When does it make sense to START a Stake Pool?
Hi Cardano fam!
I'm learning more about stake pools and am wondering when it makes sense to **start** a stake pool (as opposed to delegating). As far as I can tell, creating a successful stake pool requires **technical know-how**, **free-cash-flow** (or free-crypto-flow) for infrastructure/operational costs, **time**, a **pledge**, and a **lot of work to get delegators**.
My question here mostly revolves around the **pledge** and **work to get delegators**.
First, the **pledge**. As the price of ADA gets higher, it's increasingly harder for newcomers (or those without much money) to start a stake pool with a significant pledge. Does this mean that stake pools will mostly be created/run by those who either got into ADA very early (at a low price) or have lots of financial capital?
Second, the **work to get delegators**. I imagine there are people who are technical, have the time, and have the money (both for infrastructure and a pledge) to start a stake pool, but they don't want to put the work in to get delegators. Does this mean that it wouldn't be worth it for them to start a stake pool? Does this then disincentive decentralization? Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love delegating my ADA to stake pools that have a noble mission, but I also wonder if there is room for a complimentary incentive system. For example, instead of delegators giving their ADA to a specific pool, what if they could delegate their ADA to a "bucket" of small pools that are automatically selected by some calculated threshold. Of course, there would have to be sufficient motivation for them to do this, but this may incentivize some individuals to start stake pools because they know that they will have delegators automatically assigned to their pool, thus increasing the number of overall pools and further decentralizing.
Anyway, I welcome any thoughts here and appreciate all of you.
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