Topic: [0 GH/s 0% fee SMPPS] ArsBitcoin mining pool! - page 41. (Read 123721 times)

I have been mentioning the switch to SMPPS for quite a while now in this thread as well as on IRC.  I could have given better warning, but the expected reward for mining on the pool has not been reduced at all.

Your reward comparison thread shows some payment problems at Eligius, not payment problems here.  If the pool has BTC to pay, and someone is owed BTC, it WILL pay them.  It is very clear on our website how much the pool owes, how much it has, how much it has paid out, etc.  Miners will NOT get short changed on this system.  The pool will NOT "make money off the miners".  Over time, the SMPPS buffer will trend towards zero by definition.  I am not going to suddenly stop the pool with a large BTC buffer and not pay it out to miners.  

I do need to get SSL set up.

I was considering joining your pool. . .
I'm glad you showed a willingness to do a rapid change of the pool's ToS that significantly materially affects the mining agreement with little or no notice to your customers.
That alone is a deal-breaker for me.
The fact that the change was from 0% proportional to a system that credits users a fraction of that on short rounds (see my thread on reward comparison) is in itself a deal breaker even if you had given a bare minimum of 48 hrs or so notice by email or some other form like the header of your thread.
Finally, the fact your site doesn't have ssl as all the more popular ones is another.
It is unlikely these differences will ever be reconciled.

Best of luck though, I hope you make some money off the miners using this pps, and I hope they get what they deserve.

+1 on the move to SMPPS vs. Proportional.  Was it nice getting lucky with 9 blocks in 4 days?  Yeah.  Would it suck when probability catches up to us and evens us back out to ~ 1 block a day, yeah even more...

Thanks for all the hard work BT.  Great job so far!

Deepbit can do that because they just charge large fees for PPS and finance it out of their huge wallets.  However, if I implemented such a system, it would essentially just be creating two separate pools out of one.  We are not big enough to do that now, and there are plenty of proportional pools out there if people prefer that instead.

I think you should open 2 mode to user switch like deepbit : Prop. and PPS.

Have had our first complaint already

Someone is leaving because they are banking on luck.  It is true that we have been extremely lucky as a pool, and HIGHER than expected payouts have been sent.  However, we all know that can't last forever.  When the long rounds come around again, SMPPS ensures that you get paid for your work regardless of round length.  This, combined with protection from pool hopping (which can really reduce payouts for legitimate miners) and I think we have a good system.

Thanks for the suggestions!  I just spent a lot of time on the new payment system, but now it is done!  This means I can focus on other features.  I'll look into these, but I had a few other things at a higher priority first.

All done!  Things look ok so far.  Let me know if you see any issues.  The next test will be to make sure that existing blocks are correctly paid out the old way, and new blocks the new way. 

OK everyone, here goes the update.  Stats/website might be down for about 10 minutes, but pool will keep accepting shares.

Good job so far BurningToad

Could I request a few stats related things?

- Show total generated shares for each worker.

- Time since last share for each worker was submitted

- Shares per worker per round.

These would be useful for monitoring! Adding things like this obviously increases load on the server and one thing I like about this pool is how responsive the site is.. so if this is gonna have a large impact then ignore my suggestions

SMPPS will go live in about 1 hour, to beat the difficulty change.  It will not require any pool downtime.  Stats are likely to be down for about 10 minutes during the update.

All shares in the current round will be transitioned to SMPPS, so no shares will be lost.

Read the wall of text about 5 posts up

Along with the reason for switching: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24966.0

what is SMPPS?

Thanks! And Done!

Now user stats and pool stats will show up on www.btc-poolwatch.com

This lucky streak doesn't stop giving!

EDIT: I think it was a problem on my end and I fixed it. Keep up the good work!

Hello everyone,

EDIT, testing complete!  Test server down
SMPPS is currently in testing at http://ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com/  If you had a worker account set up on the real pool before Friday, you can just change the hostname to ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com to help me test here  This is mining on testnet, so you won't earn any real BTC.  However, if you could point a miner to ec2-184-73-57-137.compute-1.amazonaws.com for just 10 minutes or so, it would be helpful to test the system out!

I'm hoping to be able to move the live pool to SMPPS before the next difficutly change.  This means that I would disable stats for a bit, do the conversion, convert all current round shares to the current PPS value, then re-enable everything under SMPPS.  This seems to be the best way to do it if I can get it done before the difficulty change, as all shares would have the same value.

Here is the psuedo-code for the new payout method: http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Shared_Maximum_PPS  This payout method will even out payments and provide a constant expected value per share.  This means that pool hopping is worthless on this pool, as round length essentially doesn't matter.  The 'cost' of this method, is that your expected payout can be delayed if the pool has long rounds.  This is the only way to do PPS without charging a fee (otherwise the pool can easily go in the hole.)  If the pool is lucky (like it has been!) it saves the BTC to pay out on the long rounds.  All said, you can expect to earn much more BTC here than Deepbit with a 10% PPS fee, for example.

To summarize:

1) All submitted shares earn you an exact amount of BTC.  This BTC will keep adding up as "Total PPS Work".  This is (1 / difficulty) * 50 BTC per share.  This is the expected value of each share submitted.
2) When the pool solves a block and gets 120 confirmations (releasing the 50BTC), the pool then tries to do a payout as follows.  If the "Total PPS Work" for everyone is LESS than 50 BTC (it was a short round), everyone gets paid their full "Total PPS Work".  If the work is GREATER than 50 BTC (long round) the pool pays as much as it can, evenly distributed (If 5 people each have Total PPS work of 2 BTC, but the pool only has 5 BTC to pay, each person gets 1 BTC now, and the pool will pay the rest when it gets more BTC.)  It does not prioritize "older" shares, as that felt a bit like a pyramid scheme.
3) Everytime the pool gets more BTC, it tries to pay as much as it can to everyone who's Paid PPS Work is less than their Total PPS work. You will continue to get paid anything you are due, even if you stop mining.


There is a new chart that shows you daily totals for "Total PPS Work" and "Paid PPS Work", and I will continue to improve this chart. It is based on Icey's and Lego's chart code, so I'll be sending them a donation soon.

There has been some criticism of Eligius for delayed payouts.  Though we will also be using SMPPS, we should not have the same issues.  We aren't switching to completely different pool servers, and we aren't doing payouts with generations (which means the pool can only pay 50BTC per payout.)  I think the delayed rewards on Eligius are perhaps because of that.  Even if we have lots of long rounds, you will still get paid at a minimum, your proportional rewards each block, which is the same as you would get paid now for a long block, except now you will also have credit for future payments.

Don't ban the botnets or they'll DDOS you :-/

Yeah I've been looking at a 2-4x 6950 setup, but have been hesitant to set up a dedicated machine for mining over a system that I can at least accumulate BTCs with. Now that the exchange rate steadily dropping, Mt. Gox either needs to get its sh*t together or holders need to stop selling before I make the plunge. Time will tell if this is a retest of the $10/BTC range or a deeper sell off.

Of course, I'm not as concerned about using BTCs to pay for the hardware as I am with simply getting out of the USD. As (not if) the dollar continues it's accelerating decline, Bitcoin could behave in a similar manner to gold by going up rapidly (just wait for the QE3 announcement...). This will be even more pronounced as the US locks down on financial transactions across borders and more people realize their dollars are becoming relatively worthless.

On that note, using WalletPaperbackup you can print several hundred Kb of scannable data in hard copy for subsequent recovery. No need to move coins out of the country or risk confiscation of flash drives and other electronic media. Just slip a piece of paper into a book or magazine and endure the cavity search.

Bitcoin may be having a rocky start, but I think the above will build demand to a point where it may be one of the only routes for wealth to escape from the American kleptocracy, so simply having Bitcoins is better than not.

Woah, what luck this morning!