Can someone explain BTCGUILD's PPLNS to me like I am a five year old.

[bsdpunk]

I had some miners on fireducks pool and some on btcguild, I moved everything to PPLNS on btcguild, which right now makes me feel fairly foolish, since I'm hashing the same rates and getting, as far as I can tell a lesser award, Does this eventually pay out by sticking with it? Is it a game of probability.  If you can't dumb it down for me, just tell me to switch back to PPS. Thanks,
And I apologize for the newbish post.

Thanks,

Bsdpunk

[RyanRed]

I second your request. Im still a new miner myself, and I have a hard time understanding all the different pool systems.

[juhakall]

PPLNS should be one of the easiest hopping proof methods to understand. It's basically the proportional payout system, but each share can be rewarded on multiple rounds.

A proportional pool counts shares separately for each round, and when a block is found, it pays out the block reward (minus fees) to miners proportionally to their number of shares in that round. Then everyone's share count starts from zero for the next round, as miners begin working on the new block. This method can be exploited by only submitting shares during the beginning of each round (when everyone has very low share counts), and then stopping at a certain calculated moment, if a block is not found by the pool.

A PPLNS pool also pays miners proportionally to the number of shares submitted when a block is found, but it doesn't reset share counts after each block. Instead, it always keeps account of the last N shares, which is usually something like 10 times the current difficulty. This means that a single share will quite probably be used in reward calculations multiple times, but the payment for one share is lower on each occasion. This also means that pool hoppers can't exploit the pool by mining there only when other user's share counts are low, because they are never low.

Variance on PPLNS can be lowered by increasing the number N, so that even more shares are used in reward calculations when each block is found. The drawback of increasing that number is that new miners will have to wait longer to get their payments, but they will also keep receiving payments a bit longer when they stop mining.

[deepceleron]

Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares, where N is a number, typically 1/2 of Bitcoin difficulty, defining how long your share remains active.

A share is a difficulty-1 proof of work, the method all pools use to calculate miner contribution when sharing rewards. The full difficulty is around 3.5 million, it takes on average that many shares for a pool to find a block.

1. You submit a pool share (about every 10 seconds on a good GPU),
2. For every share that is active, you receive 25BTC/N any time a block is found by pool,
3. Your shares aren't discarded when a block is found,
4. A share expires after all miners have submitted N more shares newer than yours.

You can think of this as a first-in-first-out system. If you have 1% of the hashrate of the pool, 1% of the shares used for calculating reward sharing will be yours and you will get 1% of the reward anytime a block is found. An individual share might expire without contributing to your reward, or it can earn you multiple rewards if several blocks are found before it expires. This is a fair payout system as your expected reward is 100% value regardless of how or when you mine.

[kwoody]

You say you made much less doing PPLNS at btcguild? Are you running Stratum proxy? if not you aren't getting paid at all with PPLNS. I made this mistake for about 8 hours, set it to PPLNS and went to sleep, woke up with nothing. i'm too lazy to update miner software when i'm planning on powering down my farm in about a month anyway. if asics turn out to be bullshit i'll power gpus back on and update.

[fcmatt]

You say you made much less doing PPLNS at btcguild? Are you running Stratum proxy? if not you aren't getting paid at all with PPLNS. I made this mistake for about 8 hours, set it to PPLNS and went to sleep, woke up with nothing. i'm too lazy to update miner software when i'm planning on powering down my farm in about a month anyway. if asics turn out to be bullshit i'll power gpus back on and update.

It was simply bad luck since btcguild started pplns. Fyi.

[DrG]

BTCGuild has been having some of the worst if not the worst luck ever recorded.  The last time they had luck this bad they were a Prop pool and I was mining with them.  I skipped over to a few other pools and they had 2 weeks of insanely good luck.  Since I switched to PPLNS they've had periods like the last 2 nights where 3600GH/s has not found a block for 12 hours and 9 hours respectively.

Yep I'm that good (or bad  )

[RyanRed]

Thanks for all the info everyone. It has very helpful. So much to still learn

[bsdpunk]

I've left pplns on for around a day now, It seems like I'm earning about the same as I normally would. I enjoyed reading your responses and feel more educated for them.

[miner49er]

I am a newbie, just started on this and joined BTC Guild about 1 week before they introduced PPLNS. I switched right to it as soon as they implemented. I went a few days, and noticed that the PPS vs. PPLNS was kind of about the same, leaning toward the PPLNS only slightly. The PPLNS Shift History in their stats page were reporting about the same number of blocks discovered per shift, with nominal variances per shift, meaning each shift was finding approximately the sam number of blocks. after 3 or four days, i noticed that my 24 hr earning average started slipping below what it was when I was using PPS. I switched back to PPS and my 24 hr earnings rose back up. So now I am not using their PPLNS.

Another explanation could be this: I noticed when PPLNS first was introduced, that there were some very heavy hitters in the system and found blocks were up about 2-3 blocks per shift (compared to recently) when these big players were in. In the last few days, I have noticed that the big players are not in the PPLNS. may have something to do with the per share earnings, thus a dip in my payouts.

Also: dificulty has gone up, and my hash rates have not

not sure what we can draw from the above, but I have gone back to PPS.

[kwoody]

PPLNS only works on Stratum.

straight from btcguild's site

[miner49er]

i am using guiminer(polcbm), which employs stratum if I am not mistaken. either i a just have bad luck or i am the reason they finding less blocks (hehe). Every time I set PPLNS I get valid shares, but the shift pps rate and number of found blocks is on the whole less than when I set my workers to PPS. wierd.

[eleuthria]

PPLNS is a very simple system when you think about it correctly.  BTC Guild uses 'N' = 30 million.

When a block is found, the last 30 million shares (10 shifts) split the block reward.  Ignoring pool fee/transaction fees in the block, this results in:

25 BTC / 30,000,000 = 0.0000008333333 BTC per share.

So each time a block is found, the last 30 million shares are paid 0.0000008333333 (again, this is without doing the math for pool/transaction fes).  This is much less than PPS.  However, a share can get paid for multiple blocks, since each block pays the last 30 million shares.  The PPLNS Shift History shows you how many blocks paid to a given set of shares.

At current network difficulty, it takes ~8.5 blocks to equal the PPS rate.  If a shift finds 8 or less, it was paid lower than the PPS rate.  If a shift finds 9 or more, it was paid higher than the PPS rate.


The first week of PPLNS was pretty rough at BTC Guild on luck.  However, there have been 24-72 hour periods that paid an average of 30-50% higher than 100% PPS would have.  Luck since PPLNS began is very close to neutral at this point.  The only thing skewing that a bit is the DDoS that hit on 12/20 (and early 12/21), which affected Stratum more than getwork due to which servers were targeted, meaning people on Stratum (which is required for PPLNS) were more affected by the pool outage than getwork users.

[miner49er]

Thanks eleuthria. I think my problem is that I have not given it enough time. I am getting too hung up on the short term results. I keep using my 24hr. earnings as a bench  mark, so have been percieving that my earnings are lower on PPLNS.There have been a few runs of <9 blocks found on PPLNS, but on the whole it seems most shifts finding less than 8 blocks. I think I need to stop watching it so closely and let it run for a few days without switching back and forth.
 

[DrG]

I think we need to be hitting above 9 blocks per shift (especially when the shifts are over 1 hour long) to break even at the current difficulty.  I jumped back on PPLNS and am the #2 hasher (quite sad really with my small farm) and luck had been pretty bad for the last 4 days except for a short 5 hour run 2 days ago.

[miner49er]

Well I'm no farmer, just running 3 little GPU's for now; But, I cannot believe that the luck on BTC's PPLNS has been this bad. I saw the big run of 10-15 block shifts and was lucky enough to be in on it. But that has been about it since they implemented PPLNS. I figured i need to see 10 per shift or better to equal their PPS even with the 2% diffeence in fees.

[fcmatt]

Well I'm no farmer, just running 3 little GPU's for now; But, I cannot believe that the luck on BTC's PPLNS has been this bad. I saw the big run of 10-15 block shifts and was lucky enough to be in on it. But that has been about it since they implemented PPLNS. I figured i need to see 10 per shift or better to equal their PPS even with the 2% diffeence in fees.

Not to bash but pplns is not a great option to me personally. Why bother with luck when you can go pps with a reasonable fee?
It makes no sense to gamble on good luck when there is a 50% chance for it to go wrong on you. I prefer better odds then that. Maybe if diff drops in half i will try it again. Ha.. Like diff will drop in half. Pps for now.

[miner49er]

yup, they need to make more of an incentive to stay PPLNS than paying for stales. maybe a diffent share system than PPLNS.

[DrG]

Last couple of days have been horrid.  If this keeps up BTCGuild will go poof on the PPS side 

[DPoS]

one thing this thread didn't touch on was how 24 Hour Earnings is calculated for PPS and PPLNS ??

It always seems PPS will show higher there..  can someone please post the formula used for both?

thanks