and willing to operate a stable, reliable, highly-available stake pool, and with a large financial investment as well with regards to pledge (measuring in the thousands of Euros, which to me, at least, is a significant sum), appears to have been a huge misunderstanding.

Ultimately, all that now appears to matter is huge amounts of stake and marketing, and even then, I see pools 1 or 2 orders of magnitude larger than mine, that still stand little chance as things stand at breaking into a market dominated from launch by numerous IOG pools and now other sets of pools seemingly with a single operator, too. It’s really very disappointing. :slightly_frowning_face:

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