As a question for how pools 'should' run. I have 2 validators. Right now each pay out separately, so votes for one are 1/44k share and other is 1/40k share.
I am playing around with allow configuration to treat them just as one big pool. So everyone gets 1/84k share of 2x the reward.
At the moment, it doesn't matter, but if i were to start say 'pool3' (I'm not), I want to encourage votes for it, so it would make sense to allow those voters to still receive a share, even though its not forging yet.
Downside is, if I open up a new pool, those who already have votes on a 'full' one have no incentive to balance their votes to the lower one. And balancing votes is a good thing.
Thoughts? Pros and cons to each.. just not sure what makes most sense.
At first glance it looks like having the pools payout separately provides a nice incentive to balance out the votes. Pool operators with large SEM reserves will presumably also have a lot easier time optimizing their validator vote counts for the maximum payout/vote ratio by topping of their validator vote counts with their own SEM.
Something that just occurred to me is I wonder if pools with multiple validators could attack each other by pulling votes. Imagine if a competing pool, run by a SEM whale, saw you starting pool3, they could then take some of their reserve SEM and use it to fill up a large portion of your pool3 vote capacity. Then at the most opportune time for them (maybe when they have enough votes to make another validator) they pull their votes from pool3 making it lose its validator status and lowering your payout across all 3 pools (if your treating them as one big pool). Probably not a realistic scenario lol.. just trying to imagine crazy things that might happen.
That's always a possibility. However it would also be dangerous for someone to play with the vote count as their own validator might be voted out of the top 100. We will see how this would play out as we roll out the mainnet and get more adoption.