KanoPool since 2014 🐈 - PPLNS and Solo 0.5% fee - Worldwide - 2436 blocks

[wmabern]

Block!

Kano, you beat me to it by 7 seconds!

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[kano]

Block!

Kano, you beat me to it by 7 seconds!

Well I just went to bed and got the 'magic bells' as I lay down so took me a bit to get up and turn on my screens

[clgrissom3]

Block! by btsgold
2.2BTC txn fees
Prolly an S7

Sweet!  Waking up to another 2 block day!

[CakeBatterTornado]

Well the pool is PPLNS, like the majority of non-PPS pools, so I guess then the problem might be that people don't understand PPLNS, even including the description I give on the web site

I'll give another version and then feel free to tell me what doesn't make sense.

Every time we find a block, we pay the shares for a certain amount up to when the block was found.
That's the 'N' in PPLNS

Bitcoin has a difficulty for finding blocks called the Network Difficulty (I abbreviated it as Nd)

It's currently ~461 Billion
5Nd = 5 times Nd = ~2.3Trillion

Every share you submit to the pool has a difficulty that the pool requires - you see that in your miner and on the web site workers.
Usually around 1,000 to 20,000 - if yours are much lower then you are basically mining for fun so none of this really matters.
That's 'Diff'

So the pool adds up all those shares for the last ~2.3Trillion Diff and pays everyone their ratio of that 2.3Trillion as part of the 12.5+ BTC block.
So if you found 2.3Billion worth of shares, you'd get ~1,000th of the miner reward.

--

Now the following is the same for all pools that don't hide information

When we find a block, the pool has kept track of how much work was done (total valid Diff submitted to the pool) since the last block was found.
It's expected, on average, to be Nd, so if the work done was exactly Nd, then the block Diff% would be 100%
Block finding is random.
So it could be twice as much work as expected, so 200%, or it could be half as much work as expected, so 50% ... or any other %
Luck% is just Diff% upside down (1 / Diff%)

Thanks Kano!

Even this quick description is super helpful.
Personally, a lot of the abbreviations were tripping me up (e.g., 5Nd). So maybe just typing them out on your homepage would help?
The quick math examples were also super helpful to make things concrete and real.
Your explanation here makes it much more clear why there is "ramp up" time for me just plugging in my miner, and with this understanding, a new person may be more willing to stick around.
I know there are tons of resources and wikis, but just a suggestion to take some of what you just typed and include it on the homepage of kano.is to make it easy/clear for people to stick around.

[smutboy420]

Sweet!  Waking up to another 2 block day!

I woke up to see we had a 2 block night.

 so it would be really great if we also have a 2 block day, today. ;-)

[Biodom]

I know there are tons of resources and wikis, but just a suggestion to take some of what you just typed and include it on the homepage of kano.is to make it easy/clear for people to stick around.

"engineers are not good at dealing with customers..."
....typically.

kano needs a hand holding rep...at some point or even better, ask someone to design it into his front page-i am sure that there are tons of freelancers who could do it. With a good front page, this pool can triple (at least) in size.

the following explains it better:
https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=10

[firetreeactual]

I really don't get the need for lots of daily payouts.  A payout ever day, even every few days or so is fine.  Do people really need 10 small payouts a day?  I would rather get 1 large payout a day than 10 small ones.  If nothing else, it makes less work for the accounting. 

Agreed. I do not see any point for it, other than extreme insecurity perhaps. If one does not trust the pool operator to reasonably protect/hold the rewards until adequately verified, one should probably mine elsewhere...methinks. Additionally, it puts the miners' accounting load on Kano, where it doesn't belong...again, methinks.

But then, I've been occasionally told I think too much...methinks. 

[Biffa]

I really don't get the need for lots of daily payouts.  A payout ever day, even every few days or so is fine.  Do people really need 10 small payouts a day?  I would rather get 1 large payout a day than 10 small ones.  If nothing else, it makes less work for the accounting.  

Agreed. I do not see any point for it, other than extreme insecurity perhaps. If one does not trust the pool operator to reasonably protect/hold the rewards until adequately verified, one should probably mine elsewhere...methinks. Additionally, it puts the miners' accounting load on Kano, where it doesn't belong...again, methinks.

But then, I've been occasionally told I think too much...methinks.  

Sorry, but do you have multiple personality disorder today? That first paragraph first agrees with larger payments, then the second part disagrees with larger payments, because larger consolidated payments mean the pool operator running a wallet that holds those payments until they are ready to payout.

So do you agree with one large consolidated payment a day or not? I think for this pool it works fine without, all you need to do is have a mining wallet and a cold, or spending wallet, the mining income goes into the mining wallet, and every week or so you send the coins from your mining wallet into your cold wallet, which consolidates the dust for you. Then when you want to trade or buy something with your coin you do so from the cold/spending wallet and, if you use a reasonable sized transaction fee, that spend will go through alot faster than if you sent it from your mining wallet.

[traxor]

I'll weigh in on this one.

The per block payout is probably my biggest 'dislike' regarding mining here on this pool.

For me -- I don't "spend" the bitcoin often -- and then, when I do, it takes forever for my trezor to compile all of the tiny transactions to make up however many btc I'm trying spend.  If the amount is over 4btc -- it won't even work due to the size.  Also, the transaction fees are horrendous.

Having said that -- I get kano's perspective that he isn't a bank.

Just one of those quirky things I guess about this pool.

As an aside -- I just recently changed my payout address from my trezor to a coinbase wallet -- and I'll aggregate there without the fees.  The thing I don't like about this plan, is that it is coinbase (with their kyc rules).  Does anyone else know of an online wallet that one can aggregate micro transactions -- and then occasionally pull them into cold storage anonymously and fee free?

[vh]

I'd love to see a boost program where once a month you activate it and kano code will prioritize your source address ( payout addr ) tx into the next block  .    Probably near impossible to implement, but way cool.

[ComputerGenie]

...As an aside -- I just recently changed my payout address from my trezor to a coinbase wallet...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F12lpqnug-0

[bitsink]

I think there may be a problem with the pool's time zone, at least for the shift timing. The shift timing states that it is in UTC, but:

The latest shift - 825j5 yuno - just started a couple of minutes ago and it states that it started at Mar‑12 17:08:27 (UTC). The time now is 18:15 UTC. It seems that the Pool is in UTC-1h timezone instead in UTC?

Shifts appear, are created, ~13 minutes after they finish.
The start isn't the unknown factor, it's the finish point that it has to wait until all the workinfo is complete/confirmed then it works out the shift.

Edit: and you can see that the shifts are all OK by the fact they all have a Start and Length, so the start of any following shift will be Start+Length

The Server time doesn't affect the web display at all, it uses UTC for all displayed time since people all over the planet look at it.
Internally, CKDB treats everything as UTC and the code all deals with converting the Postgresql dates to and from UTC.

Each web page, at the bottom right in small letters, shows what your browser thinks is your local time, and at the bottom left, what the server thinks is UTC time.
That also effectively shows any discrepancy between your computer and the actual time, after you subtract the network and processing delay for the page request.

Not that it is very important - the pool obviously functions, but this still seems off: The bottom left time on the webpage (UTC time) is generally 1-2h ahead of the (last shift start time), which if a shift is 50min (lets say 1h to keep it simple), should be only 0-1h ahead.

[traxor]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F12lpqnug-0

I agree with everything he says.  The question I was posing -- is there another solution that I'm not aware of where I can compile and aggregate the micro transaction payouts from kano -- fee free and anonymously.  Not holding the private key for a week at a time earnings is a risk I'm willing to take.

[CakeBatterTornado]

"engineers are not good at dealing with customers..."
....typically.

kano needs a hand holding rep...at some point or even better, ask someone to design it into his front page-i am sure that there are tons of freelancers who could do it. With a good front page, this pool can triple (at least) in size.

I took a stab at adding some more language for the homepage below.
Kano: is this helpful?
If so, does anyone want to collaborate in a Google Doc? Maybe write a good front page, a good FAQ page, and a page explaining how to read the stats pages?
_____

Welcome to KanoPool!

KanoPool is a bitcoin mining pool that uses the PPLNS payout method.

Key Aspects of KanoPool

Transaction fees included in pot – Many pool administrators will keep the transaction fees for themselves, only distributing the 12.5 Bitcoin miner reward. KanoPool distributes both the 12.5 Bitcoin miner reward, as well as the transaction fees collected during that block which are ~2 Bitcoins in general. In our opinion, it is better to split ~14.5 Bitcoins per block, rather than 12.5…

PPLNS – KanoPool is Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS). This results in lumpier / less frequent payments, however, in theory, PPLNS will also yield greater payouts in the long run (a month or more).
•   In Pay Per Share (PPS), the mining pool will pay each miner a standard payout based upon the number of shares completed. The mining pool is taking on the risk of luck, and takes a premium for bearing this risk/luck.
•   In Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) the miner is taking on the luck. Sometimes the pool will find blocks quickly, and sometimes the pool will find blocks slowly. In the long run, the math will even out, but compared to PPS, the miner is better off in PPLNS as they are not paying the pool for the convenience of standardly paced payouts.

N = 5 times the Network Difficulty  – A key part of PPLNS is what exactly the N value is. In KanoPool, N = 5 times the Network Difficulty when the block was found.

Bitcoin has a difficulty for finding blocks called the Network Difficulty. For an example, let’s assume the network difficulty is 500 Billion. Thus, the N, for KanoPool’s PPLNS is 2.5 Trillion (5 times 500 Billion)

For payout calculations in our example, the pool adds up all the shares you contributed for the past 2.5 Trillion Network Difficulty. If you contributed 2.5 Billion Shares, you’d get ~1,000th of the miner reward.

[The relationship between Network Difficulty and Shares isn’t very clear to me…]

This methodology reduces variance. Your rewards will be lower than normal for the first 5x Network Difficulty (~4 days) that you are mining. Once you have mined for a full 5x Network Difficulty, you will receive your full payouts. Also, if you ever leave the pool, your payouts will continue for a slight while after you have left due to the above

Pool fee – KanoPool charges an extremely competitive 0.9% of reward for participation in the pool.

Payments – Blocks must be confirmed 101 times before being paid out (will be flagged as ‘Matured’ on the Blocks page).

The payout uses a zero fee transaction to ensure you get maximum Bitcoin, and so will be sent out the next time KanoPool mines a block after reaching 101 confirmations.


Joining KanoPool

The pool doesn't require registration for basic use but includes indepth stats for registered miners.
See below for more information on miner configuration.
You can get pool support on FreeNode IRC: irc.freenode.net channel #kano.is
or on the Bitcoin talk forum here: BitcoinTalk

Our kano.is mining servers, web site and email, are all also available at kano.space
It's a 'backup domain' in case you ever have any problems using the kano.is domain

Mining configuration:
Click on the Login/Register link to register a username to mine with,
or mine directly to the pool without registering, using a bitcoin payment address as your username.
No password is required, so just use X for your password in your miner.

e.g. if your miner has a web page, you would fill it in similar to this with your username instead of Kano:
Pool 1:   stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:3333
Pool1 worker:   Kano.worker
Pool1 password:   x

If you have network issues using port 3333, you can also try:
stratum+tcp://stratum80.kano.is:80

You can also try any of:
stratum+tcp://stratum81.kano.is:81
stratum+tcp://stratum443.kano.is:443
stratum+tcp://stratum8080.kano.is:8080

Your worker name can be whatever you choose and will be created when your miner connects to the pool.
Registered username or Bitcoin address, followed by a dot '.' or an underscore '_', followed by a worker name.
If you supply an invalid Bitcoin address, you will be unable to authenticate and mine on the pool.

If you have an Asicminer Tube, you will need to mine to:
stratum+tcp://nonce.kano.is:27181
It won't work properly on any other mining port. Don't point normal miners here.
Your Tube miner stats will show up in your account without their worker name.

If you mine only with a bitcoin address you can view user and worker stats:
e.g.
http://www.kano.is/address.php?a=1KanoiBupPiZfkwqB7rfLXAzPnoTshAVmb
http://www.kano.is/worker.php?a=1KanoiBupPiZfkwqB7rfLXAzPnoTshAVmb_worker

Pool settings
The pool is configured to start you mining at 2052 difficulty.
The pool adjusts the per instance difficulty to maintain a share rate of approximately 18 shares per minute.
However, there is a lower limit set on the difficulty of 242.

[bitsink]

Thanks Kano!

Even this quick description is super helpful.
Personally, a lot of the abbreviations were tripping me up (e.g., 5Nd). So maybe just typing them out on your homepage would help?
The quick math examples were also super helpful to make things concrete and real.
Your explanation here makes it much more clear why there is "ramp up" time for me just plugging in my miner, and with this understanding, a new person may be more willing to stick around.
I know there are tons of resources and wikis, but just a suggestion to take some of what you just typed and include it on the homepage of kano.is to make it easy/clear for people to stick around.

Agreed. The whole thing also kind of threw me off and I ended up posting some (in retrospect) unnecessary posts on the forum. Now I think it is a nice pool. Though I wonder about its longterm viability without any new hashrate coming online. The title suggests 25Ph/s in 2014, which seems to have not changed much at all (we are now at 26Ph/s), with very much different difficulty and thus hugely diminishing returns. Yes, that is still currently over USD 4000/month in income (the 0.9%), but baring in mind the costs of IT infrastructure and admin time, the pools needs to grow in hashrate in order to keep its relative size. Eligius used to be a nice pool which has gone into oblivion (though i still wonder about his business model running a free pool).

I was also thinking about the the 5Nd thing, whether this really is just a statistical smoothing function (moving average) or wether it gives "old" miners a 5Nd (currently about 100h, but possibly not constant()) lead over new miners due to network difficulty changes every 14 days? Are new miners disadvantaged by this in that when their hashes are paid out the 5th time they are worth less (if a diff change has since occurred)? Maybe this has been considered before, but some explanation would be nice.

[bitsink]

I'll weigh in on this one.

The per block payout is probably my biggest 'dislike' regarding mining here on this pool.

For me -- I don't "spend" the bitcoin often -- and then, when I do, it takes forever for my trezor to compile all of the tiny transactions to make up however many btc I'm trying spend.  If the amount is over 4btc -- it won't even work due to the size.  Also, the transaction fees are horrendous.

Having said that -- I get kano's perspective that he isn't a bank.

Just one of those quirky things I guess about this pool.

As an aside -- I just recently changed my payout address from my trezor to a coinbase wallet -- and I'll aggregate there without the fees.  The thing I don't like about this plan, is that it is coinbase (with their kyc rules).  Does anyone else know of an online wallet that one can aggregate micro transactions -- and then occasionally pull them into cold storage anonymously and fee free?

I concur. It is a little more than an eyesore, to have all these small transactions in a wallet. Eligius had a feature where a threshold could be set. I am yet to see how this pans out for me. The 5Nd thing does give the bank burden to the pool for a period of time anyway. It would be only a small step to have the user accumulate more than that.

[tournamentdan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F12lpqnug-0

I agree with everything he says.  The question I was posing -- is there another solution that I'm not aware of where I can compile and aggregate the micro transaction payouts from kano -- fee free and anonymously.  Not holding the private key for a week at a time earnings is a risk I'm willing to take.

Use both. You are going to need to sell some bitcoin to pay for expenses. So mine directly to coinbase. After all your expenses are paid. Move what you want to save once a month to the trezor.

[beltsniffer]

Agreed. The whole thing also kind of threw me off and I ended up posting some (in retrospect) unnecessary posts on the forum. Now I think it is a nice pool. Though I wonder about its longterm viability without any new hashrate coming online. The title suggests 25Ph/s in 2014, which seems to have not changed much at all (we are now at 26Ph/s), with very much different difficulty and thus hugely diminishing returns. Yes, that is still currently over USD 4000/month in income (the 0.9%), but baring in mind the costs of IT infrastructure and admin time, the pools needs to grow in hashrate in order to keep its relative size. Eligius used to be a nice pool which has gone into oblivion (though i still wonder about his business model running a free pool).

I was also thinking about the the 5Nd thing, whether this really is just a statistical smoothing function (moving average) or wether it gives "old" miners a 5Nd (currently about 100h, but possibly not constant()) lead over new miners due to network difficulty changes every 14 days? Are new miners disadvantaged by this in that when their hashes are paid out the 5th time they are worth less (if a diff change has since occurred)? Maybe this has been considered before, but some explanation would be nice.

Kano updates the thread title periodically as the pool hash rate changes. We were at about 45ph during the summer. But has been a steady decline in our average hash rate, as can be seen in the monthly statistics Pool Avg. column.

The thing I like about 5Nd, is that work is rewarded even if I lose power or network connection. It also deters the pool hoppers chasing short term luck.

[wmabern]

"engineers are not good at dealing with customers..."
....typically.

kano needs a hand holding rep...at some point or even better, ask someone to design it into his front page-i am sure that there are tons of freelancers who could do it. With a good front page, this pool can triple (at least) in size.

I took a stab at adding some more language for the homepage below.
Kano: is this helpful?
If so, does anyone want to collaborate in a Google Doc? Maybe write a good front page, a good FAQ page, and a page explaining how to read the stats pages?
_____

Welcome to KanoPool!

KanoPool is a bitcoin mining pool that uses the PPLNS payout method.

Key Aspects of KanoPool

Transaction fees included in pot – Many pool administrators will keep the transaction fees for themselves, only distributing the 12.5 Bitcoin miner reward. KanoPool distributes both the 12.5 Bitcoin miner reward, as well as the transaction fees collected during that block which are ~2 Bitcoins in general. In our opinion, it is better to split ~14.5 Bitcoins per block, rather than 12.5…

PPLNS – KanoPool is Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS). This results in lumpier / less frequent payments, however, in theory, PPLNS will also yield greater payouts in the long run (a month or more).
•   In Pay Per Share (PPS), the mining pool will pay each miner a standard payout based upon the number of shares completed. The mining pool is taking on the risk of luck, and takes a premium for bearing this risk/luck.
•   In Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) the miner is taking on the luck. Sometimes the pool will find blocks quickly, and sometimes the pool will find blocks slowly. In the long run, the math will even out, but compared to PPS, the miner is better off in PPLNS as they are not paying the pool for the convenience of standardly paced payouts.

N = 5 times the Network Difficulty  – A key part of PPLNS is what exactly the N value is. In KanoPool, N = 5 times the Network Difficulty when the block was found.

Bitcoin has a difficulty for finding blocks called the Network Difficulty. For an example, let’s assume the network difficulty is 500 Billion. Thus, the N, for KanoPool’s PPLNS is 2.5 Trillion (5 times 500 Billion)

For payout calculations in our example, the pool adds up all the shares you contributed for the past 2.5 Trillion Network Difficulty. If you contributed 2.5 Billion Shares, you’d get ~1,000th of the miner reward.

[The relationship between Network Difficulty and Shares isn’t very clear to me…]

This methodology reduces variance. Your rewards will be lower than normal for the first 5x Network Difficulty (~4 days) that you are mining. Once you have mined for a full 5x Network Difficulty, you will receive your full payouts. Also, if you ever leave the pool, your payouts will continue for a slight while after you have left due to the above

Pool fee – KanoPool charges an extremely competitive 0.9% of reward for participation in the pool.

Payments – Blocks must be confirmed 101 times before being paid out (will be flagged as ‘Matured’ on the Blocks page).

The payout uses a zero fee transaction to ensure you get maximum Bitcoin, and so will be sent out the next time KanoPool mines a block after reaching 101 confirmations.


Joining KanoPool

The pool doesn't require registration for basic use but includes indepth stats for registered miners.
See below for more information on miner configuration.
You can get pool support on FreeNode IRC: irc.freenode.net channel #kano.is
or on the Bitcoin talk forum here: BitcoinTalk

Our kano.is mining servers, web site and email, are all also available at kano.space
It's a 'backup domain' in case you ever have any problems using the kano.is domain

Mining configuration:
Click on the Login/Register link to register a username to mine with,
or mine directly to the pool without registering, using a bitcoin payment address as your username.
No password is required, so just use X for your password in your miner.

e.g. if your miner has a web page, you would fill it in similar to this with your username instead of Kano:
Pool 1:   stratum+tcp://stratum.kano.is:3333
Pool1 worker:   Kano.worker
Pool1 password:   x

If you have network issues using port 3333, you can also try:
stratum+tcp://stratum80.kano.is:80

You can also try any of:
stratum+tcp://stratum81.kano.is:81
stratum+tcp://stratum443.kano.is:443
stratum+tcp://stratum8080.kano.is:8080

Your worker name can be whatever you choose and will be created when your miner connects to the pool.
Registered username or Bitcoin address, followed by a dot '.' or an underscore '_', followed by a worker name.
If you supply an invalid Bitcoin address, you will be unable to authenticate and mine on the pool.

If you have an Asicminer Tube, you will need to mine to:
stratum+tcp://nonce.kano.is:27181
It won't work properly on any other mining port. Don't point normal miners here.
Your Tube miner stats will show up in your account without their worker name.

If you mine only with a bitcoin address you can view user and worker stats:
e.g.
http://www.kano.is/address.php?a=1KanoiBupPiZfkwqB7rfLXAzPnoTshAVmb
http://www.kano.is/worker.php?a=1KanoiBupPiZfkwqB7rfLXAzPnoTshAVmb_worker

Pool settings
The pool is configured to start you mining at 2052 difficulty.
The pool adjusts the per instance difficulty to maintain a share rate of approximately 18 shares per minute.
However, there is a lower limit set on the difficulty of 242.

Nice write-up. Thanks for the effort!  

[traxor]

Use both. You are going to need to sell some bitcoin to pay for expenses. So mine directly to coinbase. After all your expenses are paid. Move what you want to save once a month to the trezor.

1)  Not everyone pays their mining expenses by selling mined coins.

2)  This doesn't address the anonymity issue.  I'm sure I'm not the only one here that doesn't want the government to know how much btc I hold.  It's none of their business.  If, and when, I choose to use/trade/sell -- then I'll route it through a kyc account -- and they'll know about it.  In my country (the U.S.) -- that is the only time there is a tax implication.