I will vote “None of the above” and add metadata to the transaction “Replace minStaticFee with minVariableFee of 5 percent” or add this metadata with another option, but I believe the effect is strongest with the “None” option.
If you want to support this movement, you can e.g. use Martins script 13a_spoPoll.sh in combination with 13b_sendSpoPoll.sh to add a public metadata message with the optional parameter “msg: Replace minStaticFee with minVariableFee of 5 percent”
There are more voting tools in the works like cntools which should hopefully support adding metadata and be even easier to use, so you can pick whichever tool you prefer.
What is my rationale?
Yes, increasing k will force delegators to move, but I strongly believe we shouldn’t force them to move until the incentives are fixed to better support decentralization.
So I vote not to increase k. With current incentives increasing k will just lead to the majority of the currently about 270 pools close to saturation to split. So I highly doubt this will help to spread stake to smaller pools at a large scale as some hope.
Yes, decreasing minStaticFee does help, but I strongly believe it doesn’t help enough and will lead to the opposite, it would only strengthen the race to zero and lead to even more badly managed pools due to cost cutting, hurting the network.
As we know, block reward has been decreasing, currently block reward is at about 500 ADA.
Let us assume a small pool just starting out minting one block per epoch. The SPO is forced to take 340 ADA of that 500 ADA, so with the minStaticFee alone the pool will be very unattractive to delegators as the effective cost will be close to 70%.
Halving the minStaticFee from 340 to 170 ADA will reduce the effective cost with one block to 34% which is still very high and unattractive to delegators. At the same time it will halve the only income small pools have, breaking even more pools IMHO.
Replacing the minStaticFee with a minVariableFee of 5% however will finally result in an even playing field for small and large pools alike. If you mint one block the fee is 5%, if you mint 50 blocks the fee is 5%.
Why a minVariableFee? From experience I have seen the strong race to zero, so to prevent a race to zero, I see high merit in setting a minimum setting.