Looking at the numbers overall I think it can definitely be possible. The only problem is what RobJF has already mentioned. In order to do this you’d likely need to have a large amount of Ada yourself to add to the pool to encourage others to participate in your pool. If you don’t have that then you’d have to find someone or a group of people collectively with a large sum of Ada to help grow your pool, but what would be the incentive for them to join your pool?
I’ve been thinking about this, low fees compared to the competition, or maybe no fees for delegating your voting rights and that could be used tomake a profit, scale becomes important , maybe some type of a scheme where you create “a 1000 
stakepool” where you can stake no more than 1000 , pander to the little guys, because that’s the large percentage of the whole 
. Cult of personality maybe, get a famous person to stake exclusively with you. It could be the tech as well, maybe create a smart contract that makes it easy to restake your coins and add the compounding interest on it so you don’t have to keep restaking them at the end of the period, you could just press a button and forget about it, but the feature would only come with your stakepool. Maybe a lottery stake pool, where a lot of people stake their coins but only one walks away with all the incentives(the whole pot), no one looses money but some lucky person gets rich and next time it could be you if you play long enough. Maybe all of these feature in one complex staking system, weeding out the competition so on and so forth. Feel free to add anything, let’s mawl this over, the profit potential is there, I see 20billion reasons to get into staking as a business and that’s just in , in 10-20 years what will that be worth?
I don’t think staking incentives will stay just as incentives to run the network. I feel they’ll become a tool to get peoples votes, then you can create unions, push agendas , vote people in and out , control the treasury, in that way stake pools can become very important and very powerful. More I think about this more I worry about whale 
evil geniuses that’ll foresee a potential in this and establish themselves early on. It can also just be my imagination.
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Would limiting the maximum size of individual staking pools help to combat this?
Also, I would give up a bit of profit to be in a pool I can trust. I really have no idea how I’m going to choose a pool.
Hard to tell, maybe competing stake pools wiill simply keep each other in check. Funny, stake pools starting to sound like political parties. Maybe it’s just human dna 
, to group into entities
Yep, I think the stake pool creator would have to put their face and name out their to facilitate trust as well as stake a large number of his or her coins.
Given POS has low hardware costs then contribution to community becomes main criteria aka why should I stake at this pool. Could be a good thing.
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I agree with the sentiment here. I want to stake my own coins, and run it on my own hardware in my own space, on a high speed computer on a high speed network connection. I would be happy to have a staking pool but the applications are closed. It doesn’t feel right to me that there is going to be a target of only about 100 pools when there might be far more of us wanting to run one.
Good to know: If you delegate your stake to a pool there is not really a need for trust. (besides reliability)
Your ada will not be at risk in any way and the rewards will be distributed automatically to you. (its not like the pool gets your rewards and then needs distribute it to you)
Regarding pool selection: the wallets will do this for you (or at least help you with it) and sort the pools by “desirability”. Which is calculated by pool leader stake (the pledge), costs and margin of the pool and if it is saturated.
Your staking rewards will go to a special reward address that will be (as far as I remember) automatically calculated to your staked ada. So it’s basically a “press a button and forget about it”-thing.
Also nice: when your selected pool changes something (like it’s pledge or margin) the wallet will alert you to reconsider your decision.
Pool registration for testnet will be reopening soon. For mainnet registration is not required, anyone can do it. The number of mainnet pools will be around 1k or more.
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It looks like this link is already live: https://staking.cardano.org/registration/
(EDIT: someone came up with this yesterday in Telegram, I have no idea if it is already working)
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Well spotted! 
Edit: Happened to refresh it, now back to saying registration closed! 
There is a built in mechanism for this already. You can only get so much of the reward from the epoch based on the number of pools participating. So I read IOHK is expecting around 100 pools, but RobJF mentioned it could be 1k. No one can really tell at this point in time, however you are limited to 1/the number of pools participating. So let’s say there are 1000 pools, the epoch has 1,000,000 Ada available for rewards, you have 1 billion Ada staked. On the surface it appears that you would be a powerhouse and get everything, but since you can only get 1/1000 or 0.1% (1000 Ada) of the reward it encourages people to leave the pools that are too large to go to smaller pools. For the record your pool would still get it’s capacity worth of rewards, but anything over 1000 Ada would be transferred to the treasury. This should reduce competition between pools and prevent whale pools from forming.
Thanks for this. Ultimately I have faith in the system that these geniuses have developed.
If I get an additional 3-3.5% ADA/year I’m pretty happy with that
What if you have more than one stake pool running? If you really have a billion to stake as a whale 
, you can create infinite amount of pools. If you’re in it as a business, what difference does it make to run one stake pool or a dozen in parallel.
You think they wouldn’t have thought of that?
I’m really sorry we’re not seeing more knowledgeable people joining in here. I can’t tell you how it’s done, but I can say with absolute certainty that single owner multiple pools and all other obvious issues have been very seriously considered and the incentive scheme is designed to deal with them.
I’m not interested in running a pool myself, but those of you who are IMO need to read the technical papers and any/all other literature available.
BTW I know it still says 100 pools on the IOHK site but that dates way back, Charles has said 1000 much more recently, more than once I think.
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Well you know what Benjamin Franklin said, “we are all born ignorant, but you have to work hard to remain stupid.” Knowledge is hopefully the byproduct of joining this forum, and engaging in discussions with knowledgeable people such as yourself.
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A pool owner needs to “pledge” a pool with a stake when registering on chain. While there is no minimum, it is designed in a way that more pledged ADA will result in higher rewards for everybody in the pool. (and therefore higher desirability (=higher rank) when the pools are sorted in the wallet)
If you withdraw the pledge the pool will stop working. (it needs to be re-registered with a lower pledge)
This means: it’s better to have one pool with 500k pledge than 2 pools with 250k pledge. More details on that: https://iohk.io/blog/preventing-sybil-attacks/
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