I'm curious as to the transparency and economics of pools.. Obviously pools have the cost of their machine time & internet to run them. I'm wondering about the other economics:
I saw one pool that said "we've loaned the pool $XXX so that it can do payouts, thus we are raising our % fee". What the heck would this mean, and why would they ever need or do that? Doesn't the pool simply pay out the cryptocoins that it finds?
Many pools don't let you withdraw your funds until they get to some threshold, citing "fees". Is this just a way to recoup some of the costs (see above) of running the pool? What would they mean by "fees"? Are they just expecting that they can keep any funds that aren't eventually withdrawn?
What are the pool owners doing with the coins while they are parked at the pool? I guess they could secretly short the currency, or do some other type of speculation with my money. Has this been a problem?
Thanks for your comments!
The loaned about may have been for a pool doing PPS which they need a buffer of bit coins for if they have a run of bad luck.
The threshold is because new blocks of bitcoins cannot be spent till another 120 blocks have been made.
The above applies as well in the third question partly, someone else might be able to answer if a pool has been caught speculating before?
Some pools keep the transactions fees included in the block some dont. Fees are normally a few % which is taken of the block before payout.
