OK, We've got 77 / 100 responses in on the survey (free account on survey monkey only allows 100 responses), but I figure thats a pretty good indicator.
For results we've got (summarizing):
First 48hrs: full proxy - 57%, half proxy - 27%, zero proxy - 7%, with most of the rest split between 25/75%.
After 48hrs: full proxy - 65%, 3/4 proxy - 13%, half proxy - 7%, rest pretty evenly split among others.
The most common comment was "Is Ghash legit?" (paraphrased). Obviously I can't vouch for them, and they could always perform a runner (or withold the earnings, etc). That said, I've used them in the past with bitcoin miners, they've been around for quite a while (9-12mo) and have a _large_ amount of hardware in a mining farm for bitcoin. As far as legitimacy goes, they've got millions invested in bitcoin hardware, and it seems extremely unlikely that they would try to screw us over.
Here's what I think we'll do for now (will take me a bit here to get it rolling):
I'll start with proxying about 50-75% of the pool for the first 48hrs. It seems like a safe medium for now. If everything looks to be going fine, might up it to 75% as we get closer to the 48hr limit. It will also let us keep mining a bit on our own (actually still find doge/ltc blocks) so profits won't drop to 0 during that time.
I'll setup on each endpoint a specific port for those that want to choose (one port for 0% proxy, one port for 100% proxy), the default port split based on our proxying %.
As for earnings, luckily I have about 48 hours to figure out exactly how to handle it. The first thing that comes to mind is to start the clock when we started proxying (about an hour or so ago), and when we get earnings transferred out of GHash, I'll run one big script that pays out everyone proportionally between the start of the clock, and when the payment runs. Its not a true PPLNS, but PPLNS is going to be _way_ too heavy when its over 48 hours. Essentially if there are 1 million shares (example) submitted between when we started proxying and when we have a payout, and you mined 100 of them, you'd be paid 100/1000000 (100 / 1mil) worth of the payment from GHash.
how bad the rejected rate will be with proxy?
From the last 1hr of testing, we're averaging around 10% rejects (so still a huge gain for profits), with bursts at 15-20% right after block finds, and 6%ish when on a long block. This could have something to do with proxying location (we're proxying from EU), and when I get it up on the other servers, I'll have more data.
For the payout (mentioned above), we'll do something to compensate the proxying reject increase (people on the regular pool would be getting lower rejects, people on the proxy higher rejects), we'll likely normalize them for the payout. Again, I luckily get 48hrs to write this script
