[1423GH] ABCPool PPS - Proxy Pool For High & Steady Mining Rewards

[MintCondition]

To add to this, we are not planning to obtain a certificate from a third party for now.

Consider using http://www.cacert.org; their certs are free and at least for some people the warning should vanish.

BTW, Chlorine and you should update your signatures.  

I knew we would forget something somewhere while doing the transition..   Thanks for pointing it out

If anyone sees any more references to 0% fee or the introductory period, please let us know and we'll change them. There's a lot of content on the site, and although we checked it all we may have overlooked something.

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[DeepBit]

Hmm, that "effective fee" is a nice idea, thanks for the hint !
Now I can advertise my fees as twice lower :)

[MintCondition]

Hmm, that "effective fee" is a nice idea, thanks for the hint !
Now I can advertise my fees as twice lower

You should! It's not immediately clear that 0% fee pools usually don't pay for stale shares or invalid blocks. IMHO, When people are shopping for a pool it's best to present them with a directly comparable metric that's as informative as possible. Effective fee includes hidden costs and bonuses, and is therefore more suitable than the plain nominal fee.

[Inaba]

Your "effective fee" is very misleading.  Your fee is 4%, and you should advertise it as such.  Some pools have a .5% stale rate, some have a 5% stale rate, so your "effective fee" is meaningless as a comparison unless you compare it to a specific pool that never improves or gets worse, which is impossible.  So if you really mean what you say and that you should use a comparable metric, advertising a generic "effective fee" is not it.

Your fee, say in Hotdogs case, costs her (him?) almost $100 a month - people need to understand that in money terms, not in terms of percentages. If you want to advertise a comparable metric, use that.  At XX Hashrate, the fee is YY USD per month.  

[MintCondition]

Your "effective fee" is very misleading. [...] So if you really mean what you say and that you should use a comparable metric, advertising a generic "effective fee" is not it.

As with any metric, both nominal fee and effective fee are open to misinterpretation. We don't claim we have the holy grail of metrics. Calling our effective fee 'very misleading' is quite an accusation, as we try to be as transparent about it as possible.

The fee for a pool is one of its key characteristics. Miners rely on that number, so it should be as comparable as possible. Many non-PPS pools silently withhold payment for invalid blocks and are still listing their fee as 0%. Due to the nature of PPS, it is impossible to withhold payment for invalid blocks without calculating it as a 'fee'. The amount per share simply isn't the theoretical (50/difficulty) BTC.

Therefore a 1.5% nominal fee PPS pool can be expected to pay as much as a 0% nominal fee non-PPS pool (ceteris paribus). That's not immediately intuitive, especially to people new to the mining scene. If a newbie sees a PPLNS pool at 0% nominal and a PPS pool at 1.5% nominal, he thinks the latter one costs more, while in fact they cost the same.

This proves that the nominal fee, while clearly defined, is open to misinterpretation. The notion of effective fee that we use is not very clearly defined, and that's a disadvantage which we try to mitigate by explaining what we mean by it everywhere we list it. While less clearly defined, in terms of USD costs it is a better fit than the nominal fee. Perfect? Certainly not.

On our site and in our initial forum post we list both the effective- and the nominal fee, and an explanation. From those pieces of information everyone should be able to make up their mind about whether it's a good deal for them. You may not agree with our interpretation of effective fee, but at the moment I don't know how we can be more transparent about it.

[...]
If you want to advertise a comparable metric, use that.  At XX Hashrate, the fee is YY USD per month.  

We would encourage anyone to build a tool that takes as input one's hashpower and outputs a histogram of expected payouts, in BTC or USD. Such a tool would combine all reward-influencing factors into one graph: nominal fee, the variance each type of pool has, and the effect of stale rate and incentives like invalid block compensation and stale share compensation. Maybe we'll even build it ourselves, because I'm sure we'd come out looking pretty good.

If you'd like to talk about some objective reward-efficiency metric that all pools can use to advertise themselves, please start a new forum thread for that.

[Inaba]

But that is kind of the point, in your description and just chatting about it here in the posts, you are equivocating on the term itself.  That should be your first indication that the metric is misleading.  If you can't even talk about the subject in definitive terms in casual conversation, it's not suitable as an accurate metric.  "Many non-PPS pools..." "...expected to pay as much as..." etc...

The fact that it's very misleading is not an accusation, I apologize if it comes across as such, I am simply stating a fact.  The way you are presenting the data is misleading in so far as the fact that you are saying the "effective fee" (which is a somewhat ambiguous term in and of itself) is 2.1%, when in fact it's not.  It MAY BE 2.1% under SOME circumstances, but under MOST circumstances it is not.  It may be 2.15%, 1.2%, .05%, 6% (in the case of some pools paying out "bonuses"), etc... You are basing your constant "effective fee" off of a value that is non-constant, both between different pools and even within the same pool, making your metric useless (and hence misleading).

Your chart idea is a good one, I like it.  As far as a reward/efficiency metric that pools can standardize on, that's probably not a bad idea actually.  I will have to give that some thought. 

[farfiman]

I agree with Inaba. 

Using the term "effective" kinda feels like a cellphone company or internet provider with 5 page contracts and little stars sending you to the small print at the bottom of page 5.

And on the positive side  .  I  mine at ABC  and am very happy

[Hotdog453]

Yeah. It begs a comparison to other pools, but it's not using the same criteria as they are... so, well, it just gets a little awkward.

That said, though, if anyone is stupid enough to read any "X% fee!" at face value, and not do their own investigating? They deserve what they get.

The XX% is YY dollars is a calculation we all have to do ourselves. When you think of it, yeah, I *AM* paying ~100$ a month to mine here. Period. I'm paying more to mine here a month than I do for my cell phone bill, assuming values stay somewhat around this mark. But I view it as worth it to get the same, exact, rate, constantly

[eleuthria]

Advertise your real fee, don't throw around made up numbers.  You don't pay for all stales, only stales while your pool software pushes long polls, so latency still will cause stales on your pool.  Not to mention stale rates vary drastically by person to person due to system configuration, software, and location.

Even worse, you throw around this 2.1% number and then compare it to Deepbit, which offers the protection against invalid blocks, but you use 10% for them.

You take 4% off every valid submission, that is your fee.

[wndrbr3d]

Is there any chance this fee might be lowered if BTC/USD exchange rates were to improve or if pool volume were to go up?

Previously your donation calculation stated that anywhere between 1.9-2.2% would keep the lights on, so the 4% 'fee' that is now implemented is obviously above and beyond what you required previously to keep things going.

Just curious.

Thanks again!

[Clipse]

How can I reset my password since it seems i entered password wrong couple of times now account is deactivated ?

[MintCondition]

Is there any chance this fee might be lowered if BTC/USD exchange rates were to improve or if pool volume were to go up?

Hi Wndrbr3d,
Those circumstances would indeed lower the BTC-converted costs of running the server. However, server costs are a small part of the fee. Our biggest costs are paying everyone for invalid blocks and stale shares; that way everyone gets back on average 1.9% of their fee. Those costs are in BTC, so they do not depend on BTC/USD exchange rate or pool volume.

Previously your donation calculation stated that anywhere between 1.9-2.2% would keep the lights on, so the 4% 'fee' that is now implemented is obviously above and beyond what you required previously to keep things going.

Running a PPS pool is a risky business. To pay our miners a fixed amount per share, ABCPool takes the risk of (not) finding the actual blocks. The difference between the 2.2% direct costs and the 4% nominal fee is mostly due to the risk premium http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskpremium.asp. You can think of the risk premium as an insurance against bad luck.

Hope this helps,
MC

[Clipse]

Is there any chance this fee might be lowered if BTC/USD exchange rates were to improve or if pool volume were to go up?

Hi Wndrbr3d,
Those circumstances would indeed lower the BTC-converted costs of running the server. However, server costs are a small part of the fee. Our biggest costs are paying everyone for invalid blocks and stale shares; that way everyone gets back on average 1.9% of their fee. Those costs are in BTC, so they do not depend on BTC/USD exchange rate or pool volume.

Previously your donation calculation stated that anywhere between 1.9-2.2% would keep the lights on, so the 4% 'fee' that is now implemented is obviously above and beyond what you required previously to keep things going.

Running a PPS pool is a risky business. To pay our miners a fixed amount per share, ABCPool takes the risk of (not) finding the actual blocks. The difference between the 2.2% direct costs and the 4% nominal fee is mostly due to the risk premium http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/riskpremium.asp. You can think of the risk premium as an insurance against bad luck.

Hope this helps,
MC

Erm how about answering my question please id like to actually access my account again.

[MintCondition]

How can I reset my password since it seems i entered password wrong couple of times now account is deactivated ?

Hi Clipse,
Please PM your ABCPool username to Chlorine and he will re-activate your account ASAP. Thanks for your patience, MC

[siggy]

a question on the history..

Looking at the hashrate history chart, it appears Jan 2 is a little wonky (at least for me) ..   my MH/s is consistant accross Jan 1,2,3 but the BTC takes a noticable dip on the 2nd..  Any idea whats up with that?

Thanks,
Sigg

[Clipse]

How can I reset my password since it seems i entered password wrong couple of times now account is deactivated ?

Hi Clipse,
Please PM your ABCPool username to Chlorine and he will re-activate your account ASAP. Thanks for your patience, MC

I have messaged him many hours ago, no response.

[jamesg]

How can I reset my password since it seems i entered password wrong couple of times now account is deactivated ?

Hi Clipse,
Please PM your ABCPool username to Chlorine and he will re-activate your account ASAP. Thanks for your patience, MC

I have messaged him many hours ago, no response.

Interesting. New 4% fee and less responsive.

[Chlorine]

How can I reset my password since it seems i entered password wrong couple of times now account is deactivated ?

Hi Clipse,
Please PM your ABCPool username to Chlorine and he will re-activate your account ASAP. Thanks for your patience, MC

I have messaged him many hours ago, no response.

Interesting. New 4% fee and less responsive.

Hi Clipse,

First our apologies for the slower response than what you could expect from us. Due to some new year obligations we were not able to respond any sooner. I have sent you a PM; everything should be ok again now. Thank you for mining with ABCPool.co.

Regards,
Chlorine

[MintCondition]

a question on the history..

Looking at the hashrate history chart, it appears Jan 2 is a little wonky (at least for me) ..   my MH/s is consistant accross Jan 1,2,3 but the BTC takes a noticable dip on the 2nd..  Any idea whats up with that?

Thanks,
Sigg

Nice catch! after the glitch during the transition that day we corrected the balances, but not the stats. I've just rerun the stats calculation for that period of time, it should look better now.
MC

[getsbe]

I get a notice saying "Account has been deactivated. (due to repeated login failure or abuse).
What can I do to restore access to my account?
Thanks in advice!