Hey People,
You haven’t heard from me on the website for a while now and therefore it’s time for a small update.
We were quiet lucky at the beginning of the mainnet but lost luck a bit in the last few epochs. There was epoch 220 and 223 completely without a single block, which made some bigger delegators left. We still have a good base of delegators and I do want to thank every single one of you!
I wanted to let you know, that the nodes ran through all epochs flawlessly and we had no issues whatsoever.
What I do want to state in this little post is that we’re currently loosing many many blocks to the BFT nodes. For those of you who don’t know what that is: They are basically the “official” nodes which ran the network until the shelley era. Since then the community pools started taking over the network with a slow decrease of the d parameter, which relates to how many blocks the community pools can produce. Currently (epoch 224) the d parameter is 0.56 which means that 56% of the blocks are made by the BFT nodes and 44% are made by the community pools.
I went to the leader logs for epoch 223 and they state the following:
2020-10-13 03:54:45 ==> Stolen by BFT for 14994
2020-10-15 03:54:56 ==> Stolen by BFT for 187805
Note: The times shown refer to the central european summer time (CEST, UTC+2).
This means that we would have produced two blocks when d would be 0. As its not we were unlucky and lost both of our blocks to the official nodes. There is really nothing any pool can do about loosing blocks to the BFT nodes. We just need to wait for d to decrease further. It’s also possible for me now to take a look at the current epoch 224, where we have a quiet similiar picture:
Checking leadership log for Epoch 224 [ d Param: 0.56 ]
2020-10-19 08:29:29 ==> Stolen by BFT for 117878, Cumulative stolen blocks due to d param: 1
2020-10-21 22:24:58 ==> Stolen by BFT for 340807, Cumulative stolen blocks due to d param: 2
2020-10-22 10:22:03 ==> Stolen by BFT for 383832, Cumulative stolen blocks due to d param: 3
2020-10-22 13:04:58 ==> Stolen by BFT for 393607, Cumulative stolen blocks due to d param: 4
2020-10-22 13:48:01 ==> Leader for 396190, Cumulative epoch blocks: 1
2020-10-22 23:37:45 ==> Stolen by BFT for 431574, Cumulative stolen blocks due to d param: 5
Note: The times shown refer to the central european summer time (CEST, UTC+2).
What we can read here is that we would produce 6 blocks if d were 0, but as its not we lost 5 blocks of those 6 to the BFT nodes. If we consider the current d parameter we statistically should have made about 2-3 out of those 6 but as there is still some randomness/luck involved, we will only produce 1 block in epoch 224 (if there isn’t a slot battle for this particular slot).
I am looking forward to a better future as d will decrease further. I need to say that I’m still dedicated to Cardano and to running this stakepool.
Some good news at the end. During the last epoch I upgraded the pledge to 25k ADA and also assigned a new domain to the pool. From now on everyone will be automatically redirected to the new domain fairpool.eu, which is also the official domain registered on the blockchain with this pool. It is much better to read and to remember, plus looks better and more trustworthy.
Stay tuned for more updates and consider following me on twitter or join the telegram group if you want to receive more frequent updates or just want to have a nice chat with me.
Talk to you soon! 🙂
