I’m starting to think about the staking pool ecosystem, wondering if there will be a place for stratagem in it. I’m thinking that the staking pools will compete against each other as well as the official IOHK staking pool. Will staking pool coalitions springing up? Will there be ways to manipulate the odds to seek advantage? Will becoming a leader in the community offer significant advantage? Will there be politics and intrigue? Once you introduce “the human animal” into any ecosystem, things are bound to get interesting 
What do you think the future will look like?
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Also, how does the value of Ada affect staking pools? At what price does running a staking pool become profitable?
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Nice topic Sean. If all pools will have similar or the same tech features, only way to differentiate yourself would be marketing. Charles H. confirmed this on the telegram group a few months ago 
He is there quite often, i suggest you follow the https://t.me/CardanoMaingroup
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Thank you 
, awesome, will sign up immediately
!
You’re not secretly Charles H. are you?
? I have an imagination tends to run wild
LMAO, no maan but… I secretly wish I was
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Sentiment shared! It’s high time we found someone worth emulating…the man makes me want to take up mathematics 
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So based on this talk, Elias seems to be saying there will be equal rewards for full pools. Or said another way, once a pool reaches a certain size, there is no difference between the rewards issued to a full pool.
There is however an incentive to join pools that are not full. But then conversely, wouldn’t the incentive be for an established pool not to have too many stakers join?
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same thoughts here.
It’s not fully clear to me what the factor k does mean and if it’s something automatically adjusted by an ecosystems size indicator (e.g. market cap or tps) or if it’s something artificially/scientifically but manually set and refined over time?
another opinion I just cope here from facebook is
the way the reward function works in this video, it is based on the target number of pools (represented as K) which is arbitrarily selected (in this case, 20). Thus, Cardano can select a fixed number of pools, and the rewards distribution will incentivise the formation of that number of pools, all having roughly equal stake. (For reference, Charles in Jan indicated there would be roughly 20-200 pools, so the 20 here seems to be the lower bounds of that range). So the number of pools could be adjusted by Cardano as the ecosystem grows, but the reward function only scales to match the desired number of pools selected, and ensure an approx equal distribution of those pools. It doesn’t by itself reflect the ecosystem size. Note that pool operators would likely add servers etc. though as the ecosystem grows, b/c they have to meet a network responsiveness rating…thus there is a built in performance monitor for the pools. Thus, total server power could grow with the ecosystem growth, but without the total number of pools changing.
So even though this video makes a lot clearer, …
yes, this could sound like exclusive memberships for premium staking pools. But that brings up the question what is the effective exclusive value on top of the equal staking revenues?
Or in other words: does this create incentives to DDOS offline other pools “a little bit” just to become a more efficient and “exclusive”? Should we expect such staking-pool strategies, as a consequence of Cardano’s obviously (good) strategy to build an equal and well balanced staking-pool ecosystem?
Also what does my participation on a certain pool mean regarding the treasury votings? is this completely independent from the blockchain/slot creation process or has the pool also some political/strategic “opinion” that all members share?
Yes. I am sure this will be the main issue with running a pool - defending against ddos
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