Hi ReadyPlayer1, first of all thanks for the compliment on our support. We pride ourselves in our community, on Drift, Discord, and Twitter. I really suggest giving us another try, and comparing the payments after a week at each pool. You'll find that PPLNS and Proportional payments (Coinmine and Suprnova) are based on variance. Sometimes they pay more, sometimes alot less.

At Luxor, we pay PPS. I want to take this excerpt from our friends at SiaMining, that have this great descriptor comparing both:

Despite the similar names, PPS (Pay Per Share) and PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) are two very different reward systems.


PPLNS is a modification of the proportional system. The proportional system is perhaps the most natural way to distribute rewards: whenever the pool finds a block, it distributes its value (minus a fee) to miners proportionally to how many shares they have submitted since the previous block. This naive approach is unfortunately easily exploitable by using a technique called pool hopping. PPLNS corrects this issue by considering only the last N shares submitted right before a block was found, and disregarding the rest. If the value of N is chosen appropriately, the system becomes resistant to hopping, but with one side effect: in order to receive fair retribution, in a PPLNS system miners must maintain a relatively constant hashrate at all times. Being a proportional system, PPLNS only rewards miners when a block is found and confirmed by the network, and since finding a block can take considerable time, rewards have a high variance. Additionally, from time to time the pool may find a block that never confirms because another block was found and confirmed before it. Such blocks, called orphans, have no value, and result in missed rewards for miners.


PPS rewards miners with a certain amount (the PPS rate) for every valid share submitted. This amount is determined based on the expected number of shares needed to find a block, and on the reward that finding a block would yield. Note that we say “expected” because mining is a random process, so we can know how many shares will be needed on average in the long run, but not how many will be effectively needed. Since shares are much easier to find than blocks, a miner typically finds several every minute, which drastically reduces the variance of rewards. It is therefore possible for a miner to reliably estimate his earnings, as they do not depend on the luck of the pool. Because miners get paid per share and can tally how many shares they submit, they can easily verify that the promised reward is given, making it impossible for the pool operator to cheat. For the same reason, PPS is completely immune to pool hopping. All in all, PPS arguably offers the fairest payouts for all miners, regardless of hashrate or frequency. The one downside to PPS is for the pool operator, who has to take on the risk of bad luck in finding blocks. To compensate for this risk, PPS pools traditionally charge a higher fee.

Everything else being equal (fee, difficulty, and block reward), in the long run both systems are expected to find the same amount of blocks, but since PPLNS cannot pay for orphaned blocks, PPS miners are expected to receive slightly higher payouts. There are several places on the internet where it is stated that PPLNS yields higher rewards than PPS. The only reason for this is that for a long time PPS pools have had much higher fees than their PPLNS counterparts. For instance DeepBit, which was once the biggest Bitcoin pool, used to charge 3% for PPLNS, but 10% for PPS.

At Luxor, we charge a flat 3% fee for PPS, which is very competitive in the market as of now.