Awesome!  All this time I thought you were just making your shares up .  Nice going mike!

Oh!  I'd heard that the overhead for proportional was higher and didn't think about it myself; my apologies.  Indeed, thinking about how I would implement PPLNS I see that the database would be larger.  This highlights the value of a correctly weigted proportional system (scoring or whatever it's called) for the best of both worlds.  There will be more connections and disconnections with the proportional system as people hop in and out but I guess this is a minor issue.

Echoing RyNinDaCleM and hmblm1245, thanks for your continued hard work on this pool.

Looks very good.  I only mentioned mineco.in because it was the only pool I knew of (before your post) that did offered PPLNS, 0% fee, and transaction fee rewards (I know they are small right now but this is a big plus in my book).  For me, the grace period for supplying shares for a recently expired round is technically a minus.  Other than that, the list of features is impressive though I would expect to see some mention that there is no fee on BTC withdrawals.  At 25 Gh/s the variance is fairly high but I'm sure it's much better than solo mining for most people.

Given I don't have anything like a complete list of mining pools, I'll rephrase to say that right now the best bet seems to be to find a 0% fee pool using PPLNS and which includes the transaction fee reward.  Avoid PPS unless you've calculated the expected return vs. solo carefully and are happy with the reduction.  Definitely avoid proportional unless you intend to pool hop.

There are many factors to consider when selecting a pool and reward system (in what I consider decreasing order of importance):

• Pool operator trustworthiness (absolutely critical!)
• Pool hopping (applicable to reward systems with a proportional element only)
• Stales and server reliability
• Fees (including withdrawal fees)
• Variance
• Bonuses (find our next block for us and get a bonus 1 BTC!)
• Block reward (50 BTC or 50 BTC + transaction fees - does not apply to PPS)

Pretty much you just have to work out what's best for you.

PPS reduces (but does not eliminate) the need to trust the pool operator and completely kills variance but will usually come with a significant fee.

Solo mining eliminates all problems on this list apart from the rather extreme variance (this is one of my favourite methods).

At this point the best returns would probably come from pool hopping on the largest proportional pool you can (switching to a low fee pps pool).  This will usually give a high expected return and at low variance.  You have to keep your eye on the mining forums though because it's only a matter of time before proportional pools die out.

The worst would probably be mining on a proportional pool without actually hopping but this could be trumped by paying a 10% fee at a PPS pool.

If you have an ethical objection to pool hopping then it's hard to beat solo for expected returns.  Perhaps PPLNS on mineco.in has the highest expected return without the extreme variance of solo mining.

Personally I mine PPLNS at simplecoin.us (I lose block reward transaction fees but gain more in reduced stales).

While I'm all for choice I see two problems with this:

• The mining resources will be split and everyone will experience increased variance.
• The proportional payout system is quite complicated and requires much more overhead.  If you have the server resources to handle it then fine but I think it's important to let people know what pool-hopping is and give them links to the appropriate threads and software.

Share counts per round sounds cool.  I still like the idea of lowest stales per round (I bet we'd see some significant variation even among the top miners), but you'd have to filter out a lot of users because any user with shares under 2000 say for a current ronud will have an unreliable stales percentage.

Perhaps the best would be a top-10 share counts per round table but with a column for their stales too, or adding a stales column to the top-30 hashrates list.

Agreed, overall the expected payout is the same as I should get from solo mining (less block transaction fee reward, donation percentage, and stales).  I was just commenting on the misfortune of the many who appeared to have joined the pool shortly after our 3-block day and then left about a day before the next block.


Damn!  I sometimes complain about bad luck mining but I've never had a day mining which resulted in me owing BTC.

How do you figure that the thread title should be changed from 50 Gh/s to 60 Gh/s when in reality the pool's hashrate seems to have dropped from 30 Gh/s to 25 Gh/s?  Was there a surge of hashing power at one point?

I'm glad we finally found a block.  Thanks loth!
I particularly like how blocks get found about difficulty/2 shares after a chunk of people have lost faith in the pool.  I got more than 1.2 BTC for my 732 Mh/s

Much better, thank you.

My only problem is with:
which is repetitive.  If you would like to keep your original point about other pools requiring fees then perhaps just:

Thanks for all your hard work over the last few days.

Yes, I wouldn't want to be trying to pay off rigs right now.  All of my mining equiptment and power consumption has been fully funded by the mining proceeds of my Intel Atom processor (I've been mining for over a year now - it's the pools which I'm new to).

I will keep you guy's in mind for my Sapphire HD5850 Xtremes but I'm not planning on selling them right now and perhaps they won't be desired in a couple of months time anyway.

You guy's are scaling up!?

I have only two 5850's to my name.  I'm actually going to have to part with them soon (as I plan to move abroad in a few months).  It's a shame to, I'm proud of my miner.  732 Mh/s, 2.4 Mh/J, and very, very quiet.  Ah well.

1 hour 35 mins!  That's more like it.

Yay.  Hopefully your next block will be quicker.

If you just want to put across the message that the reward system used here is fair and simple then that's fine.  I read participation as having something to do with posts or donations rather than client uptime.

I don't have a problem with you not explicitly mentioning the transaction fees on the front page; saying that the pool receives 50 BTC for each block is sufficient here.  But then "Simplecoin is run entirely off of donations and ad-revenue." is a lie.  How about something like:
{
Simplecoin does not charge fees on awards or withdrawals; instead, every user has the option of donating a percentage of their gains to the pool.  A suggested donation of 1% is enabled by default but you are welcome to change this to any value.  Simplecoin also generates some revenue using ads and these are hidden from users who donate 1% or more.
}

I'm sorry if I'm being curt.  I don't mean to have a go; I'm really just trying to help.

If you guys keep this up that poor troll's going to die from overeating.

Any idea how I can permanently remove this thread from my "updated topics" section?

Some points on the new home page blurb:

> For each successfully completed bitcoin block, the pool is awarded 50 bitcoins. Simplecoin splits the reward between users based on their processing power and participation.

> While many pools require fees on transactions and awards, Simplecoin does not. Simplecoin is run entirely off of donations and ad-revenue. New users will have their donation percent set at 1%, but are free to change it to any value. Users with a donation of 1% or more will not see ads.

Given these two points I'm left wondering what happens to the transaction fees.  Surely they are not just deleted or simply never claimed!?

What do you mean by "processing power and participation"?  Do you mean to imply that users who contribute more in the forums for example will have higher rewards?  How about "based on processing power (currently using PPLNS with N = difficulty/2)."?

Finally, a minor point but I'd much prefer to read "but are welcome to change it to any value".  "free" seems too hostile to me.

Good stuff, although...

Do you think that moving from here to the site's forum will cost the pool much in terms of advertising?  The frequent posts here means that this pool is practically stickied at the moment.

I'm surprised to admit that I find the logic you follow to be sound.  The fundamental difference between us seems to be in our initial assumptions: you appear to believe in God to the point of being unable to accept the possibility that God does not exist and I don't believe in God exactly as much as I don't believe in the flying spagetti monster.

I would say more but, as you say, this is very much off topic.  This will be my last post here.

Now someone's gone and made a claim.  The onus of proof is upon you for both prayers being objectively good and pornography being objectively evil.  Perhaps the words 'good' and 'evil' have a special meaning in the christian faith which makes these statements provable but then you suffer from a self-reference which renders your point moot.

If there is no objective truth about the value of prayers or pornography then I think that subjective offensiveness is very much worth considering.

If you are trying to open my mind to the idea that logic itself is not absolute then I'm afraid I'm a lost cause.  My belief in logic is probably as strong as your belief in christianity.  If you reply to this with a solid logical argument then I'd love to continue this discussion but otherwise I think we'll simply have to go our separate ways.  Please know at least that you've not offended me.

I don't think anyone's tried to claim that God exists yet or that God doesn't exist (apart from in the pedophile blockchain comment).  All I've heard is that some people believe that God exists and some people don't.  There seems to be a natural truce to be had here.

The one thing that puzzles me is why some think that prayers are more appropriate material for inclusion in the block chain than, say, pornography.
Trying my level best not to be biased, I believe christian writings and regular pornography should be treated on par with one another in this reguard.  Both information classes are very well-know, loved by many, and highly offensive to many others.  Is there some significant logical distinction I'm missing?