I'm probably going to switch to pplns. I was thinking about making n= 1/2 of the difficulty, or is that the high for n.
I didn't post anything in this thread so far, because I thought the OP here was pretty forthcoming and I didn't want to give you a hard time. But... Seriously? You start one pool with proportional. Everyone tells you that's wrong. You switch to PPLNS. You start another pool with proportional. Everyone tells you that's wrong. You say you've learned from your mistakes from the first pool and stand behind your decision for proportional. And now you switch to PPLNS again? WTF?
PPS, PPLNS, SMPPS = guaranteed hop proof AND doesn't punish miners who disconnect.
SMPPS is not hopping-proof, and it has very serious problems regardless of whether one calls it hopping-proof or not.
I'm obviously of the DGM persuasion and I know very little beyond the basics of PPLNS. I know Meni has done the math behind it and supports it as a valid, non-hoppable variety of payout schemes. As such, I trust his judgement in those matters far beyond my own.
PPLNS is probably a lot easier to implement than DGM I would imagine.
I should point out that that PPLNS has several variants, the naive variant which is what people usually refer to is approximately hopping-proof, but not completely. The hopping-proof variant I stand behind is what I call unit-PPLNS, which I think might be nontrivial to implement. Another good variant is shift-PPLNS, which can be made hopping-proof without too much trouble, and is suitable for a parallel architecture. But even the naive variant is much, much better than proportional.
Right, so it would be fine for DGM to use a $block_reward = 40 instead of 50...
But now that I think about it, even if you changed the block reward it wouldn't matter. The score is independent of the block reward, it just divides up whatever you feed it as the reward appropriately, according to contribution.
I don't know how it's currently implemented in EMC but the accurate implementation is to use the block reward when calculating the score to award a worker for a submitted share.
You can set block reward to 40 and hand out the rest in some other way. It's possible to change the jackpot value but you need to sum it up correctly.
Actually, I would prefer Prop. If it were not for the hopping thing, you have that little gambling itch covered where finding blocks quick, pays better.... I would probably only do that if I had 5GH+ at present dif though.
Hopping-proof methods like DGM and PPLNS depend on the pool's luck, so you can have your gambling cravings satisfied. And, the choice between PPLNS and PPS has nothing at all to do with your own hashrate - variance in PPLNS depends on the pool's hashrate, not your own.
Attempts to patch proportional by penalizing disconnections
do not work. They do very little against hoppers, and can punish honest miners.