Bitcoin Forum

There is a lot of talk about the responsibility of miners to move their operations to a new pool when the pool gets proportionally too big.

The math is all the same, no matter where you mine, right?

The only differences are fees, shared transaction fees and site features? right?

Smaller pools probably have bigger good/bad luck swings because of the smaller sample.  But over a long enough time-line, are they equal in block discovery/hash?

Some pools seem to have different minimum share difficulty. For example the d7 PPC pool has diff 1, while coinotron has diff 8 IIRC.

FWIW BTC guilds guidelines for 51% mitigation are as follows:

More than 40% of the Network [last 2016 blocks]
PPS fee will be raised from 5% to 7% on all new accounts. Old accounts will also be increased (PPS ONLY) to 7% after a difficulty change. If the pool eventually drops back under 40% for more than 72 hours, these fees will be turned back down to 5% after the next difficulty change.

More than 45% of the Network [last 2016 blocks]
Getwork based pools will be completely removed within 24 hours. All users on getwork have been warned in the past that it is a unsupported and not advised method of connecting. This should remove ~15% of BTC Guild's hash rate immediately.

More than 40% of the Network again [last 2016 blocks]
PPLNS fee will be raised from 3% to 4% after a 72 hour warning. This fee will be reduced back to 3% once the pool drops back under 40% for more than 72 hours.

I tried seeing of another pool paid more with the same payment system as the last, however I fail at math and it is quite difficult to calculate due to the differences in web pool software. It seemed like I made more at BTCGuild instead of Bitminter. Anyone actually got some math to prove this theory though?

Your income int the pool depends on:

1. Your hashrate
2. Pool's fee
3. Pool's luck

Now with 1. being constant and assuming both pools have the same fee, it's just a matter of pool's luck for the short time mining on one or the other, but for long term mining it doesn't matter.

I think this is to prevent a 51% attack. Say a pool had 51% of mining power and that pool got hacked. BTC would be owned by the hacker then. They could run over a lot of transactions/verifications potentially. That's just not likely though.