A word about the new Double Geomtric Scoring (DGS) system:
EMC will be moving from the Geometric Scoring system to the Double Geomtric Scoring system. Twice the GEOMETRIES! ZOMG!!11!1one!!But seriously the new system will be somewhat different than the old system, and perhaps a bit unfamiliar to some people, so want to go over some of the major points and answer any questions people might have.
First off, this system is a hybrid between the current geometric system and the PPLNS system. In our current system, your shares geometrically decay, becoming worthless after a period of time (in our case, about 5 hours) - if you stop mining, after ~5 hours you will no longer receive a reward. This has the advantage of making the pool hopper proof, but the disadvantage that there would be a chance you would not be paid due to your shares decaying.
With the DGS, your shares decay much more gradually, over not only the number of shares but also the number of blocks. What this means is that there is effectively a sliding window of time where you will be paid for shares submitted. Each share submitted is paid a score which will eventually be converted into BTC but over time (shares AND blocks), the score decays. This happens at a much slower rate than with the geometric system, thus reducing variance on a per share basis and spreading your score decay over several blocks. A consistent miner will eventually reach a point where your hashrate is in proportion to the pool and your payout will be the same as an unhopped proportional pool on a per block basis. If you are inconsistent, your payout will also be inconsistent - however, you will always eventually be paid for the work you've done regardless of when or how consistently you have submitted that work, until your score decays past the point of value.
To be a little more technical, your score is an estimated average pending reward. When a block is found, some of your score is converted into BTC up to the total amount of BTC generated (50 BTC basically), once everyone has been paid evenly up to 50 BTC amount, the rest of your score is stored going into the next round and the process will happen again. On really long rounds, this means that the pool will pay out a bit of extra from it's own pocket to pay off everyone who contributed and on short rounds the BTC will be stored for future unluck rounds.
This method is completely hopping proof, so there will be no losses to pool hoppers. You can jump in and out of the pool and expect to be paid fairly for what you've contributed, like a PPS pool. The variance is much lower than the geometric method and similar to proportional while the maturity time is much shorter than the *SMPPS methods. Because the risk to the pool is greatly reduced, we also are not forced to charge exorbitant fees to hedge future losses on long rounds.
For a more technical explanation of the system, you can see this thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/double-geometric-method-hopping-proof-low-variance-reward-system-39497I welcome any questions or comments you all have in regards to this new system. I plan on making it live within the next block or two, after I have verified that it is paying out properly vs the current system. Currently it is running in tandem with the geometric scoring so that I can verify the output and payout.