I've run a Cardano stake pool for six years. Here is what the minimum pool fee actually does. Every figure below came off my own db-sync node tonight. None of it is quoted from anyone's proposal. minPoolCost is a flat 170 ADA taken off a pool's rewards before delegators see anything. Mean gross reward per block, epochs 641-650: 298.11 ADA. Same fee, same epoch, different pool: 1 block → 57.0% 2 blocks → 28.5% 5 blocks → 11.4% 20 blocks → 2.9% A twentyfold spread. That is not a fee. It is a charge that falls hardest on whoever earns least. And one block per epoch is the good case. It takes ~1,010,400 ADA of stake to expect a block. The median pool sitting on the 170 floor holds 762,550. The typical affected pool expects fewer than one block per epoch. In those epochs it earns nothing, and neither do its delegators. Be precise about who this hits. 504 active pools declare exactly 170 ADA: 18.8% of pools, 22.6% of stake. Among pools that actually mint blocks, 361 of 1,217. It is not every pool. It is the floor under every pool, and it is what a small operator is forbidden to go below. That floor has not moved in 207 epochs. Two years and ten months. Set at 340 at Shelley launch in 2020, halved once in October 2023, nothing since. Pools minting at least one block, over three years: 1,147 → 939. Down 18.1%. There is an action on chain right now to cut it to 75 ADA. That would take the one-block share from 57.0% to 25.2%. DReps: 63.59% yes, needs 67%. Short by 170 million ADA. SPOs: 14-26% yes, needs 51%. Short by 2.7 to 7.6 billion. The DRep gap is closable in three days. The SPO gap is not, because 17.3 billion ADA of pool stake has not voted at all. Among SPOs who did vote, yes leads 2.92bn to 0.49bn. Six to one in favour. Sit with that. Nobody rejected this. 85% of voting SPOs backed it. 93% of voting DReps backed it. It dies because the stake that decides it never turned up, and on Cardano a non-vote is counted exactly like a no. The Constitutional Committee has not reached its quorum either. Same silence, third chamber. So ask who the status quo serves. Not the 504 pools on the floor. Not the 208 operators who stopped producing blocks. It serves whoever benefits from the fee staying exactly where it is, and they need do nothing at all to get it. They just have to not vote. Deadline is the epoch boundary at 1 September, 21:45:10 UTC. Not later. There is no extra epoch. SPOs: if you have never set up governance keys, do it now. If you truly have no view, ABSTAIN. An abstention leaves the denominator. Silence does not. Every number here is reproducible from a public node. Queries, raw output and the full findings, including three results that cut against my own argument: server-tools.grahamsnumberpl… Check them. That is rather the point.