SPO Poll - Q3 2023 Setup Preferences: Answer 6 (None of the above)

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If the option expressed by @COSDpool had been available:

minPoolCost 0, minvariableFee 5%

Then I would have voted that option.

Since that option was not available, I just voted for option: “leave K unchanged at 500, halve minPoolCost to 170 Ada”. I voted this way because I believe this option at least reduces minFee and doesn’t provide an excuse for multi-pool operators to split their pools and farm more minFee chunks. See my reasoning in this post

I did however add some extra metadata to my transaction indicating that I would have preferred a minPoolCost option of zero and some brief reasons for this:

{
  "reason": "anticompetitive regs benefit incumbents, hurt decentralisation",
  "minPoolCost": 0
}

This is the transaction: Cardano Explorer - AdaStat

There is a large cohort of operators that want to vote for minPoolCost of 0 and some low minVariableFee%. The votes of these operators are split three ways between voting:

  • unchanged K, halve minPoolCost
  • Increase K, halve minPoolCost
  • None

This is because most realise that any change to K will have no effect on decentralisation because multi-pool operators will just split their pools upon any increase in K.

Unfortunately, this is politics 101. It is absolutely critical to structure a poll correctly with wording that represents community views. Otherwise you end up with completely fractionated results that are meaningless.

On a positive note: At least the vote has woken up the community to just how difficult and yet important it is to come to some sort of consensus about the wording of poll options before voting takes place. Otherwise, the only people who benefit from the poll are the incumbents that don’t want to see any changes to the existing regulation. Maybe we all needed to experience this to understand just how difficult politics is.

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