Bitcoin Forum

Please nominate any new payout method concepts on this thread! Nominations will be open for probably less than 24 hours, so if you have an idea, post it ASAP, don't wait to perfect the math!

See also: Visual comparison of pool payout methods based on real-world data (https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20689.0)

Proportional per time period:


Take a time period. (lets say 24 hours)

Then let everybody mine that time period. After that time period you say how many blocks have been found and devide this by the total shares that time period and multiply it by the shares per user.

This has a big benefit to smaller miners because in the current Proportional pools they have no chance of getting any share for the blocks that take less then one minute.

The other benefit is the fact that you would only have to update everyones balance once a day. (or maybe still have some expected payout)

This method also deals with pool hopping.

Why not Meni Rosenfeld's algo (a la continuum pool)?

Not really any better.  Actually can be much worse the pool hopping.

So what happens if the pool finds an abnormal number of blocks in the morning.  Like 8 blocks in an hour.  *COUGH* LOL
What's to stop people from jumping INTO the pool afterwards knowing that they'll probably get a larger proportional amount of coins for the mining they are doing for the rest of the day or whatever payout period is left?  If the rest of the day's solves are strictly average, the people that jump in afterwards are reaping the rewards for for where they didn't contribute at all.  It's pool hopping but backwards.  Completely devastating if multiple pools did this.  There's nothing preventing them from jumping into the whatever-the-highest-paying-pool is at that time to 'beat the house'.

Just saying.

You're absolutely right. A possible solution is to publish block information only after payments for that time period have  been made.
That won't really fix the problem though, as there are probably other ways to achieve the same. Especially with eligius, where it's rather easy to identify if a block was found by eligius (search for non-fee transactions in the block. if there are none, it was most likely an eligius block. Not sure if this always works out. Maybe it also helps to see which pool returns a long poll result first.. Well, probably not.)

I like PPLNS, although I'm not into mathematics enough to tell if it has any flaws.

I know this won't go anywhere as those with huge mining rigs would argue against it however I see some relationship to Bitcoin mining and that of real mining and I thought I might try to broaden the discussion.

First off you guys that got in early have staked your claims as it were to the best mining, much like the early gold rushers you got the easy pickings early on, established your claims and used your early finds to fund further mining. Again much like the gold rush there are some miners with deeper pockets than others and those miners have brought in heavier equipment and are tolling through far more ground than those with limited resources. The problem is, again much like early gold rush, coal mining, etc those big outfits tore through the land and with no regulation they destroyed the land, streams and rivers even to the point of causing deaths such as the Buffalo Creek Flood. You early miners as well as the deep pockets ones are much like these early days of real mining in that you have your massive mining rigs which are unregulated and cause environmental damage with the high energy consumption and heat output.

In an effort to reduce the environmental destruction regulations were put in place to stop mountain top removal, uncontrolled run off of mine waste, land reclamation and the fees, fines and cost associated with these rules somewhat leveled the playing field between large outfits and smaller ones. Granted sometimes this worked in reverse and of course there is the huge mining lobby funded by the big outfits which get away with things the smaller guys can't but let's act like all things are done over the table and on the up and up in terms of this discussion.

So how can we move Bitcoin mining into the same Eco friendly state as modern day mining? One way of course is by taxing the heavy polluters but I'm not sure how the Bitcoin environment can set that up. Maybe by Pools taking a larger fee from the larger miners, less from the smaller but it would seem that would be easy enough to get around by just setting up multiple accounts. of course if the pools took a larger fee from the larger outfits you need to push those Bitcoins back into the system without generating the same social disorder system we have in the US where the rich fund the poor by way of subsides.

so the gh/s have to share with the just some  mh/s one, since i'M one of them i say signed, but u have to tell that the guys with the big rigs in a way that they don't leave....



delay stats?! then why not use prop.

Penalizing high hash rates is surely not the correct way.

I'm at 280mhash/s, which is pretty low. Still, I'm sure I'm running less watt-efficient than big miners. I only have 1 GPU working for me, so the motherboard/PSU/CPU/... all eat power only for helping 1 GPU to do some hashes. Those guys with the big mining rigs have multiple GPUs per rig, so they're much more energy-efficient.

And don't forget FPGA/Asic miners. Those have a very low power usage,  but can easily produce more hashes than I do. It'd be unfair to penalize them.

So.. no. Payout should be proportional to hash rate.

If pool hopping is leaving when the round takes a long time, what about using a decay function where your accumulated contribution on a block decays to 0 if you're away too long (measured in shares missed, not time)? Those forfeited earnings would effectively be divided among the more consistent miners to reward them for sticking it out. One advantage is that there would be no need to carry anything over between rounds.

That is what the "score based" systems do (Slush's pool, BTC Mine, Continuum Pool, etc).   There is some variation on the precise math on how the value of old shares decay, but they all basically boil down to the concept you are describing.  Instead of making old shares "decay", they accomplish this by making shares count for more the longer the round lasts.  It accomplishes the same thing, but more efficiently because you don't have to keep going back and adjusting the "weight" of old shares.

OK, I see how that would achieve a similar result. Either way I like the idea that nothing needs to be carried over between rounds.

It doesn't seem to work sanely. At least, Python can't handle the huge numbers it wants for score...

And no-ones been able to figure out how to get puddinpop's pool working without the overhead? That would be the perfect anti hopping mechanism - you only get paid if you're there at the time.

Although I could see a lot of "hey no fair, my internets was broken when we finded the block!" happening.

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=21999.0

What a load...

The problem you speak of with gold mining is a "tragedy of the commons."  The land affected was public so anyone could do anything they wanted to or with it.  Regulations are then necessary to control public land to preserve its value for the public.

bitcoin mining is entirely private property.  Leave it alone.

Pay-Per-Share in my opinion is the most fair.

I really like how it is, personally.
I would change one (1) thing, and that would be to switch to the Ars style of figuring out who gets paid what when the server owes >50btc for a block.
Hack it up so that everybody gets paid something, those owed more money get a larger chunk.

The ability for the server to send out >50btc for a block or three would be nice too, really.  Something to remove the sometimes rather long delay to getting paid due to long blocks.

I implemented this in a testing branch, and it results in fewer people being paid usually (due to the minimum payout). I think it's pretty fair to pay the people who have been waiting the longest first (how it is now).

It would, but Bitcoin doesn't really support this in a usable way.

Anyhow, this thread was for the change from Proportional, not any of this new stuff, so I'm locking it.