Dear Cardano Citizens, Welcome to my DRep introduction
As an OG Stakepool Operator, supporting cardano since the ITN times (before staking became possible on the mainnet), I feel it's my duty to represent all my delegators and anyone else who decides to trust me to continue doing the right thing, steering Cardano to a bright future.
My motivation for being a DRep
Not only am I an SPO, but Cardano has became an integral part of my life. I'm a developer by trade, and at the moment I'm neck deep into becoming a smart contract developer on Cardano. This requires a deep technical undestanding of how Cardano works, which helps tremendously when it comes to deciding how to vote on the direction of the development of Cardano.
What is Cardano? What does it represent?
In my humble opinion the introduction of blockchain, and Cardano on top is comparable to the introduction of the internet back then. Most people had no idea why they would need a thing called Internet... they could do everything they could imagine without it. Yet, about 20 years later, we can't imagine life without it, but if we had to, it would be annoyingly cumbersome to deal with a lot of things.
However, although Cardano is a great technical achievement, it means a lot more. Cardano since the early times is advertised as the opportunity for the masses, a tool to reduce the economic gap between the wealthy and the poor. Will it achieve this goal? Well, not without putting our voting power towards it! Of course, achieving this is no simple task, and we're far from it at the moment. What we have now is the potential to reach it, but it will need a tremendous effort from all parties involved.
Yes, that includes you!
My DRep ID is the following:
drep1tp64waguk28umkvy9apt9dc3ly28c4q2xf3j2dxm0n3zulp390l
What are the challenges a DRep must face and handle? What's my approach?
Just like in any economic / political system, there will be opposing interests. Not everyone, who votes will share the above ethos. Hence it's really important to put all of your voting power to work, supporting a DRep who's pushing to reach our goal.
If only it was that simple though right...? On the surface, some votes may look easy to decide considering the above, but we always have to consider the stability of the entire network. This might occasionally result in having to vote the opposite direction, or vote for an alternative route. Care for an example? Here you are:
The case for or against raising the k parameter
The value of k has been a hot topic for years. We soon get to decide if we want to raise it from 500 to 1000, or we decide that an alternative way forward shall be found. What does k mean? It's supposed to be the parameter that specifies how many pools the system is tailored to be viable for. Right now it's set to 500.
This means that the idea is to have 500 pools to which all the delegations trickle to, at which point they all are fully saturated. For the rest it's reckoning time. Human nature is hard to model, so... it did not quite happened like that, but still, we have a lot of saturated pools, and contrary to the original intention, single entities amassing delegators started spinning up multiple saturated pools.
Is it bad to have multipools?
Running multipools goes against the decentralisation goals, even if the overall decentalisation of Cardano is outstanding.
Now, increasing k to 1000 without any extra measures will make these stakepool operators to spin up extra pools. Don't be fooled. Some already are willingly operating at half saturation, so that if k doubles they already have the extra pools. It's the same thing regardless of timing though, it's pool splitting due to anticipated k doubling.
It's important to note, that a lot of these SPOs are ones I really like. And apart from the exchange operated multipools, they are important, and useful participants of the ecosystem, spreading the word about Cardano. It's good to have them! Their delegators accepted the fact that they are running multiple pools. It's always up for the delegators to judge. It is what it is. We're humans, never black or white, we're all somewhere in-between on the grayscale. We've got to accept that.
So... would raising k to 1000 be good? It would mean that more pools would get to be profitable, but at the same time most of that opportunity will be taken by multipool operators, who spread their delegation over even more pools, by splitting them. So... even though this would likely slightly benefit us, small pool operators, I would still not vote for it, and rather seek an alternative solution, even if it takes time.