That's exactly what I've been thinking .  I'll probably shove NMC into a secondary page that's only visible once people have a wallet established.

PPLNS still working great so far, but one bug is currently present.  The "24 Hour Earnings" statistic currently assumes you are running PPS.  So if you're running PPLNS, this statistic still shows up, but it is giving you the value as if you had been on PPS.  Trying to figure out a way to fix this statistic without breaking it at this time.

After that, I'll begin adding some PPLNS statistics to the API calls.

You'd have to ask BFL that.  They're the ones who made a poorly designed FPGA that doesn't report back solves until the nonce range is exhausted, and can't be interrupted while doing so.

Thank you for adding BTC Guild to this.  Did you implement it in a way that if the API adds additional data (keeps the old stuff), it will continue to work?  BTC Guild will be adding a lot of new API data for the PPLNS payment method this week.  Nothing old will go away, but I know in the past some of these pool monitor gadgets didn't behave well when things were added to pool APIs.

Thank you very much.  Hopefully you implemented it in a way that *new* data won't break it?  I'm going to be adding a lot of API information this next week for the PPLNS system.

I'm paying orphans for now, and tx fees.  I figure at a 3% fee, that's still ~1.5% average per block after orphans/tx fees.  It's not as much as PPS, but it's "risk free".  Sometimes you just have to take the sure thing over the gamble, even if the gamble has odds in your favor.

Thanks for updating.  Only one correction right now:  Pay Orphans = Yes.  I should probably make that a bit more well known since it drops the effective fee 0.5-1% [depending on network growth/shrinkage].  Starting tomorrow the SPM target will also be increased to a 20-40 SPM range (30 SPM target).

Slush has recently updated the Stratum proxy to fix some potential reconnect issues.  While I haven't experienced any issues using it myself, I would recommend users to keep up to date with the latest proxy revisions.  You can find the latest release on github: https://github.com/slush0/stratum-mining-proxy


EDIT:  Since this post appeared on a new page:  PPLNS has been made public to all BTC Guild users today.  It is not highly advertised yet, since I'm still adding extra user-friendly things like tooltips and detailed explanations of all the terms.  You can access it immediately by going to "Manage Workers" and toggling some of your workers to it.  This will change your workers to PPLNS/PPS live, as long as they are on a Stratum based server.  You can also see some detailed statistics about PPLNS on the "PPLNS Statistics" page under PPS Earnings, and PPLNS Shift History, above Block History.

An exact size isn't required, but I ended up using 3m because it meant an average shift takes about 1 hour to complete at the current pool size.  The key factor on my end is that I want to keep the full history of every shift, and not do something like condense it down in the future to save DB space.  Larger shifts = more compact database even after running PPLNS for years.

The number can (and will) be changed over time, all the calculations are setup to by dynamic with regard to shift size/# of shifts.  As for variance, the important side of this is that 'N' is much higher than current difficulty.  The odds of a shift receiving 0 payments is very slim when using a 30 million share window, and fast enough that if a user wanted to leave the pool, they wouldn't feel like the shares are being held hostage, since they will receive all payments in less than half a day.

PPLNS will be going live in about an hour, but it will not be highly advertised until I have a more user friendly introduction to it.  If you're interested in using PPLNS, the option will be made visible under the 'Manage Workers' screen.  You can toggle workers between PPLNS/PPS live, and it will take effect within about half a second.  You may see a few new shares show up for the older method when you switch.  This is because when you switch methods, it only affects new share submissions, but the pool posts shares in batches every 10 seconds, so you may have a few shares from the old method that weren't yet logged.

Tomorrow there will be a restart of the Stratum pool around noon (PST).  This restart is changing the variable difficulty settings to a higher shares-per-minute target.  After significant testing with Stratum, I've determined that while ~15 shares per minute is low variance in 24 hours, it does mean your "My Account" hash rate estimate can vary quite a bit since at most it only averages one hour.  The new target will be ~30 shares per minute.

It may launch tomorrow depending on progress.  The biggest drawback to the new system is that it will require a bit more explanation.  PPS is just so darn simple (which is why I picked it when leaving proportional).  PPLNS is a great system, but the concepts behind it are harder to explain than "I will pay you X per share" .

PPLNS shift payments will include transaction fees, and a reduced fee compared to PPS.  PPS may see a fee reduction to makeup for TX fees at some point, but nothing is concrete at this time.

Detailed PPLNS statistics can now be viewed through the links on the PPLNS Shift History page.  This should look very familiar to users that used to mine at BTC Guild in the days of proportional payments.

For PPLNS testers, thank you very much for giving the new system a try.  I didn't run full statistics, but based on a brief glance it looks like you should have made a bit more than PPS due to some nice runs of luck in the last two days [after the one bad spell].  Your PPLNS earnings are now a part of your Current Balance/My Account statistics, can be paid out, and are included in automatic payouts.

I'm expecting to push PPLNS live on Monday for all users.  I just have a few more tweaks to make to the interface to make it more user friendly, while still having options for lots of detail for users who feel like auditing their payments on shifts.

PPLNS rewards will be part of the main account balance sometime tomorrow.  Later tonight will be a big update to show more detailed stats on each shift, and the ability to click on blocks in the Block History to see which shifts they paid as well.

As usual, once somebody has a complaint that is luck related, the pool shifts the luck back positive.  A lot of shifts just got paid quite a bit above PPS.

Since you chimed in with this...does Eligius or EclipseMC actually support miners being able to build their own custom blocks yet?  Last I heard GBT pools were still sending miners the entire block to build, rather than expecting the miner to submit one of their own.  Just because GBT makes it possible doesn't mean it's being done.

It was a good answer, except those shifts were still receiving payment, so it was far too early to say they had bad luck.  However, you were right in that it's possible for a shift to receive no payments.  It's just the odds of it happening are *extremely* low, due to the values I've picked for the implementation of PPLNS.

Those shifts are still Open.  Since you posted, 2 blocks have been found, and now 186 and 187 have 2 blocks currently paid to them.  Here's a simplified version of how PPLNS works (there are a few other pools already using this, just slightly different accounting methods):


10:00:47:   Shift #185 is finished.  Shift #186 is now starting.  You started submitting shares in #186 (for this example).

11:00:47:   Shift #186 is finished.  Any blocks found after 14:00:47 will have part of their payment sent to this shift (until 10 new shifts are done).  Shift #187 begins.

12:01:41:   Shift #187 is finished.  No blocks have been found yet, so #186 still has had 0 payments.  All blocks found after 15:01:41 will have part of their payment sent to this shift (until 10 new shifts are done).  Shift #177 is now expired since blocks are only paid to the 10 most recent shifts (30m shares).  Shift #188 begins.

12:18:44:   Block #7674 is found.  The block is split proportionally to the currently open shifts (#178-187).

13:03:39:   Shift #188 is finished.  Shift #189 begins.

13:43:12:   Block #7675 is found.  The block is split proportionally to the currently open shifts (#179-188).


Looking at shifts currently 'Open' gives you an idea of luck, but until the shift is closed, you cannot determine how the shift will end up on variance.  If you look right now, Shift #178 just closed (since 10 new shifts have completed since that one).  Only 8 blocks were found in that time, so it made slightly less than PPS (0.00000652 PPLNS vs 0.00000690 PPS).  However, luck did turn around.  Shift #179 is still open, and has had 9 blocks found since it was finished, meaning that shift was paid HIGHER than PPS (0.00000733 PPLNS vs 0.00000690 PPS).


This is just classic pool variance like you'd see with any non-PPS system.   In the long run, you should expect to make roughly 3% more on PPLNS.  This is because the fee is 2% lower than PPS, and transaction fees so far have been close to 1% of the total block reward, giving you an extra 1% in payout as well.



While there is no guarantee the pool will find a single block, it is EXTREMELY rare for a shift to have 0 payments.  The current setup uses ~9x difficulty as the value for 'N'.  That means the pool would need to take roughly 27 million shares without finding a single block.  That almost happened last night, where the pool took nearly 10 hours to find one block.  These are VERY rare circumstances though, and I purposely chose a high value for 'N' to avoid having times where a shift receives 0 payments.  It's a careful balancing act.  The higher the value of "N", the lower the variance, but the longer it takes for your shares to receive their full value.  Luckily, BTC Guild is still a very large pool, which means I can use very high 'N' value while still being able to have the shares mature in a reasonable time frame.

Fixed a display bug on the PPLNS stats:  It was not properly showing the Open Shift earnings (unless you somehow earned more than 1 whole BTC from open shifts).

PPLNS will continue testing for the weekend, and be turned on publicly Monday.  I need to dig into a few more of the statistics page so people can see all the pretty numbers behind the scenes.

Thank you to those few who volunteered to help.  I can say right now that Murphy's Law is in full effect.  I open up a payment method that is subject to variance (but not as bad as proportional, and not hoppable), and it's immediately followed by a 5+ hour block.  Sorry .

It _IS_ still working however, so please bear with the bad luck and you may end up getting a huge surge of blocks overnight to make up for it.  You can look at the PPLNS Shift History to get an idea of how the rewards will flow up/down based on pool variance.  It does stay pretty close to even due to the settings used, but it certainly does have its share of peaks and valleys.