Pay-to-Mine

[aBitcoiner]

If I were to mine with Deepbit, one hour of my day's mining would go to the pool's operators each and every day. What kind of services would I get that cannot be gotten with a free pool?

[eturnerx]

Actually it's not an hour a day - it depends if you're on the 3% or 10% fee plans. This isn't a pay-to-mine scheme either because by definition a "pay-to-x" scheme means upfront payment, not a percentage of earnings.

[aBitcoiner]

Pay-to-mine, taxed mining, call it what you want; what has it got going for it?

[hiVe]

nothing..you can chose a free pool which is just as good.
Frankly after a while i've got quite disgusted by the idea of being in a pool with fee's, people should have the right to chose whether to donate if satisfied or not and that much should be enough for the pool operator. They are getting rich like pigs on those fee's, just do your math.

cheers

[compro01]

What kind of services would I get that cannot be gotten with a free pool?

AFAIK, no feeless pool pays out on orphaned blocks, so that's one item.

[aBitcoiner]

What % of blocks are orphaned? I presume it's lower than the fee%.

[jasonk]

What % of blocks are orphaned? I presume it's lower than the fee%.

.06% - 1.2% depending on luck.  Also keep in mine with deepbit there are no stale shares which currently account for .06% of my submitted shares.  In reality fees are only 1.5% or so...

[the_viper]

I just signed up there myself so hopefully there I don't notice too much of a cut taken from me

[bcpokey]

Deepbit is the largest pool which has the advantage of breaking blocks at a pretty consistent rate (lowish variance), pays out instantly (no confirmation), pays for orphaned blocks and stale shares, has a nice user interface and if you worry about variance has a nice pay-per-share option for steady income.

On the other hand deepbit is the largest pool which makes it a constant threat for breaching the magic 50% barrier (kind of against the principle of bitcoin), makes it a target for DDoSing disrupting mining, has the largest fees of any pool and probably some other drawbacks I can't think of offhand.

I encourage people to use deepbit, but I also definitely encourage people to use the other very respectable and profitable pools, or go mine solo, especially because of the 50% of network power problem. I don't care that Tycho is making mad money off his pool, he worked hard, opened a lot of doors for bitcoin miners and other pool operators in general, and set up one of the best pools around. If he makes some bling off it, good for him.

My other favorite pool at the moment is btcguild, though I've heard good things about swepool and miningpool(?) and so on.

[aBitcoiner]

.06% - 1.2% depending on luck.  Also keep in mine with deepbit there are no stale shares which currently account for .06% of my submitted shares.  In reality fees are only 1.5% or so...

How can an average figure depend on luck? This does not make sense.

[Lars]

other pool service is poor i want 99,9% up time and someone that is up 24/7 to fix stuff

Just run a backup client with "-f 50" or so and point it towards a backup pool. Should only really kick in when your main pool is down.

[russelljohnson]

other pool service is poor i want 99,9% up time and someone that is up 24/7 to fix stuff

Just run a backup client with "-f 50" or so and point it towards a backup pool. Should only really kick in when your main pool is down.

Backup client as in another instance of guiminer? Or just have one instance and use the GPU to mine at 2 pools simultaneously? One at -f1 and one at -f50?

[jasonk]

.06% - 1.2% depending on luck.  Also keep in mine with deepbit there are no stale shares which currently account for .06% of my submitted shares.  In reality fees are only 1.5% or so...

How can an average figure depend on luck? This does not make sense.

Finding a block is about luck and probability.  Finding an invalid block is unlucky, and subtracts from profits (but deepbit covers that loss).  How does that not make sense?

[interfect]

.06% - 1.2% depending on luck.  Also keep in mine with deepbit there are no stale shares which currently account for .06% of my submitted shares.  In reality fees are only 1.5% or so...

How can an average figure depend on luck? This does not make sense.

Perhaps this is the expected value minus or plus one standard deviation.

[aBitcoiner]

.06% - 1.2% depending on luck.  Also keep in mine with deepbit there are no stale shares which currently account for .06% of my submitted shares.  In reality fees are only 1.5% or so...

How can an average figure depend on luck? This does not make sense.

Finding a block is about luck and probability.  Finding an invalid block is unlucky, and subtracts from profits (but deepbit covers that loss).  How does that not make sense?

Use this analogy. Landing a head from a coin flip is about luck and probability. If you flip coins forever you will get 50% heads (not 25-75%, that does not make sense because it is forever). How many invalid blocks will I get if I hash forever?

[innervisi0nn]

nothing..you can chose a free pool which is just as good.
Frankly after a while i've got quite disgusted by the idea of being in a pool with fee's, people should have the right to chose whether to donate if satisfied or not and that much should be enough for the pool operator. They are getting rich like pigs on those fee's, just do your math.

cheers

Um..there has to be a fee..how is he paying for his sever? uptime? load balancer..this isnt all for free yano.

[aBitcoiner]

nothing..you can chose a free pool which is just as good.
Frankly after a while i've got quite disgusted by the idea of being in a pool with fee's, people should have the right to chose whether to donate if satisfied or not and that much should be enough for the pool operator. They are getting rich like pigs on those fee's, just do your math.

cheers

Um..there has to be a fee..how is he paying for his sever? uptime? load balancer..this isnt all for free yano.

This is btcmine.com's solution. The traffic load for a pool is very small. So plans are cheap compared to profits, even for deep bit.

[Sukrim]

Um..there has to be a fee..how is he paying for his sever? uptime? load balancer..this isnt all for free yano.

Every pool I know (even "0%" ones) at least keeps transaction fees. He could finance the remaining part (if even needed) with ads (which are paid in fiat currency, which is getting cheaper + cheaper compared to BTC).

[aBitcoiner]

According to http://mining.bitcoin.cz/stats/?history=1000 , 2.6% of the last 1000 blocks found by slush's pool were invalid. Perhaps 3% from deepbit isn't such a bad deal after all?

edit: The sample size is still much too small to draw conclusions from though.

[Sukrim]

You can get the same "service" (insurance against invalid blocks) at BTCguild at 2.5% donation.

Also other pools had lower rates of invalid blocks, I'm not sure what's the global rate on this (I would suspect ~1%-1.5%).