Bitcoin Forum

Hi

I am currently mining in the deepbit pool where i can choose between two types of work payout methods; proportional and pay-per-share.

I am trying to understand what the difference is between them and this what the pros and cons are but i have not been able to gather any information regarding this on deepbits site so i thought maybe the community could enlighten me :)

pay-per-share: high fees 10%+, but income is fixed (no variation)
proportional: much lower fees, but income varies. over time, the variations will balance out.

exactly how does this work?
so far i have been mining mostly using proportional as that was the default setting but i recently tried to change it to pay-per-share to see if there was any difference. But both of them seemed to give exactly the same !?

pay per share will give more if a small amount of blocks have been found by the pool.
proportional will give more if a large amount of blocks is found by the pool.
but you never know what day you should switch to each other unless you can predict the future :p
thus, go to the method with the lesser fee!

i think i somewhere read that if i have a very slow miner pps would be better is this true?

i cant remember where i read it so i cant re-read the source

yes i have seen this also, i was read about CPU miners are suitable for pps.
gpu is for proportional. but i think cpu miners are waste of electricity unless BTC goes to very high value
(i don't know economics) :)

but then where is this "slow" line?

i am guessing my 320m with its 5000-6000 khash is in the slow area but what about my 30000 khash 8800gt?

grue speaks the truth. It's all about expected values, and prop expected value is always higher than pps.

From a statistical point of view, there are no miners suited to either method. The deciding factor is how much risk you're willing to take. For example, if you were CPU mining with proportional, and your pool found a block quicker than usual, you would have made much more money. But it could go the other way around, the pool takes longer than usual, you would lose money.

By using pay-per-share, you're essentially selling your work at a fixed price, so your payout is the same, and there is no risk for you. However, since the risk is transferred from you to the pool owner, he will want some compensation for accepting those risks, hence the high fee.

It's all risk vs. reward. :)

You may be interested in my explanation about this (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5264.0). My recommendation is to always use score-based (which deepbit doesn't currently have).

If you are mining with GPU then pay-per-share would be more profitable for me because it means 10% fee and proportional's fee is only 3%.
If you are mining with CPU, then the value is too small to make any serious difference :)

PPS would be better for them and worse for you if you are unlucky (expected shares per block is much lower than the shares per block you are getting). Right now, PPS has been a BIG profit for Tycho this difficulty step, as expected shares per block is much higher than the shares that were required to find the blocks so far.