As can be read in our earlier posts this is the inefitable conclusion of our journey.
It has been a worthwhile journey and has provided a gratious amout of knowledge. Some of that knowledge can be found in the above blog-posts or some new ones soon. It has been great activly taking part in the Cardano ecosystem but keeping the pool running was sadly not an option without a reasonable prospective of profits (or even covering costs).
Although the pool has been shut-down for now its always a possiblity to ressurect the staking pool when there are new oppertunities or some rules of the eco-system change in favour of small pool operators.
Ofcourse 2Bit will continue to be part of the new and exciting Digital Asset world. Keep an eye on this site as official news source for any future endavours of 2Bit.
]]>This is part III from our journey, see the other parts here:
When the though decision had to be made we were just a few days before transitioning to Alonzo. The KEV-keys were about to expire and the sky was cloudy. There was no way to get enough stake and the loss of rewards was becomming significant.
We decided to suspend the pool for now.
We are not deregistering the pool yet but we are evaluating what Alonzo does for the ecosystem and if there will be any changes to the leadership calculations. You could say that we’ve reached the first stage of grief: denial.
We’ve redelegated our stakes to other pools and because our pool now has hardly any stake dedicated to it its for all intents and purposes suspended. We’re still maintaining the pool and keeping it running. Maybe some day when there are a lot more people looking for a nice place to stake their Cardano they’ll focus more on decentralization and make running a small staking pool more attractive.
Untill that happens we’ll be slowly transitioning through the other four stages of grief.
]]>Now what…?
This is part II from our journey, see the other parts here:
There are currently many many pools. When you open the pool selection in Daedalus you are greeted by over 2.735 stakepools rated until a rating of 566. Everything with a rating above that is just thrown on the heap. This means you just have a place between 2.168 other pools on the heap.
You can think of a catchy name, great logo, make a beatiful site and have world-improving goals and still you are just one of the many pools in the list.
You can buy ads, post on forums, shout from the rooftops and that maybe gets your pool noticed, but then there is another problem…
As long as your staked amount is not in the millions the chance to get a block is nihil. This also means that all your stakers really have to dedicate their Cardano to the pool and take the loss of rewards untill the pool is big enough.
This is not such a bad choice for yourself to make, but for others it does mean quite a loss depending on the amount of Cardano they staked. Others might believe in your pool but when there is not enough buy-in after a few epochs without rewards they will start to ask questions.
So after the pool was set-up my brother and me staked our own Cardano to the pool. To us this was quite an investment but in the grand scale of things we didn’t even make a dent. Our pool was like flotsom between pools the size cargo ships.
Earlier calculations were a lot more optimistic, saying that about 18k ₳ would be enough to have a block once in a while. Sadly the ecosystem has grown so much that new calculations1 indicate that you need at least 100k ₳ pledged and a lot of luck. So unless you have a significant start-capital or very rich friends you don’t make a chance to stand out as new pool.
That leaves us the questions: what do we do with our pool and is this what decentralized means? Something to ponder about…
]]>This was all fine and easy, too bad the MINA communitiy wasn’t very mature and the whole idea of a SNARK-marketplace wasn’t really working out yet. So after trying it for a bit it was time to switch to a mutch more mature choice: Cardano.
Settings up a Cardano node is a whole different story. You need node keys, staking keys, KEV-keys, a wallet and a lot more. Luckily the documentation is quite alright and the community documentation is also very helpful.
And so our journey begins with generating all the necessary keys and setting up our servers.
This is part I from our journey, see the other parts here:
When you search around for hardware requirements for a full Cardano-node you read about people running it on a Raspberry-PI or some nice small server with 8GB of RAM. Well… that doesn’t work (anymore). To get the node running stable (inside Docker) I needed three beefy machines with 16GB of RAM and four-core CPU’s. Especially when you are querying the blockchain on them.
This immediately bumps you to the more expensive servers when running in a cloud-environment. I settled on Hetzner and Vultr because I’ve used them before, they served me well and I wanted to spread out my relays over multiple providers.
As described in the great Coincashew Guide it is possible to use SRV-records in the DNS for your relay nodes. This is true… kind of.
Apparently technically the node works fine with the SRV-records, but the whole infrastructure surrounding it doesn’t. Both ADA-Pools and the mandatory Topology Updater have no idea what to do with your SRV records and just show the relays as non-existent. And this is not really good for your node availability.
Only after updating my pool registration-certificate with two basic hostnames the relays were detected.
Whatever the documentation says, the extended metadata is NOT optional.
So while setting-up my first node I was mostly following the Coincashew Guide that has nice commands you just have to copy and paste. This is all nice and easy but really breaks down the moment you need to do the more advanced stuff, like renewing your KEV-keys or transfering some ADA from your wallet to your node or vice-versa.
I only really learned how to use the cardano-cli after setting up an extra server with a node on the testnet. Read the documentation, send some ADA from the faucet to your Daedalus Testnet wallet and just start playing and experimenting.
The website pool.vet is extremely helpfull to see why your Cardano pool is not showing up on the different pool explorers.
The fact that the whole support-network is running on a centralized communication service like Telegram and Discord is quite ‘special’. Something to talk about in a later blog-post.
Thats why 2Bit uses Matrix, see Contact for more information.
]]>In this blog we will write about the steps and the things we learned on the way while setting up the Cardano stakepool and other future 2Bit projects.
And altough the 2Bit Cardano Pool is far from succesfull it was still a great new thing to try and explore.
The following articles are planned: