Hi All.
New here and excited to be a part of the crypto game.
Got a deal on a s7 to dabble in mining, which i only expect to basicly break even on, but thought it would be a good starting experience mining.
I moved my workers here from bitmain after running it for a few days.
Unfortunatly it appears i moved here just before this whole "hell block" phase.
(maybe i am unlucky?)
Im wondering if someone could point me toward the best way to understand the averages over time and what metrics best describe chances to mine more coin here over time then a large pool like bitmain, which seems fairly consistant.
Im wading through the lingo, and im starting to pick it up, but is a bit of a learning curve for sure!
Thanks for any help !
Basically there are 2 main factors in mining:
1) Variance
2) Fees
Firstly PPS:Mining on a PPS pool has almost no variance.
You get rewarded exactly for the shares you submit, thus the only (tiny) variance is just the share finding variance of your miners.
Thus if you were mining PPS on AntPool you would have seen a very small variance in your daily reward, i.e. it wouldn't have been exactly the same every day, but close enough.
However, block finding on bitcoin has quite obvious variance.
There isn't a block found every 10 minutes on the bitcoin network, that's just the average expected time for a block on the network.
You'll see blocks found a few seconds apart sometimes, or a few minutes, or even over an hour or more apart.
So lets say, PPSPool gets a 75% Diff block followed by a 150% Diff block - variance
They can pay everyone after the 75% block, because PPSPool earned more than they have to pay the miners - they earned a full block (100%) but only have to pay the equivalent of 75% worth of shares the miners sent to the pool.
But once the 150% block arrives, they have 225% total shares from miners, but only 2 blocks (200%) to pay them with.
Ouch they now have lost 25% of their stash
So to handle this problem, they must do 2 things:
1) Keep a safety net of BTC to be able to pay everyone when luck is worse than 100%
2) charge a higher fee to cover that risk of bad luck.
There's a paper all about this here which includes the risks of mining on low fee PPS pools:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.4980v1.pdfOne more important thing to know about all this is transaction fees.
When anyone finds a block, they don't (usually) just get the block reward (currently 12.5 BTC) but they also get all the transaction fees from all the transactions they include in the block.
This has actually been quite a lot of BTC for a while now - currently this month it's averaged about 7.5% more added to the 12.5 BTC of each block.
So this is where the pool fees make a VERY big difference in the equation.
If a PPS pool is paying it's miners 100% PPS - then the pool is charging the miners, on average, for this month, 7.5/(100+7.5) = a 6.98% fee.
Wow that's even higher than the ridiculous fees at nicehash
In the case of last June, tx fees average for that month was 22.3%, so a 100% PPS pool was charging everyone 22.3/(100+22.3) = a huge 18.2% fee
Some PPS pools pay their miners less than 100% PPS, others pay a bit more than 100% PPS
You'd have to check the PPS pools to see what their fees are from week to week and month to month.
Now PPLNS:On PPLNS, we reward all miners every time we find a block.
This means that when we are lucky and find more blocks than expected, we are rewarding miners better than expected.
But when we are unlucky and find less blocks than expected, we are rewarding miners worse than expected.
So what does 'expected' mean?
It's what you would 'expect' to get if the pool luck was always 100% (which of course it isn't)
So what is the 'expected' reward on PPLNS?
That again depends on the PPLNS pool's fees.
Here the fee is 0.9% of the total and we include Txn fees.
So if luck was 100%, then the pool's average PPS for a month would be (100%+Txn) * 0.991
But there's the issue of luck/variance to consider.
You wont get the same reward every day, some days you'll get more than you expect and other days less, and at the worst, some days no reward at all.
FYI: AntPool PPLNS keeps the txn fees - so this month they would be charging you a 6.98% fee (ouch)
Last June they would have been charging you a 18.2% fee OMFG!
So how do you 'expect' to be better off here?
Well you expect to be better off in the long run, since the fees here are lower than any other pool worth mining on.
However, sometimes the luck sux and you get paid a lot less, other times the luck is good and you get paid a lot more.
In the long run it averages out - as the Blocks web page history information shows.It's just a question of how close to a profit or loss your mining is.
If you can deal with getting 70% PPS in a month on rare occasions, without going broke, then you should be OK here.
If you can deal with getting 162% PPS in a month here on rare occasions, then that should be OK also
