Braiins pool now supports Lightning payouts

[Kruw]

Braiins pool (formerly known as Slush Pool) now offers the ability to collect your mining rewards using the Lightning Network: https://twitter.com/BraiinsMining/status/1780975851737072085

Now miners can just collect fees from others without having to pay any themselves 

[DaveF]

They have had it for a couple of months now.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/braiins-becomes-first-mining-pool-to-introduce-lightning-payouts

They are also the default pool for this small space heater / miner: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5480799.0
So they probably wanted to add the LN payout option so people with those miners could actually pull out their $0.20 a day

-Dave

[Kruw]

They have had it for a couple of months now.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/braiins-becomes-first-mining-pool-to-introduce-lightning-payouts

Yes, but it was invite-only: https://twitter.com/BraiinsMining/status/1760320060575408533

Now it's a standard feature.

*Also that article from Bitcoin Magazine is way off. Braiins wasn't first, NiceHash has supported Lightning withdrawals for years - https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/how-to-use-bitcoin-lightning-network

They are also the default pool for this small space heater / miner: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5480799.0
So they probably wanted to add the LN payout option so people with those miners could actually pull out their $0.20 a day

-Dave

Neat device, thanks for sharing.

[mikeywith]

*Also that article from Bitcoin Magazine is way off. Braiins wasn't first, NiceHash has supported Lightning withdrawals for years - https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/how-to-use-bitcoin-lightning-network

It's not "way off" Nicehash isn't a mining pool, so if there is no other mining pool that did this, then the statement in the article is correct.

Anyway, good to see Braiins Pool making some moves here and there, although, sadly, as things look, I don't see how this pool will continue operation, looking at this last 6 months' status, I only found 1.5% of all blocks, this puts them in a very difficult spot, things took a very bad turn at one point when there were accused of mixing a dozen blocks to some code related issues, which up to this point -- they have not admitted although many people believe that the odds of them having that terrible luck stream for 200 blocks or so was too low.

I really hope they recover and start attracting large miners again.

[DaveF]

...
Anyway, good to see Braiins Pool making some moves here and there, although, sadly, as things look, I don't see how this pool will continue operation, looking at this last 6 months' status, I only found 1.5% of all blocks, this puts them in a very difficult spot, things took a very bad turn at one point when there were accused of mixing a dozen blocks to some code related issues, which up to this point -- they have not admitted although many people believe that the odds of them having that terrible luck stream for 200 blocks or so was too low.

I really hope they recover and start attracting large miners again.

Large miners are both good and bad.
They will make you more BTC because they are generating more blocks so your % that you take off the top is a larger number.

BUT you need more support staff because although large professional miners are largely self sufficient, if there is an issue they don't want to wait for an answer.
And loosing one, even if it's no fault of yours still hurts more then loosing 2 dozen smaller hobby miners.
Not to mention your back end servers have to be more powerful since they are handling that many more shares and that much more bandwidth.

-Dave

[mikeywith]

I can't really tell whether large miners are good or bad for a mining pool, but I believe, they are essential for the well-being of any mining pool, as you already know, all manufacturers are focused on large miners, and all these small home miners floating out there don't make up a small fraction of the network hash rate, it's a sad fact I know -- but it's what it is.

Also, I don't believe large miners would require you to have a better infrastructure, in fact, I think the opposite is correct, common sense is that large miners who have thousands of miners would be using proxies, I think the resources required to deal with 5 average miners whom each uses 5 miners is a lot greater than dealing with 5 large miners each using 5000 miners, same goes for support and the other technical stuff.

[DaveF]

I can't really tell whether large miners are good or bad for a mining pool, but I believe, they are essential for the well-being of any mining pool, as you already know, all manufacturers are focused on large miners, and all these small home miners floating out there don't make up a small fraction of the network hash rate, it's a sad fact I know -- but it's what it is.

Also, I don't believe large miners would require you to have a better infrastructure, in fact, I think the opposite is correct, common sense is that large miners who have thousands of miners would be using proxies, I think the resources required to deal with 5 average miners whom each uses 5 miners is a lot greater than dealing with 5 large miners each using 5000 miners, same goes for support and the other technical stuff.

No matter how the data gets to the pool through the stratum servers direct or proxy the back end still has to take a look at every share. The more shares the more work.

Beyond that I am making the (possibly incorrect) assumption that when you show up at pool 'X' with your 1 EH/s of mining power you are going to be able to get a better % rate then the DaveF & mikeywith mining company can get even if we show up 50 PH/s

But, in the end unless the pools or large miners tell us we will never know.

The other thing that we will never know unless they tell us is, how much (if any) of that small percentage of 'unknown' pools that mine blocks is really just a pool being run by a mining pool for a private customer. So Braiins (or any other pool) can actually have a few more blocks then we can account for.

-Dave

[mikeywith]

No matter how the data gets to the pool through the stratum servers direct or proxy the back end still has to take a look at every share. The more shares the more work.

There are no more shares from large miners, the pool adjusts share difficulty to maintain a fixed number of shares per time unit, 10000 miners under a proxy would submit the exact same number of shares as a single usb miner would.

True for the rates, large miners pay less for fees, because they are, well "large".

I also just got to know that some custom firmware guys started their own pool using the "fees" they collect from miners, and they do find blocks on regular bases, isn't that crazy?