FPPS or PPS Pool with instant same day payout (Recommendation)

[kano]

I guess the nay-sayers didn't read what I said

When a pplns pool (other than antpool) that finds multiple blocks each diff change ...

I wasn't referring to my pool size.

Also, none of the pools that pay the modified PPS methods keep the same reward level when fees go down ...
That's called running at a loss, which the PPS/*PPS* pools avoid by making sure they get a high enough % of the pool's total,
which is the point of my comment to start with, the PPLNS pools can set a smaller fee for that reason.

Mandatory reading about the statistics of payout for those who haven't read it:
https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf

[mikeywith]

However, once the pool gets small enough that it's not hitting at least one block per diff change then it becomes very hard to stay the distance...

Or you could mine for a few months and then the pool operator modifies the N value for payment and you lose all the work you did, or a small PPLNS pool decides to shut down before hitting a block when the last block it found was a while ago, or you mine for 5 months and on a given random day your internet connection goes down for 3 days and so happen that is the time the pool hits a block, i could spam the thread of reasons why mining on small pplns is rather risky, unless you do this for a hobby, nothing except for either very large PPLNS pools or a PPS pool makes any sense, that is the reason why large pools are getting bigger.

The problem with anything that has to do with money is the fact that monopoly and centralization will always find it is way to it, a rich co-operations like Binance can afford payment in PPS+ for free for 0% for a whole month, given the hashrate of that pool, the capital invested is HUGE, and then they will settle with 2.5% fees on FPPS IIRC, so 1.5% more compared to small PPLNS pools is not worth the risk to most miners, and it will only get worse for small pools with a small capital, that is sad but true.

[Biffa]

The answer is rather simple, throw hash at small PPLNS pools so they aren't small any more. Oh and don't fragment the PPLNS scene even more by creating another small pool.

The last reason of mining for 5 months and losing out because of your network outage caused you to ramp down is true of massive PPLNS pools more so than small ones. The ramp time on a big pool for pplns can be in the matter of hours. The bigger the pool is the smaller the ramp, even 5ND was small when difficulty was much less in the past. I can remember kano pool having a ramp time of 36 hours in the good ole days.

[DaveF]

I remember when some pools shut down gracefully here over the years, giving weeks / months of warning and people were still pointing their miners to the pool to the last second when the operators were saying you are not going to get paid, go elsewhere. Yet people kept them there. I have been guilty of pointing my stuff a pool as backup that was offline for months so I never checked. And so on. So yeah, the smaller pools are costing people money who are not on top of things or have other issues. The smaller pools are more vulnerable to big players messing with them. Smaller pools tend to fly under the radar if they are doing something funky. etc.

Somewhat rambling thing, I posted something similar a while ago but...

I actually touched on something similar a while ago, on how a government / cabal of banks / really rich person could do it to slow down / destroy bitcoin growth. Back of the napkin numbers 2016 blocks every 2 weeks / 4032 a month. Let's use 1.25BTC in fees per block since that gives 7.5BTC total per block.

7.5 * $10000 (figure a higher price) gives us $75000 multiply that by 4032 blocks gives a bit over $300,000,000 but once again. Sticking with round numbers. Take $300,0000,000 and multiply it by 1.15 and you are at less then $350,000,000 but lets run with that number.

$2 billion USD I can run a mining pool that does FPSS at 15% above (the 1.15 multiplier) and never finds a block for 6 months.

How many small pools can I put under with that? How many larger ones would be crying in pain?

In the process I could destroy every other SHA256 coin with the mining power that would be pointed to that pool. Transactions will slow to a crawl for weeks waiting for difficulty re-adjust down while everyone points to my "pool".

Towards the end I do point the hashrate towards BTC. Then after 2 or 3 difficulty re adjustments back up I turn it off and walk away. How many people throw their hands up and walk away at that point.

Allowing for staff and overhead since this is a "professional" thing lets add on another $200 million. Since I would have to buy a lot of BTC at "retail" lets add on another $200 million and lets just add on another $100 million for the price of BTC going above $10k and staying there.

In this admitted fantasy world I have spent $2.5 billion (if I never sold any of the alts I mined, actually got 90% of the worlds hashrate and a few other things) and done the following:

1) Killed just about every small pool
2) Hurt a lot of bigger pools
3) Decimated all SHA256 coins
4) Slowed down BTC for a long time

However, if I was actually a "bigger" pool myself I could have been playing this game to fuck with the competition. Now that BTC is on the way to recovery how many people  will mine at my 5% fee pool because I stuck with them as the big evil pool that did all this was playing there games.

Sorry if it's a long rambling post. Just felt it should be said again.

-Dave

[mikeywith]

The answer is rather simple, throw hash at small PPLNS pools so they aren't small any more. Oh and don't fragment the PPLNS scene even more by creating another small pool.

Easy to say, impossible to do, if someone has large enough hash power they rather solo mine, someone who has a mid sized or small hash rare won't take the risk, there is almost 0 incentives for miners to support small pools, they want to make $$ with as low risk as possible and everything else means nothing to the majority of them.

... your network outage caused you to ramp down is true of massive PPLNS pools more so than small ones.

Wrong, you mine to kano.is i mine to antpool ( will never do  ), my connection goes down for 3 days i lose 3 days of mining, your connection goes down around the time kano hits a block you lose all the pow submitted prior to that (could be a month, 3 months or anything).

You commented on the guy who lost a few hundred dollars on kano pool, if he was mining on a large pplns pool his loss would have been very low, large PPLNS pools are close to as safe as pps pools given the small ramp time whereby you don't risk months of pow.

[kano]

...
Smaller pools tend to fly under the radar if they are doing something funky. etc.
...

I'd say that's just a guess?

... I can give very clear examples of exactly the opposite, that has happened.

During Nov-2017 my pool found two very high difficulty blocks in a run of 5 blocks, the two 875% and 928% - total for the 5 was 1936% yikes.
There was a factor of having around 50% of the pool hash rate coming from rental at the time.

To analyse this problem, I contacted a few of the largest miners on the pool (that represented a very large % of the pool hash rate), got them to check all their block find records in the systems they ran (and also in their miners) to make sure it matched the blocks they found on the pool, I wrote a second independent, accurate, binary block hash check from scratch and added it to my KDB code, then reran 3 months worth of the pool shares (I log all of them) through the code on another server, overlapping the time of the 'issue' to see if the front end pool code had somehow missed one or more blocks.

The result was: no it wasn't a problem from the pool's non-binary block hashing - being the last straw on the subject for me, I banned rental mining ever since.

Jul 2018, slush, who was much bigger, had a run of five blocks with a total worse value ... 2109% ...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg41534985#msg41534985
Their response was effectively to ignore it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg41900729#msg41900729

Many of the following posts are about the 400PH miner who should have averaged about 2 blocks a day and the pool stats showed none by him, 8 days after the above bad run.
Their reply was that the stats are "For Fun"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg43143004#msg43143004

[DaveF]

How about: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=441465.msg52190610#msg52190610.

I did not necessarily mean funky as bad / stealing in and of itself but also along the lines of funky as something is wrong and the 4 people left mining there never noticed. Bravo Mining had the had the same thing when they shutdown but kept their stratum ports open. Stopped communicating here, website down and for a week before the stratum ports that were still spitting out and accepting work on an old block stopped responding.

And that's great that you "found and blocked" cheating miners And that you block rental sites. It's your pool do as you wish. There have been many people who have found blocks using NiceHash and MRR (myself included) not going to debate what you want to do.

-Dave

[kano]

...
And that's great that you "found and blocked" cheating miners And that you block rental sites. It's your pool do as you wish. There have been many people who have found blocks using NiceHash and MRR (myself included) not going to debate what you want to do.

-Dave

Alas, there are clear financial risk issues with rental.
It is to the rental miner owner's advantage, and the rental site, to withhold blocks, not all blocks, just some, making it hard or impossible to detect.
(lesser diff changes means being paid more)

The forum is full of altcoins scams, yet a large % of the forum have no qualms getting involved with them thinking only about (dubious) financial advantage.
Clearly it is no stretch of the imagination that people would withhold blocks to their financial advantage also

Thread on the subject:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1002086.0

[DaveF]

What seems to be easy to guess is that PPLNS pool with small hashrate that finds a block once in a blue moon will be the less profitable compared to large PPLNS pools (pool fees ignored), since the fees reward spikes only last for a few days or weeks at best, those small pools's chances of hitting a block during that short period of time are slim, while large pools will most certainly manage to hit a few blocks with handsome fee rewards.

But...the reverse is also true. For whatever reason the small PPLNS pool has only been hitting 1 block a month but due to luck it's only on some of the biggest fee days. At the 6.25 point per block fees are now a lot more important. Even an hour or two apart can cost you 10%.

Block 632,485 had 1.198BTC in fees mined 14:50:58 UTC (Today)
Block 632,491 had 0.396BTC in fees mined 16:21:25 UTC

Ouch.....if you were on a long PPLNS round and found 632,491 instead of 485. But......WooHoo extra beer if you found 485 instead of 491. And....whatever if you are on a large PPS+ pool.....


And bitminter.com a very small PPLNS pool is shutting down. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788753.0

Unless they find a block in the next 30 days how much BTC did people loose mining there instead of a nice PPS pool or a larger PPLNS pool over the last 10 months? Even if they find a block all that work that was done before the 1/2ing is getting paid with a 6.25 block. These are the losses that the people who scream only mine in PPLNS pools or only mine on low fee pools fail to see or account for.

Stay safe.

-Dave

[minefarmbuy]

As sustainable business model would help operators. PPS is detrimental to the network imo effectively leasing your hashrate to a pool to do as they wish with it in most cases. For PPLNS to work you need to provide an environment that supports consistency in payout and have a long decay so work isn't lost. Planning for all possible variables actually strengthens PPLNS compared to PPS in reward an with consistency. Obviously you can dismiss me as biased with our SPLNS "+" score on Laurentia Pool. 

[kano]

Well considering I know ViaBTC pays kickbacks, which are illegal is most jurisdictions, it may not be the best pool to mine at

I know this to be true since: someone managing a mining operation that was mining at ViaBTC considered coming to my pool, but only if I paid them kickbacks like they claimed ViaBTC did.
Alas I rejected them and they stayed at ViaBTC