changing the payment scheme is a big deal and not something you should rush into,
I'd like to continue the "
grand SMPPS experiment" and see what happens, but I would very much like to see the pseudo PPLNS system side-by-side to compare the two options.
I've made arsbitcoin my home for the past month or two for a number of reasons:
1) purely sentimental, this is where I found my first (and only) block
2) it has pretty good uptime (compared to some others I've tried)
3) it has a low (zero) fee
4) and I get low stales (around 0.3% lifetime - I have gotten up to 10 times that at some other pools)
I've read a bit about pool hopping and how it can affect payouts for steady miners in proportional pools, I'm curious how it affects us? (I realize that it
shouldn't have an effect, but I've also seen that our buffer has been steadily going down ever since the hashrate started spiking like it has in the last few weeks)
whatever payment plan discourages pool hopping the most, while still offering low fees and good performance (low stales) is where I wanna be.
Thanks for the input! I was kind of rushing into it, afraid of everyone leaving when we weren't able to act like a 0% fee PPS pool. However, it has turned out that users have not been too bothered by the delay in payment that has popped up lately, so I'm not as worried about it for the moment.
This means, I will plan on completing PPLNS code, and enabling it in a "simulation mode" like I mentioned before. Then we can see what it looks like!
As far as what discourages pool hopping the most, I think PPLNS is a little better than SMPPS. Neither is vulnerable to the "Prop pool" style of hopping based on round length, but, SMPPS is somewhat vulnerable to people hopping out based on going into a negative buffer. They stop mining, but those who continue mining basically help pay their past credit deficit. This was the main reason to consider a switch to PPLNS.