Thread by @adamKDean

How we got to "minPoolFee": The ITN was a completely free-market economy where minPoolFee and operatorMargin could both be set to 0. During this time, the game theory worked correctly, delegator stake moved en masse to the pools charging the lowest possible fees...

During HTN the concern was raised r.e. the Sybil Attack Vector that a well-funded actor who had outside income sources could afford to run (multiple) pools at "Zero" cost to delegators to attract all their stake. Since entrenched delegators tend to stick around...

This could present a problem either via that bad actor flipping the switch and charging an enormously high rate (not against the code is law, up to the delegators to monitor and move) or drive the rest of the "honest" stake pools out of business and thereby attack the network...

So... the "minimum pool cost" that IS in the IOG research (although maybe not sufficiently tested/modeled) which is operators actually charging what it actually costs to run their stake pool was floated as a solution... To arrive at 340A IOG polled the existing SPO community...

And arrived at rough average costs of I believe ~$210 USD per month to run a stake pool ($ADA waas ~$0.1USD at the time so 340 * 6 = 2040 * 0.1 = $204 USD/month). So, the rate (at the time) was set by the SPOs (at the time)... Obviously... there have been some changes since then

This is why I am in favor of modifying the minPoolFee but not blanket removing it from the system (IMO a knee-jerk reaction) as the Sybil Attack vector is still in play. If anything, we should campaign for a new vote of all SPOs (using the pool keys to prove one pool one vote)...

To arrive at a "minimum cost to operate" average for all pools across the network. The numbers can then be tweaked/modified per the price of $ADA at any given point in time based on consensus of the impacted community (SPOs, not us armchair quarterbacks)...

This is why I support people and projections like @TobiasFancee and @DrLiesenfelt who believe that the current scheme is flawed, but are actually working to study, analyze, and rationally approach the topic rather than taking quotes and research out of context...

And attempting to make wild and wholesale changes to the underlying parameters w/o consideration for the knock-on effects that this may have months or years down the road. The parameter change itself is easy, the outcome/results of the change are harder to predict.