Why so few PPS pools?

[spudhed]

just wondering why it is that so few pools support pay per share? i was told i shouldnt mine on deepbit due to it gaining a controlling share or something, so i switched to swepool, my speed went down a bit but i didnt mind too much, now however theyve switched to prop and it seems to have more than halved my earnings. i did ask on the swepool thread this morn and was told earnings should be up about 8%, now near 2000 shares later ive still not been given any reward and my "worker wage" was still at 0.16btc (previously i was getting 0.34-0.39 per day on pps) so im pretty certain prop isnt for me or somehow im not understanding how it works. in any case are there any other pools that are as good as deepbit offering PPS? the only other ive seen is Continuum and their page doesnt fill me with confidence, plus its in canada and im in europe

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[fcmatt]

just wondering why it is that so few pools support pay per share? i was told i shouldnt mine on deepbit due to it gaining a controlling share or something, so i switched to swepool, my speed went down a bit but i didnt mind too much, now however theyve switched to prop and it seems to have more than halved my earnings. i did ask on the swepool thread this morn and was told earnings should be up about 8%, now near 2000 shares later ive still not been given any reward and my "worker wage" was still at 0.16btc (previously i was getting 0.34-0.39 per day on pps) so im pretty certain prop isnt for me or somehow im not understanding how it works. in any case are there any other pools that are as good as deepbit offering PPS? the only other ive seen is Continuum and their page doesnt fill me with confidence, plus its in canada and im in europe

from what i have read pps has a weakness that allows an attacker to withhold valuable blocks just to screw
the person operating it and workers. imagine.. getting a valid block, not submitting it, screwing everyone over, you do not
get the 50 bitcoins either, and otherwise being a jerk... yet you still get paid per share.

just to ruin pps pools. the whole concept needs some more thought if you are going to allow open joining.

[Dude65535]

Most pools don't offer PPS because if the pool is unlucky the operator loses money on PPS. Also someone who wanted to hurt a pool could use PPS and hold back any shares that were also a valid block. This would cost the attacker very little compared to submitting every share, but would cause the pool operator to lose money.

Have you checked to make sure it was not a change in difficulty that caused your earnings to change?

[spudhed]

im not sure im still fairly new to this, it seems a pretty big drop and on returning to deepbit i was getting a decent rate again (until the site went down just that is) there wouldnt be much point mining if im dropping from pulling near 3 coins a week to a little over 1 at best

[Sukrim]

Swepool is tiny compared to deepbit, this means you will see more variance from day to day.

Mining one month in each pool will give you ~8% more on swepool. Mining one day depends entirely on luck.

Also with deepbit PPS you are paying stale share miners, meaning every lame CPU miner that still submits a share from 2 days ago gets money that you would/could/should have earned.

Nice of you to give 7% or your earnings to stale miners and another 3% to [Tycho] - I'm sure he'll take better care of it than you!

[kiwiasian]

Swepool is proportional now? Their website doesn't say so

Swepool offers the no-variance option of Pay-Per-Share at the lowest fee1 avalaible. You don't have to worry about stuff like when is next block solve or is my pool having luck. The only things that matters here is the shares you submit, and what you are going to do with all the btc you get.



1Current compensation is 81.0775 µbtc/share

[supa]

Because they're risky and easy to cheat?

[spudhed]

maybe it is just that i dont properly understand prop, so i dont get paid out for a month? ive always used pps so far and been actually able to see my progress even hour by hour in some way, now all i get is the number of shares increasing while the "worker wage" seems to tell me im earning a whole lot less and as theres no sign of progress at all aside from the .5btc i earned while it was still PPS, it just seems wrong to me that ive been mining 12 solid hours and have yet to see any return at all, maybe they need to make it a little clearer that something is actually happening rather than just showing that its connected taking your shares and not doing much else, or maybe i just cant wrap my head around it and im a damn fool, how is it that day to day its luck but over a month its more, what if your luck day to day is bad for 10 days, surely thats going to wound your take for the month

and yes swepool is now prop:

News

Swepool switching to propotional

Due to unstainable losses with pay-per-share we are switching to proportional mode with 0% fee. Hashspeed calculators is out-of-order and will soon be functional again, but there will be no downtime of pool and all your shares is counted towards next block solve.

[bcpokey]

maybe it is just that i dont properly understand prop, so i dont get paid out for a month? ive always used pps so far and been actually able to see my progress even hour by hour in some way, now all i get is the number of shares increasing while the "worker wage" seems to tell me im earning a whole lot less and as theres no sign of progress at all aside from the .5btc i earned while it was still PPS, it just seems wrong to me that ive been mining 12 solid hours and have yet to see any return at all, maybe they need to make it a little clearer that something is actually happening rather than just showing that its connected taking your shares and not doing much else, or maybe i just cant wrap my head around it and im a damn fool

and yes swepool is now prop:

News

Swepool switching to propotional

Due to unstainable losses with pay-per-share we are switching to proportional mode with 0% fee. Hashspeed calculators is out-of-order and will soon be functional again, but there will be no downtime of pool and all your shares is counted towards next block solve.

Block find bonus

Now we have a block find bonus. That means if your miner find a block, you will get a neat bonus of 0.5 btc on top of your pay-per-share. This bonus is payed out automatically to your account on block discovery.

Proportional is very simple to understand. You get paid when a block is found by the pool. What you are paid is relative to the proportion of hashdata you put into the pool (if the pool has 100GHash/sec and you have 1GHash/sec you get 1% of the block reward, if the block reward is 50BTC you get .5BTC).

This means if the pool is lucky and finds a block faster than the "average" time should be, you make more BTC yay! If the pool is unlucky and finds blocks slower than the "average" time should be you make less BTC nooo! The variance will even out over longer periods of time statistically, but in a period of a day or 2 days you may see more or less blocks.

You can look at http://swepool.net/statistics for a sense of payout times. On sunday they found 3 blocks (lucky!), on Monday they found 1 (sorta average), and so on. Overall swepool thusfar has been somewhat unlucky (or malicious users withheld blocks from the pool, dunno) which is why PPS was not working (the average time to find a block was lower than the average time should have been, so PPS cost the pool operator BTC).

If you absolutely can't stand not seeing the tiny trickle of bitcoins come in constantly then mine on deepbit. You lose out on BTC but gain in peace of mind I suppose. But remember bitcoin is not a race it's a marathon. You need to adjust your thinking for longer term.

[dinox]

This is a graph over shares per block at swepool. It is a moving average over 10 blocks, to reduce variance. Y-axis is shares and X-axis is block number.



Sure, it *could* be because of just bad luck, but to sustain operation we would need 66% fees...

[martok]

any other pools that are as good as deepbit offering PPS? the only other ive seen is Continuum and their page doesnt fill me with confidence, plus its in canada and im in europe

Nope, Continuum's webpage is just a cobbled together interface to the RPC system, mainly because I am not a web designer. Just FYI though, Continuum's server is actually located in the U.S but that too is not in Europe as you point out. We do still offer PPS though and proportional as well. Yes, PPS can be cheated but if people do that, the PPS pools will go away and as will the cheater's income from such sources. So not a very smart thing to do longterm imo.

[spudhed]

ok i think im getting it slowly, so you only get a payout when/if a block is found? but it doesnt seem quite such a good deal unless you have quite a wedge of power going into the pool (im only getting about 270mh/s) and only then if youre lucky enough that a block is found that day, im not a gambling man so the luck aspect doesnt sit so well with me, for example if a block isnt found for a few days youve wasted quite a lot of time, i know its only essentially idle pc time but still, im starting to understand why that could be bad for the operator, having to pay out on shares if a block isnt found that day, but i also see why prop is not so good for me, pps eliminates the luck element if im right, but im guessing with whats mentioned above the days of pps pools are numbered.

so what about solo mining is it more worthwhile or is it even more luck of the draw?

i may well try continuum at some point but i think until i fully understand whats is going on im going to stick to deepbit for now, yes i know it may not be ideal but its the situation im most comfortable with for the moment, its a shame there have to be cheating b*stards out there who ruin it for people though

[bcpokey]

ok i think im getting it slowly, so you only get a payout when/if a block is found? but it doesnt seem quite such a good deal unless you have quite a wedge of power going into the pool (im only getting about 270mh/s) and only then if youre lucky enough that a block is found that day, im not a gambling man so the luck aspect doesnt sit so well with me, for example if a block isnt found for a few days youve wasted quite a lot of time, i know its only essentially idle pc time but still, im starting to understand why that could be bad for the operator, having to pay out on shares if a block isnt found that day, but i also see why prop is not so good for me, pps eliminates the luck element if im right, but im guessing with whats mentioned above the days of pps pools are numbered.

so what about solo mining is it more worthwhile or is it even more luck of the draw?

i may well try continuum at some point but i think until i fully understand whats is going on im going to stick to deepbit for now, yes i know it may not be ideal but its the situation im most comfortable with for the moment, its a shame there have to be cheating b*stards out there who ruin it for people though

PPS is the only non-variant option, and it is offered at a steep fee to cover the operator against potential runs of badluck. Everything else comes with some variance.

The larger pools have lower levels of variance for the most part but those times of badluck hit them too (and they hurt because you are making a tiny trickle of coins to start with, then that trickle will stop for an extended period of time). Solo mining probably has the largest variance, and for small amounts of hashing power is pretty much a non-option at this point.

[spudhed]

thats the thing im happy to pay that fee, as i say im not a gambling man at all i like things i can work out (can you tell im a really unlucky person?)

[error]

Mining may not be right for you. You may do better by purchasing BTC outright, or offering goods and services in exchange for BTC.

[spudhed]

i wouldnt go that far, ive been very happy with my results so far plus ive always been an avid overclocker and its nice to have something that will actually use all that extra power, i just prefer pps by a large margin although im looking into score based pools now as it seems the next best thing to pps, if/when i get more power then ill likely be a little happier with prop (still not happy but happier)

and the killer is buying bitcoins isnt all that easy for a person who ruined his credit years ago and has no bank account of any sort at all (one of the reasons i love BTC, i HATE banks/paypal and all their cronies)

[Grinder]

ok i think im getting it slowly, so you only get a payout when/if a block is found? but it doesnt seem quite such a good deal unless you have quite a wedge of power going into the pool (im only getting about 270mh/s) and only then if youre lucky enough that a block is found that day

Deepbit usually finds several blocks every hour, so there's not much luck involved if you choose proportional payout either.