Is it just my imagination or are the mining pools stealing from us?

[Mabsark]

I'm a member of a few mining pools and none of them payout all 8 decimal places of your bitcoins. The ones I'm with only payout up to 2 decimal places. So, if you leave the mining pool and can't withdraw all 8 decimal places, does the mining pool get to keep them? BTC has 7,638 members. Imagine if BTC Guild kept all the "change" from these members, that'd be a tidy sum they just made.

Basically, if a mining pool does not payout all 8 decimal places, they're stealing from us.

[BioMike]

If I remember correctly Eligius pays full 8 decimal out. Remains are send after 1 week inactivity.

[bitv]

When I used slush, I think they pay out to your bitcoin address with the accuracy of 2 decimals and leave the rest decimals on your pool's account. I could be wrong though.

[AaronBarr]

They make lot of cash like that!

[Mabsark]

If I remember correctly Eligius pays full 8 decimal out. Remains are send after 1 week inactivity.

Maybe, they're all like that. It'd be good to get some official comfirmation though.

[jasonstx]

switched from slush to btcguild for that reason. Still have 0.00602445 BTC in that account with no way to get it out.

[mf]

Most pools also take the block's fees for themselves, in order to keep the pool running.
Is there any pool which takes only a percentage of those fees for themselves, or would that not really be enough to keep that pool running?
I'm entertaining the idea (so far just playing with some math about it) for a pool which kept to themselves only a percentage of the fees found in a block, and distributed the 50BTC *and* say 95% of the block's fees to all the contributors.

[blck42]

I mine at bitcoinpool, they dont take any fees and payout to the 8 places.  They are funding themselves through donations.

[Mabsark]

Most pools also take the block's fees for themselves, in order to keep the pool running.

I'm not really bothered about the block fees as I never had them to begin with. If they're not paying out all 8 decimals though, that's just plain theft.

[Mabsark]

I mine at bitcoinpool, they dont take any fees and payout to the 8 places.  They are funding themselves through donations.

I haven't tried them yet. I'll give them a go after someone finds the first blocks on certain pools.

[blck42]

I agree with you about not paying out to the full 8 places being somewhat dishonest.  I started playing around with the whole bitcoin concept and mining at bitcoinplus.com (a website miner) and quickly realized it was going to take forever to generate the minimum amount of btcs to make a withdrawal.

[kookiekrak]

you guys do realize that its only like  <.001 btc per person?

that means for each 1k users, they'll "make" the 1btc that the persons left over.

not much stealing going on there.

the real issue is mining pools not paying out transaction fees. I've seen up to 2btc as transaction fees!

[jasonstx]

We do keep the transaction fees at this time. If transaction fees begin to represent more than 2% of block rewards, we will begin to include them in block rewards.

From BTCGuild.

Sounds fair.  I know that each physical server they run probably costs upwards of $150 a month for hosting (colo rack).  They deserve to make something for running a pool.

I think that they ALL need to add some 2 factor authentication though, google authenticator API is pretty easy to setup and just latch it to your payout wallet.  BTC has a payout lock and thats why I use them.  If your wallet address changes, you get an email and no payouts can be made for 24 hours.  This gives you enough time to log back in or contact the pool before anything is taken.

If mtgox did the same thing (email prior to transaction with authorization link) then none of this other stuff would have happened.