If you look at the stake/reward-curve (i.e. at pooltool.io) you’ll see that at least multiple million ADA are required to be able to compete with more established pools.
Those numbers are especially hard to reach if your pool is already up and running - it is easier to convince a bunch of people to come together for something new with a great outlook than to join something that is already not performing well (a pool with less than multimillion delegation cannot perform well, again, check out the reward curve). Even friends have been telling me “lol dude why is your pool ranked so low, not gonna delegate there”.
On top of that, allowing the same operators to run multiple pools completely counters the saturation effect.
I myself will shut down my stake pool if the k-parameter-update in March won’t have the desired effect of redistributing enough delegation to my pool, and I’d expect others to do likewise. At some point we are just missing out on too many profits.
tl;dr Establishing a new shelling point is hard enough, getting people to join one that is underperforming due to its size is next to impossible. On the flipside, there is in practice no upper cap on the growth of big pools.
I fully understand your concern. We are still far away from the true decentralization. This is either to fail or work out. I bet on, that it will work out. Maybe not in March but hopefully in a time frame of five years.
This is my time frame for my stake pool.
Everyone should start a project with a plan. I knew all of these problems beforehand and I still launched a pool, but homebrewed. Maybe you reconsider and start something similar? I plan to built up my pledge over time, so as soon we hit March I hope to have 25k ADA ready. Likewise as you I want to see if it attracts happy delegates in March!
I mean the 25k is just the requirement for being eligible for the Cardano Foundation delegation. What I mean is - if you don’t command multi-million ADA your pool pitch won’t hold.
Of course it will work out, I’m very bullish on ADA long term but I’d like to reconcile my inner businessman with my inner tinkerer. Right now they are at odds because of this.
LoL it seems like you must be new to the “game”. Yeah it’s pretty much charles homies took 80% of the delegators at start since they were promoted on all cardano videos their pools were way oversaturated even back at start, they changed k lately no problems they just made 5-10 pools idiots still delegate to them. The average investor does not care about decentralization just to maximize their profits. I don’t think we will see anything groundbreaking in march if they lower k even more they just setup 20 pools, why should they care they suckered in all the noobs to delegate to them they don’t even need to market anymore. At the beginning I cared about my pool a lot, upgrading it with the latest software, monitoring it, checking the latest git commits, changes to the software.
Not anymore f this dogesht, I still have it running and check on it 1-2 times a month but I’m done with this garbage project. Keep on dreaming that this will get any better.
The only way decentralization would ever work is to autostake between the pools and divide the stakers automatically, it will never happen. Too many interest now just like in other areas in life the top pools are monopolies.
TBH you are better off taking your ADA and stake it somewhere then waste your time, energy, money to run a pool.
I will wait until ADA will reach an acceptable price then I will dump it all and move all my cardano bookmarks into the Recycle BIN.