Awesome thanks for the info
Hey @MegaWind,
From the site it sounds like you want to pursue this as a business venture, am I right on that point?
If so/otherwise - Did you have some particular business model in mind? Proportional dividends? Whales get improved terms etc.? Do you plan to run the pool business yourself?
What do you sell online and where are you based?
To be honest, I will probably start staking by myself then compare my numbers to yours to see if I have an advantage joining your pool. We will know soon enough
Hi @rin9s,
Yes, longer term I would treat it as a business venture - it would have to be to commit this level of high end equipment and security to it.
Short term Iām willing to do it at a loss to help Cardano since I believe in the project itself, and we already have significant network/computing resources available so itās a good fit for how to contribute to the project. Iām a former software architect but I donāt know that Iām going to learn Haskell to contribute to the codebase lol.
As far as business model though - mostly weāll just have to see how the staking terms are set next month for the Shelley release in order to determine whatās a win/win for both the pool(s) and the stakeholders.
Offhand, I could imagine a series of pools depending on a) size of stake and b)length of time stake is committed, with better terms for larger and longer stakeholders. And yes some form of proportional dividends would be a great option, it all just depends on what the staking rewards are which we wonāt know until next month.
Anyway, exciting times for Cardano/Ada and looking forward to more developments as we get closer to Feb!
Hi @CosmosX,
We are a manufacturer and seller of lab grown gems including lab grown white and pink diamonds (for jewelry). Outside of Seattle, WA.
Re: staking yourself and comparing - absolutely.
If the pool has no net value add then it doesnāt make sense, and ultimately I can see itās best if the Cardano network has both high speed pools and independent stakeholders b/c the diversity of nodes increases the robustness of the overall network.
Great comeback @MegaWind, thx.
Overall business model presented succinctly, it will have to be dependent on stake size & time frame, and itāll need to be worthwhile on some level for the folks running the servers.
Iām considering how to approach this but whether I start my own pool, or whether I will bring HW/Stake to some pool, Iām less interested in the profit side and more concerned with creating a federation of independent pools. Different pools, who could coordinate with regulation status and market reality. Thatās why member pools will have to be totally independent on management / business entity side. The federation itself could handle all its limited responsibilities on a āpeanut dividendā from the member pools.
Thoughts?
One more question - at this point would you find whales ( however ideological) or common folk (with an aim to have them delegate to you en masse) more attractive as pool members?
(Wonder if micro-payments could be an issue on the latter(?))
Hello everyone. We are planning to launch a staking pool as well.
Iāve spent quite some time researching the IOHK github projects, it seems that running a staking pool wonāt be as trivial as running a random binary. There are potentially many different services to run. Also, running a staking pool is an ops challenge as uptime is critical. Currently there are absolutely no info about how delegation will work and I have no idea if clustering of different cardano nodes will be possible to offer HA.
That being said, whoever is thinking or working towards launching a staking pool I would love to get in touch.
Cheers
Me too! Count me in, please!
Iām in.
Data Scientist and Python/Ruby Developer.
Iām interested in learning more about Cardanoās staking nodes.
How can i create a staking pool? Is there a tutorial on that?
I just created a docker image for cardano-sl node, anyone can run a cardano-sl node via one command. Have a try here
.
Do you know if I can run this node on a Docker on a NAS Synology DS716+II ? Thanks!
Absolutely ! I am running my node on a vps and its performance is not as good as your NAS.
Define medium? 10K? 50K? more?
I would say that with the price going up, and Shelley release only in q2, i think that 50k would be considered āmore than mediumā - in the end this is to be a currency for the un-banked not just an impressive ROI for tier 1 country whale investorsā¦ Where will the 500 ada? 2000 ada? 5000 ada stakeholders stake? Any friendly pool doing anything for the community? We will try to gather here , at least 1000 people adafans . io/2018/01/14/first-ada-fans-meetup-barcelona-mid-september-2018/ 
Great! You donāt happen to have some instructions for setting up a node on Docker from a Synology by any chance? I found your node on the Registry list but I donāt know what is the execution command to enter in the Advanced settings/ Environment tab.
Exactly like on this Youtube link at 1:42 for Minergate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql4bnTNi9eM
The GUI is amazing, while I usually use CLI. AFAIK, you donāt need extra setting, just run and everything will be fine.
Hey Adafans,
Sorry you got flagged, probably for self promotion (really hard to understand where the commercial line here isā¦).
I think youāre right and that whales (not just 1st world either) pose the biggest threat to Cardano having any semblance to a democracy in how itās run. The problem however is not the people, itās the money. Some ordinary folk are greedy and egotistical, as are some whales, some folk are great. as are some whales.
I would go as far as a āNo Whales Allowedā policy, where all are welcome, but there is a cap on an individualās investment so that no one investor will carry the bulk of a poolās stake and have too powerful a voting power.
Problem with that attitude is that the money is going to get to the pools anyway. What if we find ourselves in a position (which in the beginning we certainly will) where all that capital goes into whalesā pools holding all the ADA stake, and all the votes for Cardanoās future?
Yes, we must keep Cardano on track and make it democratized, but early on I think we have to have our own - āNon purely profit Drivenā whales who believe in the project in order to compete. In the long term we should find a mechanism to separate āgood stakeā from ābad stakeā and incentivise the exiting pools and their operators & investors to behave in a way that is beneficial for the project (and hopeful people in general).
Not a simple problem by any rate.
Great feedback rin9s! Thank you! Sure the āwhaleā concept is a little abstract. Lets think about ābig bag holdersā like this - category I - ada fans that will hold cardano for long term (this is what you call a "good whale?) and cat II - ada holders that are in this just for profit - and fill sell at the right price and dont care about the community.
Both of them (by holding) lots of ada will do nothing to undermine its value ā¦ We also know from Charlesās last updated that cardano doesnt have āto many whalesā and the distribution of āwealthā is rather balanced.
If this will be true when Shelley goes live - most likely that all whales and all groups of whales will create their own pools. The ādilemmaā is - where will the small / medium holders stake? At a whales pool? Or can we āgatherā 1000 Fans join and create a fan ruled pool + a community around itā¦
I see lots of āstaking poolā cardano sites that pop up - but none of them is saying nothing about will they do for the communityā¦ is this ok? To make money from having a pool - and doing 0 for the community? Will Ada medium holders āfallā for this pools?
I would not call running a node and having a stake as well as being rewarded, however appropriate, is doing nothing for the community. First, youāve parted with some $ for the stake, and second, while it may be a relatively small cost, you have to continuously maintain your nodeās uptime/aliveness so the Cardano network can function optimally. Moreover, you may need to possibly expand these staking resources/nodes later on to handle more throughput, which means more cost to you.
Thereās nothing wrong with making money while providing a service. The remuneration for any service is typically formed by demand and supply for such service, as is with anything else I suppose where moneyās involvedā¦