Bitcoin Forum

Why would a pool operator have zero fee, or even pay me to mine?

Several reasons:

- To get a bigger hashrate, so the pool survives on the long run (fees can be added later once there are enough miners)

- Because pools are more of a hobby then a business, it costs more to run them then what you can gain by them, so if it costs money, it better be for enough miners

Hi
Ozcoin was founded when there were a lot less pools around.
We were miners before we ran a pool (still are actually :)), didnt like paying fees or getting bad "service"- connection issues and such.

One of our aims has always to be to provide an exceptional and fee free experience for miners.
At times when we have felt be are not offering exceptional service we have offered extra payments to miners as "compensation"
Also we tried the block finders reward etc, found the big guys got most of the rewards so chaged to paying the extra to everyone rather than a few :)
These extra payments have always come from my BTC earnings except for some member initiated rewards where miners contributed to extra rewards :)

Since we moved to Double geometric method we are running at a bit over 1% "donations"  as our bugs are ironed out and the pool offers excellent service I would expect that to raise a little :)

To be honest I never planned to make a profit from the pool - I do expect it to break even at some time.
What I have found is running the pool I have met a lot of great people and had opportunities to make some BTC income aside from the pool and mining - this has been gold to me :)

Then there is the thing, I see 3 types of people in Bitcoin:
1:Profiteers - quick buck and out of here
2:Hobbyists and those that think BTC is interesting and want a few to play with or "in case it gets big"
3:Those that see the potential of Bitcoin to if not change the world at least to be a viable "internet" currency that has real life use and value

I would like to think of myself in the 3rd group and I think its worth spending a bit extra now if it will help Bitcoin succeed longterm :)

Recently I have seen a few projects pop up like Goat and another where people are able to buy Bitcoin miners shares and other things that pay a % above pps value. I'm sure these people have their business models worked out and expect to profit :)

Best
Graeme

Like selling btc at a very high premium price to people that cannot (for all kinds of reasons)
buy btc from exchanges at the "standard" price.