I cannot find anything in my account that says what I've earned, what I've been paid, and what I'm owed. To say I don't get paid until N exceeds 5 x difficulty + delta tells me exactly nothing. What is my N
Do you have any plans to provide transparency for miners
I think PPLNS is the worst thing ever conceived for miners. I can see why you like it since payouts significantly lag work done.
I guess in 14 hours I'll see how much I'm paid for the first block found since I started mining here.
Yes as someone linked my earlier post, I removed the one piece of information that gave an (inaccurate) estimate of the payout.
I will definitely be putting more information on the web site as I work through the changes I'm doing.
Unfortunately that's taking me a bit of time (xmas holidays, recent irl issues, pool issues and pool management)
Once that is done I'm sure everyone will be happy with the result.
If you are concerned I might not be paying out the right payouts in the meantime, by all means, wait until I've added that information to the web site before mining here.
As for your misunderstanding about PPLNS:
Of the 2 basic types of payouts, PPS related and block find related:
No pool op who understands statistics and the problems with PPS, would willingly use PPS unless they had a large fee or, like Eligius' block find payout modified PPS, the risk was on the miners, not the pool.
The normal PPS pool risk is two-fold.
One being that, statistically, long term it is expected that bad luck will eventually make the total payments exceed what the pool earns. For a small pool, early on, that is highly likely ... as can be seen recently.
The other risk is that block withholding by miners will simply make the pool unsustainable by not reducing the withholding miners payout thus running the pool broke.
If you wish to read about pools and payout there is also this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.msg1146110#msg1146110Of the block find related payout schemes, PPLNS is the best IMO for the following reasons:
There is no major risk in the payout scheme for the pool or the miners thus you can expect the pool to survive long term.
People are paid proportionally to their work done each time a block is found and the funds are available.
Luck means that sometimes the payouts are slow and sometimes they are fast.
As long as the pool is big enough (as we are now) it would be difficult to argue that the rare slow payouts are much more than impatience.
Basically what this means for me is that I expect the pool to continue running for as long as there are enough miners.
Luck and variance play no direct affect on the viability of the pool, only indirectly if the luck is bad enough to make the miners leave.
The fees are quite clear, in our case, we pay 99.1% of each block+txn fees to the miners.
I have still yet to understand how people get themselves in a position where hourly payouts (vs payouts after work is done and payouts available) makes the difference between being able to mine and not being able to.
Of course, if a pool is small, the variance can indeed mean not getting enough payouts in a certain time frame needed for some, but in the case of this pool, if the current variance is something you cannot deal with, then by all means, find somewhere else to mine.
