Bitcoin Forum

It is a well established fact that proportional is a flawed payout method.
"Strategic miners" mine the most profitable part of a round then hop away somewhere else leaving the dedicated "regular miner" to "finish the block".

Proportional appears to be the fairest method and is often chosen by new pool operators unaware of how exploitable it is or the "hopper tax" they expect their regular miners to pay.

I really don't mind where people mine, I'm just curious if it is lack of knowledge, lack of care about income or just what :)

I expect the hopper community will come up with some fud to try to counter my claims - they were very vocal when my pool changed from proportional to a fair payout system.

https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf
Appendix B
Pool-hopping in proportional pools
shows the detailed maths
IMO the whole PDF should be required reading by anyone planning to open a pool :)


Cheers
Graet

For slush and Deepbit the loss to hoppers only amounts to 1 to 2%. If people know and accept that their costs are a bit higher than the pool fees, I can understand that. I can't really understand full time miners at other proportional pools - on one of them, fulltime miners earn about 0.7 to 0.8 of PPS on average. Thats a 20 to 30% loss.

So Deepbit for example: they already charge a 3% fee, and then a fulltime miner loses another 2% to hoppers. And yet this is one of the biggest pools out there.

Not hatin on Deepbit, as they were the first pool I used. Very simple for a newbie to figure out. However, there's a reason I switched pools once I got more familiar with different pools.

Is it confirmed that pool hopping software can figure out where to hop based on who annouces a newly found block to defeat deepbits delayed stats?

It was confirmed over a year ago. Deepbit is one of the pools hoppers rely on.

A year ago the software was beta and unreliable for the most part.
So it is improved and out in the wild?

It was reliable enough for me to earn 1.45x at Deepbit on average, for three months.

You make it sound like you are not using it anymore. If so great why stop?

Did something change?

No, just stopped mining - electricity costs are too high and complaints about the noisiness of gpus were too many.

Easy to verify.

I mine on Slush because it was the first pool available when I started mining. I have spent so much time tuning hardware, software, etc., more time learning other things about Bitcoin, and the pool is reliable so I never thought to switch. It's only recently I learned about hopping as I didn't pay attention to the pool aspect much these days as I figured things had settled out. Inevitably there is always more to learn though! Maybe it isn't entirely logical for me to stay with Slush but I just started using the new Stratum protocol so now my stales rate has dropped significantly.

Perhaps the Mining Pool Comparison wiki should have something on hopping:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

Although it is a bit late now seeing as ASICs will be coming soon.

I would consider switching to a new system if it was healthy for Bitcoin - e.g. something like P2Pool where the workers can decide what transactions are put into the block thus promoting more decentralization in the network.

My hashrate is forwarded to prop. pools :D

+1 I'm a greedy bastard.