A beginner friendly and transparent guide to inflation pools?

Question

As of writing, Google Search for "stellar inflation pools" reveals:

• a reddit post with a comment that links to other posts
• Inflation | Stellar Developers page
• promotional site for an existing inflation pool — biased info

While some include information on what an inflation pool is, the how* and why are not conveyed in a succinct manner or at all. Here are some of my key questions which could be better addressed:

1. How do I set up an inflation pool?
2. What are the benefits of running and maintaining a pool?
3. What are the risks in participating in or running a pool
4. Where can I find a list of available pools?

See this Example Delegate Proposal** and an available listing as an example of how dPOS delegates are handled elsewhere.

This question is distinct from How do I select an inflation destination? because it is for specific aspects (see breakdown of questions) of inflation pool and is not limited to selecting a particular inflation pool as destination from your wallet.

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*There are technical details in the Stellar Developers page which could be confusing to newcomers.

**Different mechanism from Stellar's inflation but the pooling is similar. This is simply an example. I do not endorse any linked material in this post.

Answer 1

Quoting the Lumenaut.org pool website:

Inflation is a nominal mechanism which distributes new Lumens, on a weekly basis and at a rate of 1% per year to the holders. The inflation is distributed using a voting system, if yout address does not have the minimum requirements of 0.05% of the votes, then you can still achieve it by joining a pool. The pool is where the community can gather together and vote all their Lumens to reach the minimum requirement, so Stellar Development Foundation pays the inflation. Basically, it means that if you're a holder then you receive free Lumens.

Source: https://lumenaut.net/#faq

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How do I set up an inflation pool?

You will need some development knowledge. There's no easy start or tutorial out there (when writing those lines), but you can check out the Lumenaut Network repositories. We try to comment as much as we can the code!

You can also check out the Stellar documentation at the Stellar official website.

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What are the benefits of running and maintaining a pool?

Inflation is a nominal mechanism which offers free XLM to holders, to receive the XLM the address needs to have at least ~51.8 Millions XLM but since that is a large amount to most of us, there are pools out there. The pool is were the community gathers together join all their XLM to reach the minimum requirement of XLM so Stellar pays us the Inflation. The pool then gives you the XLM you deserve (1%) weekly.

The pool can choose to take a fee (for maintaining the servers for example) from each of the accounts voting for the pool, or making it free. For example, XLMPool takes 10%, Lumenaut takes nothing.

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What are the risks in participating in or running a pool

There's no risk in participating in a pool. However, some pools may ask your secret key to set their inflation address to your Stellar wallet automatically. Beware about that since you should never, ever enter your secret key somewhere else that the official Stellar.org website (and check that your connection is secure too).

Running a pool may have some risks since it depends how you organize yourself for deploying the servers. Server costs some money, so you should add something like a fee or a donation address to pay them.

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Where can I find a list of available pools?

As of writing, the current pools (that have reached the 52M minimum of votes) are:

• Lumenaut Community Pool, 0 fee, so it's 100% free
• XLMPool, 10% fee

Answer 2

here is an easy explanation about the whole inflation topic, including a tutorial on how to setup the inflation-destination from a fee-free Reddit-Community pool:

https://lumenaut.net/#faq