And I think wars should be fought with rainbows and unicorns and sugar drop gum balls. But guess what, we don't live in that world. Luckily for you, no one is forcing you to join a pool as has already been stated. Pool operators have expenses as you've already been told. Expenses that we pay for out of our own pockets. We're providing a service that makes you money. Why do you think we should shoulder the expenses while you gain the reward? But the great thing about Decred is that you don't need to join a pool. You think the fees are too expensive, fine. Don't join one. Even better, when the source is released, why don't you run your own pool? You can set the fees as low as you want. I'm sure people will flock to your service. Hell, I might even join myself. I've always enjoyed disaster movies.
When you are shopping, consider this. When you join a pool, your tickets are there for up to 6 months until they vote. (Yes it may be sooner.) If a bottom dollar pool runs out of money and closes with little or no notice, you may miss those votes. That said, once the code goes public, I can think of a way to run a minimal pool on one server. Sure it is all eggs in one basket, and if that server is down, you are out of luck. But it will be cheap.
So much ranting - and fees are already down to 5% Are we going to see a competition or an oligopoly of chosen ones ?
Hard to have "chosen ones" with open source. But we will see some drop out. Or break the rules, and get removed from the master list.
Would anyone be interested in an alliance of solo stake miners? You have to donate a VPS to join, but we would each run a voting node in the pool. Fee would be 0%. I currently have a 2% missed rate solo mining, so a 5% fee is too high for me to be interested. I would benefit from joining forces with other solo miners to make a federated stake pool, however. The downside would be many people would have the power to vote in a way you didn't want, but you are trusting 2+ people with that power when you join a pool anyway. If anyone did vote against the owners wishes, they would be removed from the pool. Depending on what people wanted to do, we could also allow non-VPS donating people to join the pool with a 2-3% fee?
@Kandiru i think its almost impossibile to do, anyway there should be someone with the "power", like owner of root account. When you join third-party pool, you should trust 2-3 persons. But when u join community-driven pool, you should trust 1000 persons.
That is an interesting concept. I dont think this would be feasible with the current state of the stake pool software though. Not having control over all hosts could cause issues if 1 has a problem. I am biased as a pool Op but on this I am just relaying facts. You would do better running your own node on AWS(or similar) as a backup to your primary and call it good.
I'm not anticipating many people joining, but if you had 3 people with 1VPS each, that would result in a good pool with no fees and no increase in hosting costs over the status quo. It does require some trust, but no more than using a public pool.
It's relatively easy to do. Make a 1of3 P2SH multisig address with a voting pubkey from each wallet. Use that in --ticketaddress. P2SH multisig is natively supported by the stake manager. The only downside is if you disagree with each other in terms of voting. Whoever gets to the miner's daemon with their vote first gets to choose the vote bits.
Regarding voting I'd be worried more about PoS pool operators having PoW pools as well. 3 VPS shared PoS pool sounds like a good idea. I already mentioned AWS is still free for 12 months. We shall start a new topic I think.
If you have a 2% missed rate why would you want to increase your risk by pooling with others? Additional people in this design would increase your risks. e.g. missed votes, unpaid VPS, or old software on VPS. If you are asking others to do work for free for you, eventually those people are likely to stop doing the work.
Well I would still run my vps, just it would also vote for other people, and their vps would also vote for me. If they go offline, I don't lose anything.
I believe a low proportion of missed tickets is more important in most cases than very small % fees differences. I think pool operators will keep their fees as low as possible for attracting more users at first and then for keeping their users. Switching between pools or even trying solo PoS mining is quite easy if someone finds the fees unreasonable high.
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I think the idea is that it's an "or" grouping, not an "and" grouping. If he's in a P2P pool and all members or the pool are hosting votes for each other, then the odds of failure aren't the possibility that any one host fails to report when called, they're the possibility that ALL hosts fail to report. Assuming he, at 98% success rate, pairs with 2 other people each of whom have a (fairly bad) 95% success rate, the odds of anybody in the P2P pool failing are 0.02*0.05*0.05=0.00005 or 1 in 20,000. This is the whole point of the stake pools having multiple servers. If we assume an officially-run stakepool has servers each of which have a 99%(or better) uptime, then they should only miss 1 vote for every 999,999 successful votes, something that no single server would be able to accomplish.
Yes, but that wasn't my point. There are more risks in the threat model than the statistical percentage of missed votes. If that is all one is concerned about, there are simpler ways to ensure two additional votes happen in your scenario. There are plenty of reputable clouds that will support a person in this respect for free or low cost. In this way you don't need to worry about a botnet voting for your tickets, for example.