Bitcoin Forum

I have been trying to look for a BTC pool that would
- Allow you to mine
- Anonymously and without registration
- Reward you for a block that you'd mined up to x% (say 66% - 75%)
- Paid out the remainder of the mined block to the other miners on one of the usual share bases.
- Had very low fees - anywhere from 0% to 0.5%

I have not found a pool that fulfils these criterion.

So I was thinking that this might be an interesting opportunity.

Would you mine in a pool that offered these features?

Are there any other features / options etc. which would persuade you to shift from your current pool, or from solo-mining?

Just trying to gauge interest here. If I can drum up a threshold level of interest (say 1TH/s or so), I'd invest the resources needed to set this up.

no simply because it wouldnt be fair now if it was something like
 the person who finds each block got all transaction fees for that block as a bonus and everyone got there usual share rate that might intrest people but 1 person getting 60-75% of each block is just unfair to anyone who can afford to keep up with the heavy miners

How are you going to pay the remainder of miners on the usual share basis when you are giving away 3/4 of a block reward? Guess that means everyone who doesn't solve a block gets paid 75% less than mining a real pool?

You'll need to flesh this out a bit more.  It sounds like you might just be talking about Proportional payouts, which some pools already do, but I'm not sure.

From the remaining 1/4 of course.

No, they would get paid a percentage less that's equal to the percent they get if they were the ones to mine the block. This can be anywhere from 0% to 100% and, if desired, each miner could set their own percentage.

Either do the math or try this thought experiment: Consider the simplest mining pool in the world, a simple pay per share pool. Now imagine they add one person who keeps 100% of the BTC he gets if he mines a block but gets 0% of his shares. If he never finds a block, he never gets paid anything and he has no effect on the other miners. Now, say he finds a block, he gets 100% of the reward, but the pool wouldn't have found the block without him. So, again, he has no effect on the other miners. The same math holds for any percent between 0% and 100%.

The closest you'll get to that is PoT, a payment scheme I invented:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=131376.0
Alas ozcoin was the only pool that had it implemented but no longer supports it.

Would you like to resurrect it and collaborate on a new pool?

I've got my hands full at the moment...

Let me think, and please correct me if you spot an error:  when a pool finds a block, payouts are based (with variations in the scoring formula, transaction fees, and pool fees) on 25 * work_i_did / work_pool_did.  Say I'm a small miner in a medium-sized pool who sees ~0.01 BTC per round, meaning I'm doing about 0.04% of the pool work, and the pool finds an average of 36 blocks a day (that is, about one out of every four blocks) and I find a block once a year on average.

The proposed reward system is to give 18.75 BTC to the finder who then gets no credit for the work the finder contributed to the pool for that block.  That leaves 6.25 BTC to split between me and the other miners.  Now, work_i_did / (work_pool_did - work_finder_did) is still very close to 0.04%, which means I could expect a payout not much over 0.0025 BTC each round.

Disregarding changes in difficulty and network hash rate, under the current system, I make 1 BTC every 100 rounds (2.78 days) or a total of 131 BTC per year, under the proposed system it would take me about 400 rounds (11,1 days) to make 1 BTC, or 32.85 BTC per year plus the 18.75 I'd get for finding my one block = 51.60 BTC a year.

Nope, I think I'll stick with the current system.

Why pool mine then? You can simply solomine and get 100% of the block reward.

True, but it is still perfectly fair, since if you find a block, you get to keep most of the reward. So it's only fair that if someone else finds a block, they get to keep most of the reward.

Such a pool could give each miner a slider from 0% (which is what normal pool mining is) to 100% (which is what solo mining is). If you set your slider to X%, that means X% is deducted from every share you earn, but you get to keep X% of every block you mine.

The advantage for people who set it to 100% is that they get to use the pool's administrative functions such as monitoring their hash rate, emailing them if their miner stops, a nice GUI, and so on. They also don't have to bother running and updating a bitcoin client. But it would also give you a nice way to transition between pool mining, solo mining, and everything inbetween.

I dont think it would be too far out of the way if they got a little bonus, Maybe like .01% or something. But then the heavy miners would have a better luck streak since they do more work. Guess its like I buy one lotto ticket and the guy next to me buys 1000 loto tickets. He would be pissed if I won, but I wouldn't be pissed if he won since he shelled out more money, envious yes, but not pissed off. Something like that. The guys that shell out the tons of money should get some kind of kick back for supporting it more.

Oh, I see what you're saying now.  Give the block finder a larger percentage of the block found.

I doubt you'd find many people to mine at a pool with that reward system.  The payouts would only be fair if everyone had a very similar hashrate and variance would be huge.  Miners don't like variance.

How do you figure? It would be fair to every single miner. It could even use pure PPS. You pick a percentage, X. If you mine a block, you get X% of the block reward less the pool fee. For each share, you get (100-X)% of the PPS rate less the pool fee.

Variance would be precisely as high or as low as you want it to be. Set X to 0 and you get perfect PPS with no variance at all. Set X to 100% and you get the same variance as solo mining. You get to choose exactly how much variance you want.

Precisely.

This hybrid model would probably appeal to the solo miner who currently gets nil income and is holding out for the 1 in 622 million (!) chance. He gets a trickle of income which is a share of the residual (say 33%) 25BTC+ reward after the lottery-winning miner has been paid.

The higher hashrate miner knows that the chances that he gets to solve the block are much higher, so his loss of the steady trickly income is offset by his higher probability of getting 2/3 of the reward.

A bonus would be nice, maybe 1btc to the finder and the other 24 to the pool. Do any pools work that way?

Would be nice to have some incentive tied to dedicating the hashing power...

If difficulty never increases, sure.  If block rewards never change, sure.  But both of these things happen and miners most likely to find blocks in the near term (when difficulty is lower and block reward is higher) would benefit most.

How do you figure? The miners most likely to find blocks are also the miners most likely to submit shares that don't find blocks. It's perfectly fair to everyone, all it does is let each miner choose precisely how much variance they want. PPS is fair to everyone. Solo mining is fair to everyone. Everything in-between is fair to everyone -- the difference is just variance.