Welcome to Gold Coast Cardano Stake Pool. I have been following crypto for a number of years now and my interest peaked in 2016/2017. During that time I ran a number of miners, a few ASIC miners, and some GPU miners I built myself. This was about the time the currency went through its last significant peak and cracks started to immerge in the underlying technologies. You see, I was really interested in the potential of these coins to be useful for general utility and spending however when their popularity increased so did the transaction times and fees, rendering them basically useless as an everyday currency. There were many challenges to overcome and many solutions proposed but I was particularly fond of the approaches proposed by both Ethereum and Dash.
Ethereum was pioneering smart contracts and was developing this new concept of proof of stake. It was very interesting since after buying/building/running miners I really grasped the overhead of these machines. It’s like an arms race, when a new batch of miners was released the difficulty would go up. To a miner, the difficulty feels much like a handicap, suddenly your machines become less efficient and you need more and more power to process the same number of blocks. It’s hard to see how this built-in expediential inefficiency would be well suited to a decarbonised future.
In the mining game ultimately low power and specialist-designed machines win overall and this does not support the decentralised model well. As we have seen the bulk of ASIC production and mining occurring in China with easy access to these resources.
Dash has incorporated a governance system that provided funds for currency development and stakeholder voting. This appeared to be quite a novel idea since the future of many other coins at the time was decided on debates in Reddit or other forums with volunteer core development teams. Of course, in this type of forum, it would be difficult to assess exactly how much stake each commenter has in the currency and many arguments would lead to forks in the blockchain as different teams split the currency into different directions. This both dilutes the currencies and erodes the inherited trust within them.
I hadn’t been closely following the cryptos over the last couple of years and Cardano kind of snuck up on me as I only really discovered it recently. While the other cryptos were iteratively updating, the Cardano team was carefully planning a new type of cryptocurrency based on peer-reviewed science. This made it slower to enter the race but kicking off with the most comprehensive planning and design behind it. These design specifications and development strategy address many of the challenges current coins are facing and incorporate my personal favorite concepts, Proof of Stake, governance, and development funding.
My interest once again peaked after I discovered Cardano and I wanted to be involved, beyond just holding coins, so I decided to support it in any way I can. As it turns out I am a server infrastructure specialist, I happen to operate a small private server farm in a small independent commercial data centre on the Gold Coast for my associated businesses and clients. Due to the small footprint of the Cardano nodes, they consume a barely noticeable amount of the available headroom. This feels like an ideal way to contribute to and support the blockchain.
I will be the first to admit that my stake pool is not attractive to stakers attempting to maximise their Cardano returns and the chances of winning a block are pretty slim at the moment. I do hope that stakers wishing to support decentralisation of the blockchain will notice my pool since unlike many other pools, it is not run on multinational cloud server infrastructure, nor a raspberry pi sitting in someone’s home (not that there is anything wrong with that if they have reliable supporting infrastructure). Gold Coast Cardano Stake Pool is run on privately owned server-grade infrastructure within an independent commercial datacentre and offering all of the redundancies and security expected.
I endeavor to repledge any earnings back to my pool and keep the lowest possible epoch fee and 0% variable fee until the pool is generating regular bocks if that ever occurs. Regardless of my pool’s success, I plan to keep it operational indefinitely, supporting the network and processing transactions as my contribution to a coin that I believe is best positioned to become a truly useful digital currency.