Bitcoin Forum

I don't get it?? In the newbie forum most especially, pools without fees are preferred over those that take back a small fee.

Here's how I see it: Pools with fees are more reliable in the long run because they have some extra funding to keep their services up and running. Ones which do not incur such fees don't seem to have this safety net.

Am I missing  something?

Almost all pools keep the transaction fees. Depending on the number of blocks a pool gets; that might be sufficient to pay the colocation for the server.

With difficulty going up so fast, it's only natural that miners want to keep every penny.

What's more, pools usually pay on a daily basis, so if a pool is not around tomorrow miners will just switch to another pool.

Are you running a pool or planning to?

The most popular pool (based on it's hash rate) actually has one of the highest fees in the business. Their results are pretty reliable, but it doesn't always correlate to reliability in server uptime. Most people do after all suggest you always have a second backup pool.

wknight done a good job of keeping track of this recently.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=106417.0

Also organofcorti does a lot more indepth study on all the big pools.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77000.100
http://organofcorti.blogspot.co.uk/

However to explain why some newbies probably don't like fee pools is quiet simple, they probably don't have the hashing power the more long term members of the community do, so many of the newbies just coming in now also are still understably using GPU's. If you are still using GPU's with an ever increasing difficulty, you won't be making that much of a net profit, so it's a good idea to save Btc where you can.
Since they probably aren't mining much in the first place, every mBtc matters.

So you've paid for the colo. Who runs it? Who maintains the pool 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is on hand to respond to queries and complaints in a timely manner? Should a pool op do all this for free?

ALL pool have to be run at a profit or you end up with an unreliable pool. MTRED for example is a fee free PPS pool - not only does the pool op not take a fee but he runs the risk of not being able to payout a run of bad luck.

Whether the pool runs for a fee or accepts miner donations for added services and benefits, there has to be a revenue stream or the pool op has no real way keep uptime high or develop new technologies that help miners even more.

Block tx fees are atm insufficient to use as pool revenue and as the block reward halves many pools will pass block tx fees to miners since they will start to make a larger percentage of earnings.

tl;dr
If you don't want to pay a fee (or a donation) to reduce your mining variance at a pool, you have three options:
1. Stay with fee free pools that don't reward/encourage donations and deal with poor uptime and unreliability
2. Use p2Pool
3. Solo mine and deal with variance.

One word:

GREED

Why should a miner care whether his pool is reliable in the long run?

If they're solo mining they shouldn't.

Each time a miner has to go to back up increases stales, if the website's down you can't access your coin, and if the pool fails losing coin is a certainty.

All of these are short run concerns.

Yes you are missing things like p2pool

No fee and it's much much better and safer than any other pool. Fees to keep the service up and running? You keep p2pool up and running  :D

For any given miner at a particular pool, losing coin is not a short run concern. Unless the timecale you relate to is quite different to others?

I've been wondering why p2pool isn't more popular. Have people just not made the switch yet?

p2pool have problems with stales/orphans. At this moment:
10% in average of it's power is wasted. So it's like 10% fee pool.

sorry for being noob but what is the best pool to go with in terms of reward ?

There's not really one "best pool".  Solving blocks is a random event after all.  One pool may be having terrible luck while another is having great luck.  So if you have allot of hash power you may want to split it between several pools.  Kind of like diversifying your investment portfolio.
Sam

Why do people not like fees? Maybe because they dont feel the services provided are worth a 3-10% tax on earnings.

When you actually calculate it out.. it is a SUBSTANTIAL income for the pool operator.

Say we have a 5% pool that does 2500ghash/s.

5% * 2500 = 125 g/hash worth of fees.

on my rig I am getting 1.7 ghash for about .6 BTC/day

125 / 1.7 * .6 btc = 44.17 BTC/day * 365 = 16122 btc/year.

at current exchange rates.. thats $170k USD/year, not chump change.

Of course, if a pool operator can explain how much it costs, how much time it requires etc than that might help miners understand why they are charged so much.

Of course the pools could be operated as a business and its just the owner making a nice living off of the services he provides...

Your calculations imply a degree of constancy which simply isn't there.

1.  If you want to estimate yearly earnings, you have to assume that a pool will maintain a particular % of the network hashrate.
2.  The USD/BTC exchange rate is not stable. Six months it was USD $2 per btc.
3.  Extrapolating the yearly earnings of a pool from your own mining results is not a valid method. You should convert the hashrate to shares per day, convert that to expected blocks/day.

Aside from that, you miss the point - of course the pool owner needs to have a "nice earning" from the services he provides - how else is he or she expected to take maintaining the service seriously? Maintaining a pool is a 7 day 24 hour job, and many of the larger pools employ people from different timezones to be on hand for miner queries and pool emergencies.

My costs are $250 a month for the pool I can squeeze it down to $100 but I will max out at 300 - 400 GH capacity then there are issues keeping the pool up and running hackers constantly attacking, system problems are like keeping your mining equipment running for a 5 to 10 GH of GPUs.

Then you want to update your site and make improvements, none of that can be posible without a profit.

Davinci

Thank you for your explanation,  is that like pool hopping ?

No.  If you have multiple Rigs/FPGA/GPU's you could point each one at a different pool and mine full time on each pool.  Or you could use Balancing or Load Balancing with CG Miner.  That way your more likely to have better luck overall.

Pool hopping is a very complex operation, I wouldn't recommend it for a noob.  And it is very unpopular with some folks.
Sam

Apart from the fact that having backup pools is good practice, for non PPS reward methods mining at multiple pools at the same time reduces your earnings variance. If you split your hashrate the right way, could even get less variance than you would mining proportionally at DeepBit alone, and come much closer to the equivalent PPS earnings much more quickly.

tl;dr if you can mine in multiple pools at the same time in the right way without incurring penalties (eg increased stales from some proxies) then you'll receive average aggregated rewards closer to PPS without the PPS fee.

You make very good points. I was attempting to explain what it seemed like from someone who doesnt understand what goes on for the pool side of things while at the same time curious as to how much effort is required to run a big pool.

Thanks.

Data taken from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.0
Current mining pool listings, 16th September 2012               
     
      Pool              Hashrate           Fee
      EclipseDGM*          1270           No fee               
      Maxbtc                   195           No fee                   
      Eligius                     271           No fee               
      Itzod                      333           No fee               
      Bitminter                1298           No fee                     
      Mkalinin                     50           No fee               
      P2pool                     333           No fee               
      Triplemining              196           No fee           
      Mt. Red                   507           No fee                   
      BitcoinPool               111           No fee               
      Bitlc.net                    77           No fee                   
      BTCmine                    66           No fee   
                                     ----   
              Total                4707


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Pool           Hashrate         Fee
      Coinotron            60               2%               
      OzcoinDGM*       821               3%             
      Polmine              153               1%           
      Ecki.net               59               1%                   
      50BTC              2893               3%               
      Bitclockers          282               8%               
      Bitparking           181                2.5%               
      BTCGuild           2547                5%               
      BTCMP.com          53                4%           
      DeepbitPPS*                           10%             
      EclipsePPS*                             5%             
      HHTT Pool            19              1 - 17%               
      OzcoinPPS*                         5%               
      BTCWarp.com        31                0.5%               
      DeepbitProp*      4122               3%               
      Slush                1727                2%   
                                                  ----
      Total                                    12948

The network hashrate at the time these stats were takes was around 20Thash
So
20 - [4.7+12.9] = 2.4Thash of "Unknown"

2.4 + 4.7 =7.1Thash not paying fees (assuming none of these miners are on a private pool that charges fees - I suspect there are some)
12.9Thash paying fees
I know someone would love to do the exact maths - I have rounded and estimated a little - but I think this shows that a great majority of miners understand the needs for fees and are not fearful at all  :)

13 of 25 charge fees (not including EMC PPS, 13 and a bit if you count that ;))

*I used Deepbit Proportional, EMC DGM and Ozcoin DGM hashrates rate when calculating as these stats are not split between payout methods.

Cheers
Graet
.




               
               
                 

FYI, deepbit's hashrate is anywhere from 3850Gh/s to 4300Gh/s depending on whether they're being hopped at the time, and I know some of the bigger hopping proxies solo-mine when there's nowhere to hop, so that could add a few hundred Gh/s.
Nice work though!

The consumer is foolish. Raise the price of the product and then put it on sale down to almost the original price and loads of people will buy it.

People on the Internet have become accustomed to getting web based accounts and services for free. They don't realize that with all the advertising and the future tricks the people who are offering the service have planned to trap their customers and force them to pay that they really aren't getting it for anywhere near free.

Look at how many people use Yahoo! Mail. It's a long way from being one of the better web mail providers and they make you pay $20 a year to use any more features than the web mail. Yahoo Mail used to offer free POP access which allowed them to grow their user base to huge numbers. Now they are one of the most expensive.

I mine on abcpool.co. It has a reasonable fee but it is reliable and most importantly the owners seem to be honest, unlike my experience at btcguild where I believe thousands of bitcoins were stolen because of "bad luck" which went on for days and days.

more fee = less profit. scary..
not reading thread...

Your belief means nothing. "Bad luck" often goes on for days and days. Why not prove that the "bad luck" was outside a given confidence interval? Prove that it is unlikely to P < 0.05 or < 0.01. Otherwise you're simply slandering a pool op.

i pay 5% at ozcoin. the guys on the irc are really helpful and awesome so i happily donate a bit to keep the show going.

Well sometimes the smaller pools are better but it's really boils down to what you prefer

I did a whole thread on that last year. Some Poisson's formula or something like that was used to show that the odds of a 5 day streak of bad luck was like 1 in 200. And there were more unusual periods of luck that weren't calculated. It's been a while now and nobody seemed to care that they were getting ripped off so long as the pool advertized "0% fee".

Post a link and I'll go over your calculations - I enjoy having new data to work with.

But it is hard to get a reasonable ci in a 5 day period - I usually accumulate months of data before I have a useful ci. Check post on p2Pool and bitlc on http://organofcorti.blogspot.com.

BTW, BTCGuild is PPS now - luck no longer plays a part.

Could BTCGuild be cheating its miners?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=35505.0

Vladimir's essential self-defence guide for Bitcoin Miners
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38785.0

The data is not longer at the link in the OP. Do still have it on hand?

Fees are a matter of preference...

If you join a no fee server, and don't get much help, it might be good to join a fee server. You can get helpful benefits.

also likewise, if you're on a fee server, and got getting any benefit out of it, then got to a no fee server, where even if you get ignored it'll cost ya nothin!

Most pools do keep transaction fees, and I read somewhere that they usually take 1BTC for every block solved (which gets 50BTC for the pool)

I'm quite happy with EclipseMC.  No fee.  I can buy credits to get a sms if something goes wrong (.1 bitcoin for 100 sms, BARGAIN!)

I donate 1% of my profits, and will do more once I've paid off my mining equipment.  We get looked after pretty good there.

If you're after mining support, nothing beats http://www.bitcointalk.org/  :D

also, DGM FTW!

only choose PPS if you absolutely have to have BTC coming in every few hours.  Otherwise DGM pays you your proportion of what was earned when a block is solved

If you want to get paid fast and regular and have good uptime fee paying pools are the way to go.

Free pools you have to wait for the blocks to be confirmed before you get paid and when the pool goes offline you will worry they have run off with your bits.

I think most newbies will start on free pools and slowly drift to the pay pools as they experience unreliability issues.

Greed

No most of the data on http://l0ss.net/ was removed and then a few days later the site was completely taken down. I never saved it.

thats simple, most humans are selfish as shit, if they have to donate 1-3% they are getting mad and rage about it :P