However, for me to use what little influence I have right now can someone maybe give me an higher level overview of how a ckpool works vs say a larger pool like antpool. I read the thread on ckpool last night and it was a bit over my head. I am trying to learn more of the of the inter workings.
Welcome.
The ckpool thread itself is about the software behind how kano.is and solo.ckpool.org work and not something regular miners are expected to understand.
There really is nothing different fundamentally about how antpool and kano.is work, as ultimately they're both PPLNS stratum mining pools for bitcoin.
The main difference is that we wrote the software we use ourselves from the ground up to be ultra-scalable and efficient to minimise any chance of lost work and orphan blocks. Because of the design of the software, we're also able to include more transactions than any other pool without it affecting our performance - and that means more transaction fees on average for every block solved, and transaction fees are included in miner's rewards. Additionally, unlike every one of the larger 3 pools, we do not do SPV mining meaning we always validate all blocks before working on new blocks - which mean there is zero chance of us working on a broken fork of the blockchain (which the larger pools were guilty of doing last year). Whatever fees that may seem to be lesser on other pools, and whatever alleged extra rewards they get from merged mining shitcoins are greatly offset by the losses incurred by the software design/set up/policy/maintenance of the rest of the pool design.
Payouts here come when blocks mature (101 confirmations) and the entire block reward is completely distributed on each block solve meaning the pool never behaves like a "bank", storing miners' bitcoins - and the associated risk that come with behaving like a bank are abolished. In the future we may be doing payouts once a day to consolidate payouts but that will only happen if we become large enough that blocks are more frequent than they currently are. We also guarantee that should we ever get very large, we will create disincentives to take more miners to prevent our size from ever being a risk to bitcoin's decentralisation - 10% is our cut off. Kano also provides personalised support on this forum instead of no support or facebook messages. Kano being the main pool admin means you have someone who sets alarms to literally wake him up 24/7 should there be any issues to work on them as soon as possible. Finally, Kano and I are the software developers responsible for cgminer which in some form or other powers more than 90% of the network, and we continue to develop mining and pool software and contribute it all back to the community.
Thank you for taking the time to explain this to me. I have been watching this pool for a about month and seen it double in size. In fact it was a couple of my viewers that recommended that I move over this direction. I am pretty impressed with the overwhelming response that I received from everyone. Being on YouTube I get a lot of questions of where I mine, how to I get set up, etc, etc, so I will take some time over the next little while and come up with some bullet points to why this is better than one of the larger pools and why I decided to change directions. To those of you who identified as viewers of mine, keep me honest here and tell me from your simplistic user perspective (or complex) why you guys chose this pool over others. Like I mentioned earlier I want to put it out there to try and get some more hashing power pointed this direction just as long as there are no objections by the pool owners.
At any rate, thanks again!
You may find this earlier post helpful ( from kano):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.msg13658516#msg13658516Well if they are mining PPS elsewhere, then the simple answer is that indeed, on PPLNS it's expected results vs PPS fixed results.
With PPS, yes they would have a fixed result but that would, of course, be lower than the expected result here.
If, however, you are comparing PPLNS to PPLNS, then the pool size here now is large enough that the variance should be negligible for anyone except on rare occasions for someone who has to pay their electricity bill more than once a week.
(Edit: just to put that into perspective: the pretty bad luck we had in 'red october' of around 50% luck for 12 blocks over 31 days, would now equate to about 5-6 days of 50% luck, due to the increase in the size of the pool. As the pool grows, that 5-6 number will continue to decrease)
The advantage here is that the expected results are high due to:
1) Pool fee is only 0.9%
2) Reward includes all txn fees, and over the last 100 blocks that has more than covered the pool fee (101% txn fee average)
3) Pool orphans/lost blocks are, currently, 2 out of 463 or 0.43%, and considering our block change times, it seems the actual expected % could even still be lower
Using those 3 numbers you get an expected reward of 101.0% * 99.1% * 99.57% = 99.66%
(completely ignoring block finding luck)
Of course block finding luck is just that, luck, and past luck has no effected on future luck,
however, the fact that we have had, long term, greater than 100% luck means the rather important point, that the pool itself is not at fault causing negative luck
What do I mean by this? Well simply that if we had a year of bad luck (e.g. low 90's%) , it's gonna be pretty hard to explain that with statistics even with a pool the size we've had over the past year (let alone with a larger pool); instead, such long term bad luck would really suggest that there is something wrong with the pool.
However, that hasn't been the case. Not only have we been well above the low 90's% and thus well within acceptable results for luck, we've been above 100%, suggesting quite clearly that there's nothing in the way the pool works holding back luck.
Yes we've had periods of good and bad luck, and as stated before, the effect on rewards of the bad (and good) luck has been reduced by the pool's growth, but even as we have grown, we've seen no problems with luck changing over the month or 2, it's just continued to be random as before, and fortunately, better than expected.
EDIT: To understand the 5ND, I found this post, from ZACHIM, helpful:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789369.msg13198117#msg13198117I am seeing a lot of new users here asking/talking about the 5 times Network Difficulty.
I am going to try to explain and simplify it:
Let us pretend that the current difficulty is 1000.
Then that means we should expect that 1 in every 1000 shares submitted would solve a block.
If we solve a block on the 1000 share, then we would have solved it at 100%
With a PPLNS structured payout each block found gets payed out based on the LNS (Last N Shares) in this case the N = 5. So in our example the LNS = 5 x 1000 = 5000 shares.
If you just started with the pool and we found a block on the 1000th share (100%) and you had submitted 10 shares, you would not receive payout of 10/1000 = 1% of the block because the payout takes into account the LNS, so your payout would be 10/5000 = 0.2%
Now lets say we find another block on the 1000th share and you submitted another 10 shares, again you won't get the 1% but instead you will get 20/5000 = 0.4% so you get paid for the previous shares submitted as well.
Now lets get wild and say we just found our 5th block on the 1000th share (5 in a row at 100%) and you submitted 10 shares each block, your total would be 50 and total shares would be 5000 so 50/5000 = 1% now you have reach the full "ramp up" and are getting full payout.
This is what ends up working out great if we find blocks more often than 100%, you have the potential of getting your shares paid more times.
Example continued: Lets say you have been mining with us for a long time (your fully "ramped up") and we find 4 blocks at 100% and 2 at 50%, that gives us the total 5Nd of 5000 shares, but we found 6 blocks. You have submitted your usually 50 shares during that time so you are at 50/5000 = 1%, but now so now you are getting 1% of 6 blocks instead of 1% of 5, but you have not submitted any more shares.
This is what we are talking about with the 5Nd, you won't be getting full payout until you have been mining here for the duration of the 5Nd. You will still get paid for all shares submitted and those shares are not getting paid any less, and if the pool is lucky you get paid more.
I know a lot of us like to mention this because people tend to join CKPool then they see their first payout and think "Wow this pool pays awful, I'm leaving", but then when they leave they should still see payments coming in and in the end they probably got just as much as they would have somewhere else, and if the pool was on a luck streak even more.
Hopefully that helps, anyone please feel free to correct me on anything or fill in with something I missed.
I think this may have been my longest post ever.
edit: I just looked at the "Shifts" page on Kano.is and we are currently sitting at getting paid 8 times for some shares!
