I've thought of a few possibilities to bring some form of PPS back without needing large reserves. One approach might be to split the 25 BTC reward so that 5BTC is distributed via PPS and 20  BTC via DGM (or whatever split). A single share gets a PPS payment computed from the value of the 5 BTC and a DGM share at the value of the 20 BTC. At 5 BTC provided for PPS and a 5% fee the pool would need a 230 BTC reserve to cover that with a 1 in 100 risk of ruin. This provides at least some regular, no need to wait for a block, type of earning with a chunk that becomes available when a block is found via DGM. The split could be adjusted based on reserves the pool has. What are the thoughts of something like this?

If you can provide the funds for the reserve I'll switch it on now.

blockchain.info doesn't pick up all the blocks. You're better off using blockorigin. There's also the stats.csv which is the block file I provide for the weekly pools thread.

The pool has had a bad run of luck, especially in the last two weeks. This is a major reason for providing DGM. I don't have the funds to keep a reserve of PPS going through the bad luck period. It does vary a a lot though. The last difficulty period I think I was about 1.4x difficulty overall. The period before that I was about 0.9x difficulty.

The process of paying transaction fees is almost as tricky with DGM. I don't know of any DGM pools that pay it - are there any? It's still on my radar to investigate though.

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A social engineering hack attempt was attempted on the bitparking server this morning. The attacker attempted to convince my hosting site that they were me, and successfully gained access to the customer service portal. They used this to raise support requests to gain access to the server. No access to the server itself was available through the portal and they did not succeed in gaining access to the server as I was able to communicate to the hosting provider about what was going on.

The attacker registered a domain name, "chrisdouble.co.nz", as part of the social engineering attempt to gain access. This domain name is not owned or affiliated with me. If anyone attempts to contact you regarding bitparking services you should be wary that this may be a social engineering attempt. I can be reached on the bitparking Bitmessage address shown at the bottom of the pool's main page if you want to confirm my identity. My GPG fingerprint is also available on the bitcoin otc and I can sign messages with GPG to confirm information if you need confirmation messages are from me.

Some bitparking services are currently disabled while I deal with cleaning up issues related to the attack and tighten some things up. Most notably the PPS servers are offline and traffic is being redirected to the DGM servers. The bitparking hot wallet is at the bare minimum needed to service DGM blocks as they arrive. My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

If you use other bitcoin services be aware that they may be targets of similar social engineering attacks. At least one other pool, BTCGuild, has had an attempt using the same method and you can read about that in their thread.

The attacker in my case attempted to pass off that they were the 'toil' or 'Josh Rogers' identity that was possibly involved in the OzCoin hack so it's possible these are done by the same party.
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In the meantime, pool is up with one dgm server running while I resolve these issues and attempt to bring the others online.

If anyone receives email from chrisdouble.co.nz, domain registered today, that is not me.

Someone is currently trying to break into the pool server via social engineering with my hosting provider. I'm working on it and in discussion with my hosting provider.

Pool is back up but the PPS servers are having issues. I've temporarily redirected them to DGM while I investigate.

Edit: And we're down again, sigh. I'll comment here when we're stable.

Pool is back up now.

Edit: And we're down again. Investigating.

Crashed bitcoind. I'm in the process of restarting it.

The chance of solving a single share is constant. So it suits a miner to mine that share wherever it can get the highest price. On a proportional pool, that pays out blockvalue divided by totalshares, the hopper will want to mine wherever the total number of shares are lowest. Say there are two pools, one with 10 total shares so far and one with a million. It would be better for the hopper to mine at the pool with 10 total shares as it would get 1/11 of the block value if it finds the block. It would only get 1/1,000,001 if it found it in the second pool. So the hopper moves around mining at whatever pool has the lowest number of shares, which will be one that has found a block most recently. So the hopper is getting more money this way than if they weren't hopping. This means the miners that aren't hopping are getting less money due to the actions of the hopper.

The pool loses out too because it gets a huge influx of hashrate at the beginning of the round and then, as it goes longer, it drops off leaving it with a low hashrate and even less chance of finding a block. Other miners get disillusioned and leave.

I think these are the main arguments made for those that think hopping is bad.

Luck is difficulty divided by number of shares for the round. So it's luck for the round (current block being mined).

The funds are not mixed.

I've posted on http://exchange.bitparking.com the details of what is happening. Have you sent me a bitmessage asking for progress? They get responded to more quickly for status requests and general enquiries simply because of the volume of mail going to admin@bitparking.com. There are *thousands* of emails and recovery requests. Each one takes time to recover the state of transactions and data. I'm doing the best I can to recover the data and work through the queue. PM me your email address and I'll see where you stand. I don't see anything obvious received from 'human'.

I can give you the reasons why I don't do it, but understand that there is no right approach. Anyone can do whatever scratches their own person itch. The pool is designed to protect alt coin chains via merge mining and to distribute these coins to users who want to get them via mining. Their use of the coins will hopefully (if they don't immediately sell) help with the exchange rate of the coins. If I were to only provide bitcoin and receive fees via selling the alt coins then my selling would dump the alt coin market and drop their prices quite a bit. I'd also be tied to the risk that the alt coin prices drop, or the alt coins fail, making the pool lose money while offering a zero percent fee.

This is the last 'justification' post I'm going to contribute to this thread because it's completely unproductive. Any answer is a 'right' answer depending on individual miners wants and needs. That's why it's great having so many pools to choose from.

User stats now have round duration and time/duration on the list of previous payments.

I don't know, sounds like a good project for you to investigate.

Yes, that is how it works: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merged-mining-work

Yes, if you've registered an address for them.

They are calculated the same as PPS in bitcoin, but with a 2.5% fee.