Why 340 Ada min fee is not being reduced

Thanks to @rphair for pointing out the advertising motive in his github comment: CIP-0050? | Shelleys Voltaire decentralization update by michael-liesenfelt · Pull Request #242 · cardano-foundation/CIPs · GitHub

Motivation of free advertising

I think @rphair is right. I think one reason the min fee of 340 Ada is not being reduced, is because it drives pool operators to compete for delegators by producing youtube content and showing off their donation credentials. It is free advertising for Cardano.

The problem

The min fee of 340 means a pool needs 10 million total stake before this fee is small enough to be relatively insignificant to delegators. Pools are all competing to achieve this size so that delegators can choose them without foregoing significant lost rewards. Consequently, pool operators are behaving like colourful birds in the PNG forest, dancing and showing off their plumage. Generating youtube content and displaying proofs of donations.

Profit motivated pools are competing for a scarce resource represented by a pot of 10 million Ada. If they can get to this size then they have hurdled the bar and can then continue to accumulate delegators. If they grow too big, then they simply split into multiple pools and continue to grow. Small pools find it difficult to pull delegators away from multi pool operators since the min 340 fee imposes a financial penalty on the move.

Ways to choose a pool

So how are delegators supposed to choose a pool? Currently they can watch youtube content and choose particular pool operators through getting to “know them”. But how much can you really know someone through youtube or even meeting them in person? We all know that spies can infiltrate organisations for many years as trusted individuals only to turn when the time is right. Does choosing a pool based on how much you think you would like a youtube presenter improve decentralisation?

Then there are the sites like adapools.org that publish a leader board based on yields, social contact information, and whether the pool is part of a multi-pool group. I don’t think this encourages decentralisation either.

A small pool can’t get to the top of the leader board because their relative fees are too high with the mandatory minimum 340 Ada fee. Furthermore, why does listing social contact information affect the ranking? You might say it is because you want to know if you can trust the pool operator to not change his fees. But Cardano is supposed to be a trustless, permissionless, decentralised protocol, with non-custodial liquid staking. Surely it would be better to address such fee change risk with technology. For example, by building a notification mechanism into wallets to warn delegators before the change is enacted.

Encouraging decentralisation

I don’t think the adapools.org style leader boards, or youtube advertising by pool operators, is the best way to push decentralisation. I think we should be able to measure the correctness and performance of each stake pool somehow. We should be able to know if the pool is producing appropriate blocks containing all the transactions it was given and not censoring anything. Also, that the pool is not providing preferential treatment to somebody or part-taking in MEV. In other words that the pool is operating in accordance with the mission and ideals of Cardano. I think these things are most important to Cardano delegators.

Profit insensitive pool operators

I don’t have the answers for how we can monitor and measure pool performance. But, I do know that there are many operators who will run a stake pool irrespective of any profit motive. Many of these operators are focused on correctness and running their pool to improve Cardano’s goals of decentralisation, open access, and fairness. Many are freedom, privacy, and free software, enthusiasts, and may be insensitive to pool running costs. Many probably don’t even care how many blocks they get to produce so long as they do produce occasionally for positive feedback of correct performance. Nevertheless they are professional and determined to not miss any assigned blocks or otherwise fail the mission.

Problem with 340 Ada min fee

The problem with the min fee of 340 Ada is that delegators are discouraged from staking with the enthusiast, service provider pools. These operators are running their pools for reasons other than profit. It might be to learn more or maybe because they are just idealistic zealots. These people are running their pools correctly. But, delegators are discouraged from staking with them because the mandatory 340 Ada minimum fee makes their pools not viable options.

Staking in the long term

There is not much else you can do with your Ada capital at present aside from speculate on NFTs or provide liquidity on a DEX. Both of which are risky. But this is about to change. There will be opportunities to use your Ada capital as backing for stable coins, lending agreements, collateral for derivatives, etc. These alternative uses for Ada will have a big effect on the staking ecosystem as will the staking of the Ada held in their smart contracts. Furthermore, staking rewards will continue to decline over time to eventually equal just the protocol fees.

So thinking long term:

  • Do we want people staking with profit insensitive pool operators?
  • Are profit insensitive pool operators good for the ecosystem?
  • Would encouraging staking with profit insensitive pool operators improve decentralisation?
  • Will reducing the min fee cause a race to the bottom?
  • Would a race to the bottom in stake pool fees have a deleterious effect on decentralisation?

I am interested in the views of others.

@Michael.Liesenfelt and @Colin_Edwards have expressed ideas about the 340 Ada min fee in other threads. However, I don’t think anyone has talked about how profit insensitive pool operators affect decentralisation, especially since the costs to run a pool are low.

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I really appreciate the time you’ve put into this post. I can tell you’ve put a lot of time and thought into it.

I agree that the staking atmosphere is evolving and changing. Staking the Ada held in smart contracts will drastically change stake distribution, as well as holder engagement. As institutional interest grows, I also think that there will come a time where lots of ADA will be locked up in institutionally owned pools. This has happened on other chains, and I believe its a process of growth.

Hopefully, we can use the available protocol parameters to protect our smaller validators. In my research and experience, running validators is an expensive job. I’m sure its controversial to a lot of operators out there, but I rely on the min and variable fee to pay for my costs and time. Without it, I may have just delegated my stake instead of spinning up a pool and attracting a base of delegation.

I do feel like a race to the bottom would not be ideal for the ecosystem. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not terribly interested in working for free. That being said, I’m deeply passionate about this space, and I would continue to contribute in anyway I can, regardless of financial incentives. Although, I wouldn’t have as many resources to contribute.

I think many of our current tool builders, validators, community members, social influencers, and general Cardano heroes are contributing in part for financial gain. At least I hope they are…because their work is valuable to all of us.

I worry a little when people get excited about cutting operator fees. I don’t terribly see how it would redistribute stake to smaller pools. Larger pools would still be able to out-compete any new fee structure and likely increase their entrenchment.

Furthermore, I think we want a robust and secure network of operators who are incentivized to maintain competitive, secure, and up-to-date nodes. I’m not sure this is possible if we ask people to run their nodes for charity or at a loss.

I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, and this is only my current viewpoint. I see a lot of chatter about dropping the fees, and not much about the importance of the fees…so I just wanted to chime in with my humble ramblings.

Again, thank you for taking the time to create a great thread and continuing this discussion.

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Let’s not be cynical. Skeptical, sure… cynical, no.

What world do you want your children to live in?

The challenge (dilemma?) of growing stake suggests that to some extent, for Cardano to grow and be successful, there needs to some willingness to make decisions–such as selecting a pool for delegating stake-- for reasons other than, or more complex than, profit. Not all blockchain projects are designed to thrive when people help each other, but Cardano seems to be more designed that way, given the challenges that seem to start arising for everyone in the ecosystem with some percentage of people in the ecosystem seeming to focus more heavily on wanting only what may be best for themselves.

The goal of discussion in the SPO community often somehow seems to be how to create value in the ecosystem while removing or separating values out. In the SPO community, values–such as supporting charitable causes–tends to be considered suspect or cause for suspicion. How is that working for Cardano? The network is secure… now what? Cardano is surviving… but is the ecosystem thriving? I don’t necessarily disagree much with what is said in the original post, but I do disagree with how it’s said… supporting not-for-profit or charitable causes is “profit insensitive?” Wow. Not even the fiat economy is so uncompassionate. Not-for-profit and charitable organizations are a real thing, you know. Give to a charity you believe in sometime. It feels good. But I digress… the community seems to love spending time trying to identify problems with the protocol–blaming the protocol-- when the same “issues” perhaps may in fact be more easily addressed by taking a good hard look in the mirror, so to speak, and reflecting honestly about the usefulness of some motivations over others in the scheme of things.

There are two possible goals for contributing to Cardano:

  • Aiming to win– For you to win (for example, for you to get all the stake you may want for your pool), someone else in the ecosystem must lose. Anyone who “wins” at some point would also be expected to “lose” at some other point in time. Be careful what you wish for. As the idiom goes, “There is always a bigger fish.” When people in the Cardano ecosystem lose, then Cardano also loses.
  • Aiming to continue participating– If the goal is to keep making contributions to Cardano that you may make while taking care of your own needs and interests as well, then Cardano has the potential to grow and remain stable long into the future. When Cardano grows, then we all benefit.

There are other blockchain projects out there that seem better suited than Cardano to maximizing profit without allowing for the “messiness” or complexity of values.

What world do you want your children to live in? Do you want our children to live in a society where a lack of complex values is considered an improvement? A perceived obsession with “winning” at profit in first-world economies while leaving behind “losing” economies in second- and third-world countries was at least part of the original inspiration and motivation for creating Cardano in the first place. If Cardano becomes an ecosystem where only a lack of values–in other words, valuing only technology–is incentivized, then the project has failed and/or will fail (lose, in other words). Everything changes but change itself.

In Cardano, creating value over time requires reflecting your values.

CHG

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It is really good to see that this topic continues. As an SPO that has been been operating a functioning Stakepool since October 2020 I can honestly say that the 340 ADA pool fee is probably the biggest obstacle that any new operator has with regards to getting established in the ecosystem.

This is a sad reality in any market situation and the current fee does nothing more that to protect established and large pools. This is not just an insignificant factor - this is over 50% of the reward being extracted from Delegators where pools cannot mint more that one block in an Epoch. Given that you would need several Million in stake to provide a likely chance of more than one block each Epoch this acts as a total barrier to any new entrants in the Stakepool arena unless of course you can pledge amounts in the hundreds of thousand of dollars (even at the current low ADA price).

I have 300,000 in stake which has been pretty consistent for 2 years now. However I have just gone through a period of 42 Epochs and only been allocated one slot - this is well below the expected number and so how am I expected to keep my delegators happy when not only do I get a run of luck like this but even when I do mint a block I have to give what little block reward that I get in Pool Fee back to my delegators (as this is only fair on them) - so why then should the large pools have this artificial luxury of being protected with a 340 ADA Pool fee. Large pools will fight like hell to keep this pool fee as they know that once it is remove then a whole new platform is produced whereby they all have to cut there fees and will have to make revenue through running an attractive and fair pool. Yes there will be a race to the bottom but that is how it should be. The pool fee was never in the original design and it does nothing but destroy competition and decentrallisation.

Then finally as I have eluded to in my other post about a similar topic this pool fee is creating a not insubstantial compliance risk. We cannot have well over 50% of Stakepools returning rewards that are significantly below the much promoted 4% return simply because of a pseudo tax that most delegators have no idea is being imposed upon them. If you want to attract regulator scrutiny with regards to protecting the small investor then this is a great way to go about that

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…here’s another way to look at it. Either the behaviour changes more in the interest of the greater good voluntarily, or the (minimum?) fixed fee may drop from 340 ADA to about 30 ADA in order to try and incentivize similar changes in behaviour. What’s the better longer-term decision? For now, it’s still up to us, the community.

To help in attracting new delegators to Cardano in a significant way outside of a technical community, the community really needs to “walk the walk,” not just “talk the talk.” Suggesting that nothing can be done until IOG and the Cardano Foundation “fix the protocol” is a lazy excuse. As Hoskinson said in a recent video, “Remember… Cardano is yours.” Making changes on your own terms tends to be better than having to make changes on someone else’s terms.

A Cardano community that is only willing to treat others with love and compassion to the extent that the protocol incentivizes treating others with love and compassion has far bigger problems than whatever may be imperfect about the protocol.

CHG

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I really appreciate everyone’s thoughts and different perspectives.

I think we are in a very early stage of the lifecycle of Cardano stake pools and I think it will change significantly over time.

My view is that over time a stake pool will be an access point that provides the operator with an extra degree of control or assurance.

If Cardano does go on to provide a successful “financial operating system” then there will be so much utility value to Ada. Ada will be used as capital to back stable coins, lending agreements, and all sorts of derivatives. This will result in Ada residing in smart contracts and being staked from there. The architects of these smart contracts will have a lot of say over how that Ada is staked. Maybe they will design in features that allow the users to vote on staking arrangements. Maybe users of smart contracts won’t care so long as they earn the highest yield.

I don’t think Cardano staking will stay like it is today and remain as the main focus for people seeking to earn a yield on their Ada.

Regarding the difficulty and cost of running a stake pool:

I think it is cheap to run a stake pool. I have been running a mail server and DNS server for over 20 years, for free. I run these for family and friends and so that I can control my access to these internet services. I want to know that these important software systems are not doing anything untoward with my data and I want to control the storage and access to my data. For me, running a stake pool was simply a “bolt on” service that cost me almost nothing extra. Furthermore, the costs to run such infrastructure is getting cheaper and easier every day, and it gets more reliable.

Why will people want to run a stake pool

For me, the reason to run a stake pool was to have some control and to be able to verify things. Also, to have an inside view of Cardano progress. To see how things develop and to be better able to see future opportunities. It is like having a call option on the future of Cardano because it will help me see things earlier. I could just keep reading, but there is nothing quite like getting your hands dirty and running something to help your understanding.

When I say “control”, I don’t mean that I seek to gain more control over Cardano. I am not interested in building a staking empire. I don’t want to run multiple pools. I don’t run my pool to make a profit. I don’t market my pool. Control for me means control over access to the system for myself and my family and friends. Problems like MVE (maximum extractable value), transaction censoring, or preferential access, makes this worthwhile for now until these systems and society’s acceptance develops more. None of us know how things will play out in relation to government laws or the wider community’s expectations.

I don’t know: Maybe there are not many people that view things the way I do. But, I think there are. I think the cost of running just a stake pool will continue to reduce. I think any profit from running a stake pool will also reduce. I think a stake pool will increasingly become a bolt on service undertaken by other Cardano utility providers (DEXes, Lending providers, Stable coin issuers, Layer 2 roll-ups, Derivatives platforms, Tokenised stock exchanges, and the list goes on).

The case for better stake pool metrics

One post seemed to indicate I said something negative about supporting charities. I personally donate to the free software foundation and have done so for years, and I personally donate to other charities. But, I think this is irrelevant to running a stake pool with the aim of furthering the ideals and mission of Cardano.

I think it would be better if we developed and focused on metrics to measure the correctness (fairness) of stake pool operation. Whether the pool is being used to provide preferential access or censor transactions. Or, whether it is re-ordering transactions to extract value.

Maybe it is quite difficult to measure such things, but I think these would be better metrics for judging pools rather than youtube content and proofs of charitable donations.

Why min 340 fee will stay

In the meantime I don’t think IOHK or Cardano Foundation will want to change the minimum 340 Ada fee because it is creating a heap of evangelists all broadcasting free advertising for Cardano. However, the deep down motives of these evangelists, are not necessarily pure.

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AFAIK the min fee will be changed after the Vasil hardfork. At least this is what was said in a call a few months ago.

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Indeed, I suspect the min fee will be reduced sometime after Vasil. If I remember correctly, there was talk of reducing to min fee to around 30 Ada on the call @weebl2000 is referring to. Who knows what change will actually take place though.

Anything that can decrease the barrier to entrance for new and existing validators is a good thing. I’m all for it. I think we want to continue moving toward being an ever increasingly decentralized chain.

In my personal opinion, Cardano is simultaneously one of the cheapest and most expensive chains to validate on. Its true the hardware requirements are low, and the costs of running said hardware are low. But its also true that an entity needs around 500k USD in staked ADA to have a reasonable chance of contributing a block to the chain. And to offer a “competitive” pool, you need around $5million USD in staked ADA. A fully saturated pool (the protocol’s optimum pool) is holding over $30million in ADA at current prices.

Lets not forget that StakePools are businesses. Running a pool is providing a service. Depending on where you live, you may have a whole slew of additional professional and tax fees associated with maintaining compliance. Not Financial or tax advice…do your own research. But, all of this adds up to a lot of time, work, energy, and thought.

We are blessed to have the Cardano Foundation’s and IOG’s rotating delegations. Equal, available, and ongoing foundational support for validators is quite slim across the crypto ecosystem. Its amazing that we have rotating support providing new, existing, and novel pools the resources to mint blocks and contribute to the ecosystsem.

I truly hope that if/when the min fee is changed, it brings about the type of change that operators are seeking. I also hope that it will create room to change other parameters such as K in the future. I remember having a dreamy conversation with a few operators in early 2021 about a future Cardano with a very large k. Who knows, maybe in the distant future a pool with 2 million ADA will be considered a very large pool.

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Nit-pick: $30 million (With the other values you have correctly multiplied by 0.5 $/ADA, here you have doubled by 2 $/ADA.)

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oh man, thats a blunder. I’ll change that. Thanks for pointing it out.

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This, I believe, has a lot of truth to it. It is often said that stake pools are businesses and as such need to cover their costs, which is true but it is also sometimes used as a pretext to hide other motives.

If my expectation would be to run a pool with a guaranteed income of 340 ADA per epoch while neither taking a risk nor paying the cost for obtaining the necessary stake, any sane business person would point out the obvious flaw in my thinking.

Yet the “business model” of some SPOs seems to based on the assumption that they can not only extract the fixed fee from their delegators but also take an additional cut in form of a variable fee, all while not having nearly enough pledge to assure a steady block production in the first place.

Of course, this can’t work for most people unless you are an influencer and have enough followers who stake for other than economic reasons. There are influencer pools with 100k pledge and 4% variable fee. Such a pool has 100% return per year even if not fully saturated.

I’m not saying this is bad. Dishonest, yes, if pretext arguments are used. Maybe it is even beneficial for all of us to have such evangelists, as you call them, and people who pay for their income streams.

Over time, however, I expect to see other models that are more advantageous for people who have ADA to stake but neither want to run their own pools (which, I concur, costs nearly nothing to do) nor pay exorbitant fees.

Specifically, I would like to see pledge markets. Or how about a smart contract that delegates to the highest bidder?

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I also think these sorts of things are coming. I believe the profitability of running a stake pool is going to be driven down until it reaches the marginal cost of running one. This is what happens in all markets where there is competition.

The influencers you describe with 100K pledge, charging additional 4% fees, are getting “money for nothing”. Currently these influencers have a giant moat around their businesses in the form of this 340 Ada minimum fee protecting them from fair competition. The only reason they have this moat is because they were early.

Cardano prides itself on providing a fair, equal access platform. If this is true then there must be no barrier disadvantaging new entrants from competing with incumbents. The 340 Ada min fee is anti-Cardano.

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I would like to see pledge markets. Or how about a smart contract that delegates to the highest bidder?

One thing that I feel uncomfortable with about the current model is that it mixes up “who is doing a good job” with “who is offering the lowest cost”. Having block producers lose business because someone else put up a flash sale doesn’t make for a more stable infrastructure.

Everything I see modeling this out is more fragile, more risky than the current state. The only people who benefit are the people running the protocol; being able to “rent” delegation opens up a number of economic attacks.

Our block producers aren’t that expensive - I’d honestly be happier if everyone just adopted the same fee structure forever: everyone gets a variable fee of 5% or something. Start competing based on who has the most up to date software, security certs, personal pledge or geographical diversity.

Who knows what change will actually take place though.

The delay is more organizational than anything else. Vasil didn’t help because it took a lot of the senior leadership attention (which is limited), but the wider context is that Cardano is on a path towards decentralization, where the founders take a step back and have greater community involvement in decisions.

That is not an easy process; over time the community has changed from a group of highly engaged, highly informed crypto-nerds to much less involved members of the wider public. The reality is that any change that doesn’t have widespread public acclamation is really hard to make in blockchain (and that is by design.)

The 340 Ada min fee is anti-Cardano.

Cardano is an open platform that can support many different views; it’s bigger than you, me or even Charles. I personally don’t like the fee, I agree with you about the platform being better without it. On the other hand, that’s my view as an analyst, not as gatekeeper or ideological purity tester for Cardano.

(I am expecting renewed focus on this soon.)

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I agree. I think we need to focus on tools and metrics that allow the community to see if pools are being run properly in alignment with Cardano ideals. To see if pools are part-taking in MEV, prioritising certain entities, or censoring transactions.

For example, I recall that there was a stake pool some weeks ago that was consistently producing empty blocks, presumably to lower its propagation times. There have also been stake pools running dual producers to ensure they don’t miss producing blocks, but then they produce two different valid blocks at the same time and cause the chain to fork which in turn causes other pool operators to get their blocks orphaned.

There is also “freeloaderz”, aimed at providing better access to “the community” by better managing chain congestion. But which community? Freeloaderz medium article says:

Freeloaderz is focused on improving the Cardano ecosystem and supporting single stake pool operators. We offer several advantages to participating SPOs.
First, by joining FreeLoaderz, the combined resources of participating SPOs will help spread out transaction submissions across the network, thus helping users and delegators get the quickest transactions possible through our combined resources.

Why is freeloaderz necessary when the protocol is supposed to provide fair access to anyone and everyone already. Do we need things like freeloaderz to fight against outsized control over transaction bandwidth? Surely such concerns should be already addressed in the protocol design? And, I think they are.

Most pool operators are talking their own book and are thinking that competition will centre around profitability with bigger pools gaining economies of scale. I just don’t think the main focus will be about making money by making blocks.

The barriers to entry to be a Cardano block producer I see are:

  1. Education and skill in running software (easy and getting easier)
  2. Reliable internet access (cheap and getting cheaper)
  3. Corralling enough capital (stake) to “guarantee” producing a meaningful number of blocks

To be honest, I don’t think most stake pool operators today are going to be able to corral capital as well as the traditional finance mob. Tools to make money will, and are, being built as we speak, and these tools will want preferential, or at least assured, ledger writing access. Those that design and build the tools will make a lot more money through sophisticated financial engineering than will be possible by just faithfully producing blocks. Just wait until Blackrock and Goldman Sachs start shifting their capital around. The additional cost for them to run multiple stake pools is zero and the reasons they will want to run stake pools has nothing to do with earning staking rewards.

I hope we have some good tools for monitoring things like:

  • Preferential transaction access
  • Censored transactions
  • Delaying transactions

I know the Cardano designers have thought a lot about these things as you can see it in their research papers.

I just think that the cheaper and easier we can make running a stake pool the better. I would like it to be so easy that everyone can run one.

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I couldn’t agree more. Its sometimes hard to remember how early we all are to the party. I suspect there will be some interesting events, hurdles, and changes as our chain develops. You’ve raised some valid and provocative concerns, and I appreciate them! Conversation and community engagement is invaluable. We are all pieces of this chain.

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Hi Colin,

Separating a problem statement from a solutions approach makes sense.

Most of the discussion in this thread seems to speak implicitly to the existing community. I tend to consider Cardano more in terms of potential for growing the size of the community, and what I may do to help. I’m not “all in” on Cardano and as hard as I may look, I can’t find a compelling reason to invest more, currently.

I can’t in good conscience seek more support for my stake pool in the form of delegation from the wider public without first gaining support from the Cardano community. Why would my mother invest her savings in a stake pool if the Cardano community won’t support the same pool?

Also, explaining return on stake needs to be simple. My mother is not interested in hearing about x percent return AS LONG AS and IF, UNLESS, UNTIL or THEN. You get the idea.

Seeing pools having much more stake or pledge than mine, such as GNP1, having financial difficulty does NOT motivate me to invest more. I have an extensive professional background working in IT and am willing to work to add value in the Cardano ecosystem. While I’m interested in available delegations from IOHK and Cardano Foundation, I’m also not really impressed. If IOHK said to you, “Hey Colin, we put your name in a draw to see if you’re going to get paid this week,” how would you respond? What kind of talent are you trying to attract? Cardano isn’t a video game. Don’t rely on strategies designed to appeal to 14-year-olds.

Therefore, so far what I know is that my return on any investment I make in operating a stake pool is going to be zero. While I make a commitment to operate a stake pool professionally and ethically, my future success and happiness in no way depend on the success or failure of Cardano or the stake pool. I cannot justify depending on Cardano. No way. Without consequence, operating a stake pool necessarily must become a game in order to continue participating (within the community sometimes people point out that “operating a stake pool is a business,” but that usually seems to be used to excuse entirely selfish behaviour, which tends to be short sighted not only in business but in life in general).

I know that Cardano is at least in part based on game theory. While I’m no expert, understanding the prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t seem so difficult. Within the community, the discussion about delegation without fail seems to end up in the category of betrayal rather than trust. So, the outcome of all this discussion seems predictable regardless of what parameters may be tweaked and by how much or when. The outcome will be punitive.

Surprise me. I’m the kind of people Cardano wants. Make it impossible for me to leave.

CHG

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Actually running a stake pool is easy. The major obstacle in running a stake pool is being able to corral enough capital.

Given that pool operators want others to provide most of the capital, it surprises me that pool operators expect to be paid more than the providers of the capital.

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I hope for your sake that the fixed fee stays at minimum 340 ADA. It sounds like you need the money.

(puts the financial risk manager hat on)

I think it’s important to consider all crypto assets as highly speculative projects that are still in their infancy. (and I say that as someone who is very much bought into the impact that crypto might have, and the potential upside if it works out.) So, I would highly encourage her to try crypto out: buy some coins, experiment with DeFi, do a bit of market making, a bit of trading, buy an NFT, experiment a bit.

Don’t invest your retirement in crypto.

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Sounds like your server might be configured bad if you only got 1 block with 300K stake in 42 epochs.