Eligius: New payout method POLL

[Barek]

So you may potentially be setting yourself up for a dead pool if a long dry spell hits.

What am I missing?

That is true for the current proportional method, as well as for solo mining. And if it was not, then the pool operator would take the risk on himself, with such low fees, and then you would definitely be left without a pool..

With proportional you have a 'clean slate' after each round.
With shared MaxPPS you potentially accumulate a big 'debt' across many rounds. Which, of course, would average out eventually, but people may not want to stick around that long.

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[yxejamir]

With proportional you have a 'clean slate' after each round.
With shared MaxPPS you potentially accumulate a big 'debt' across many rounds. Which, of course, would average out eventually, but people may not want to stick around that long.

That's a misconception you have. With either proportional (current method) or SMPPS, the pool will not pay out more than it has actually earned. The difference is davka on shorter rounds, where the proportional method pays out immediately, whereas the SMPPS holds some of the funds until longer rounds. This is precisely how it deals with pool-hopping, BTW.

So, if there is any 'debt' in comparison with the current method, it's actually only accumulated on shorter rounds, and payed back on longer ones.

Hope this clarifies.

[Barek]

Let me give an example.

Imagine everything was going well for a while and blocks were found according do expected number of shares. Everyone is happy, because everyone got the expected number of bitcoins. The pools does not have any coins held back or owes any. (Same here as if pool just started)

Then comes as week of bad luck. None if any blocks are found. Shares pay out less and less. The rational thing would be for everyone to stay, but people just say they get more per share at other pools and leave until the pool has caught up. Hashrate goes down and it takes even longer to recover.
In the extreme, everyone would leave, leaving behind a pool where shares are worth less than expected value. Why would anyone start mining again?

Think of it differently. There are two situations:

• Pool has above average luck: just regular PPS
• Pools has below average luck: Proportional with round starts when pool starts to go below expected number of blocks and round ends when pool again is above average number of blocks. (with early partial payouts). Pretty sure Luke will run into that, because that is how long share info would need to be stored.

Anyways ... look at the big pools and their payout methods. People seem to stick to what they understand without having to think much about it. Just look at deepbit's fees. People do not seem to mind.

[gentakin]

Then comes as week of bad luck. None if any blocks are found. Shares pay out less and less. The rational thing would be for everyone to stay, but people just say they get more per share at other pools and leave until the pool has caught up. Hashrate goes down and it takes even longer to recover.
In the extreme, everyone would leave, leaving behind a pool where shares are worth less than expected value. Why would anyone start mining again?

As I understand it, account balance increases only after a block was found (correct me if I'm wrong).

So when a longer-than-average round takes place AND the pool has not enough savings to payout the full PPS after the block was finally found, this basically switches to proportional (with more than 50BTC total reward, because the pool still had some savings left from a lucky round) and everyone gets (their_shares/total_shares)*(50+pool_savings) BTC.  [NB: Even though this looks pool-hopping-vulnerable, it probably is not, because it only applies to unlucky rounds]
Now compare this to proportional, where miners get even less reward for unlucky rounds, because there are no pool_savings. And I think most proportional pools don't have any problems with too many miners leaving on unlucky rounds.

Because miners got underpaid in this round, the pool remembers that and later on, when a lucky round takes place, adds the missing BTC to the account balance.

[iopq]

I don't understand if that method deals with pool hopping at all
if not, Multipool will be happy with this

The whole point of this discussion was that the old method is susceptible to pool-hopping, so yes, all the methods suggested above deal with it.

I still don't understand how, can't you solve easier shares and leave?