Topic: [1423GH] ABCPool PPS - Proxy Pool For High & Steady Mining Rewards - page 38. (Read 151781 times)

Kudos to BTCGuild for providing their block history to the mining community. And your interest is noted!

Chlorine and I are trying to do the best we can with our limited resources. The next feature to be introduced will most likely be automated password recovery and account reset, since the current manual process is slow and takes quite some effort to support as we keep gaining more and more users.

Of course, as always, you're welcome to suggest any other features you'd like to have on ABCPool! You can reply here or PM me or Chlorine directly. Just don't expect it to be implemented the next day!

It is a little weird that you do not list the blocks found by your pool.

I guess you could be pool hopping with the hashes and no one would know. I would hope this is not the case.

Why exactly do you do this. btcguild.com is also a straight PPS pool but they should the blocks they have found.

Do you not want your miners to be able to figure out your actual income?

Hi Stoppots,
Every member of ABCPool is paid per share. The share price is determined by a formula based on the theoretical expected number of blocks to be found. That reward is independent of when or how much blocks are actually found. As such we do not list the block history, sorry!

Hi Hotdog,
We have had a few minutes of connectivity issues this morning, reporting is running fine.

Hash rates seem oddly low this morning, but my miners all seem to be fine. Issue with reporting, mayhaps?

Is there a way to view the block history?

Yeah, thanks!


Mmm, I'll check into that. Thanks.

I just want to clarify that I am begrudging no one charging a fee for a pool.  It's a hard life and a 4% fee is perfectly reasonable, especially for a PPS pool.  I am not saying its' unreasonable at all - I'm just trying to get the point across that transparency is paramount for miners, and advertising an "effective" fee is not transparent.

Hey Hotdog, what stats does mining monitor have that EMC doesn't? I'm always looking add stuff. EMC has done everything MiningMonitor does since the beginning (before MiningMonitor even existed), but I'm always open to new ideas.

I guess I should re-word it: My issue was primarily with the alerting. I could never get the pools to alert me quickly, though, admittedly, I was rather limited in my testing; ARS never worked correctly, and at the time I tried I don't think Slush/BTC had alerting. It's been awhile.

Mining Monitor's biggest limitation, obviously, is their lack of 100% pool coverage. I'll probably be moving some miners over to try EMC today, for giggles.

Uhh.. you hope what clears what up?  You did not address the fact that you are advertising a false fee at all.  No one mentioned anything about invalid blocks, why even bring that up?  

Your pool charges a 4% fee and you pay for stale shares, but only up to a point (perfectly reasonable of course). You also effectively pay for invalid blocks.  You don't have an "effective fee of 2.1%", that is just basically a semantics game.  By that logic, the "Fee" for Deepbit is only 1.5%.  That's ridiculous.

Please, stop trying to advertise a false fee and then making statements that have nothing to do with the problems people have with your false fee claims.  Your fee is 4%, plain and simple.  If you want to explain why your 4% fee is different than other pools "fees" or "donation," by all means have at it.  But don't advertise a fee that doesn't exist.  Tell your users the truth - you charge a 4% fee.  Then tell them what your 4% buys them.  THEN they can make a decision on whether or not 4% of their earnings are worth what you're selling.


Hey Hotdog, what stats does mining monitor have that EMC doesn't? I'm always looking add stuff. EMC has done everything MiningMonitor does since the beginning (before MiningMonitor even existed), but I'm always open to new ideas.

Forgot about the ~1.5% for invalid blocks in my comments above...

In the spirit of transparency, displaying pool blocks found and those found invalid would be beneficial?

Ah! Maybe now I finally understand where the confusion is coming from. Thanks for sharing your reasoning! Now to clear things up, hopefully: In the Bitcoin world there is a difference between 'invalid shares' and 'invalid blocks'. At ABCPool we subdivide invalid shares into 'stale shares' and 'invalid shares':

• Stale share - a share (handed in by a miner) that is solution for the previous block. It's up to a few seconds late and therefore useless. ABCPool pays you anyway. Poolwide average is at 0.4% of total shares, but the individual number differs depending on your latency, software and hardware.
  
• Invalid share - a share (handed in by a miner) that is duplicate, wrong, or extremely late. ABCPool does not pay for these.
  
• Invalid block (or orphan block) - a valid share submission that is also a valid block solution, but later turns out to be rejected by the bitcoin network. The theoretical (50BTC/difficulty) reward formula assumes all blocks are valid. However, 1.5% of found blocks become orphan blocks that do not generate 50 BTC. This is because of network latency in the Bitcoin network and has nothing to do with the miners connection to the pool. However, that practical difference of 1.5% makes the theoretical reward unrealistic. At non-PPS pools orphan blocks also cost you 1.5%, even though a 0% fee is listed: The pool doesn't get the 50 BTC reward, so it is also never distributed among miners (there are exceptions, such as deepbit). At PPS pools, the 1.5% can only be compensated by a 'fee'.
  

I hope this explanation clears things up. I will also change the terminology from 'invalid block' to 'orphan block' to better highlight that it is very different from an 'invalid share'.

Indeed, low-quality miners benefit more from the stale-compensation than high-quality miners; the individual stale-rate might vary roughly between 0% and 1%. Our goal is to provide the most predictable mining experience out there. PPS is of course already the most predictable reward mechanism, but stale-compensation makes it even more predictable. When you consider non-pps pools, you'll always need to correct the fee to include the expected stale rate. Since other pools do not do that calculation for you, our 'effective fee' attempts to make the correction the other way around.
Excellent idea. I've added it to our features roadmap!

As for Brunic's question/issue, I recommend using MiningMonitor for multiple miners, which you obviously do have. None of the pools have good, functional, clever stats like MiningMonitor does. Or at least none I've tried/seen.

"Only 4% fee, which effectively comes down to only 2.1% fee because we compensate stale share and invalid blocks. (compare: 10% fee at deepbit)"

First page on their website, on the bottom. It seems clear enough for me.

A complain that I somewhat agree though, is that stable miners with less stale or invalid shares pay more fee, and in a certain way, pay for miners who produce more stale or invalid shares. My lifetime invalid + stales share are at 0.3%, I think I'm far from the 1.9%. I agree that the overall effective fee of the pool is 2.1%, but my effective fee, for my account only, is currently at 3.7%. My shares seems of better quality than the average miner on this pool, but I pay more fee because I'm better. Miner with lesser quality hardware who generate more stales or invalid get a better deal of all this.

You need to make a revenue and I don't complain about the fee. Overall, it is still a good deal. But your structure of fee seems to reward more the average miner than the high quality one. Another pool can come by, say "hi there, I don't pay for stale or invalid, but I'm PPS and the fee is 3%" and, for the bunch of guys who generate the most valid shares, this pool becomes the better deal. And you get stuck with the stales/invalid shares that doesn't bring you anything.

Anyway, in order to make this fee less painful ( ), I'll ask for a feature for the website. My problem is that I have one, maybe two unstable workers. Right now, I'm testing them with different settings, hoping to make it more stable. It would be nice to add, besides each worker, a timer that indicate at which moment the pool stopped receiving information from the worker. Something like:

Worker Name   Active   Hashrate (Mhash/s)       Check worker    Time died                    Time since died
worker.hard        N                    0                         Y               2:17 PM, Jan 7               36 hours

Check miner is a check box, that you active if you want to have the timer working or not. With that, I'll be able to work on stable workers, and if I have stable workers, you get more MHash! Nice deal huh?  

And I an trying to figure who actually has invalid and stale shares approaching 1+ per cent.

I am barely at .11% (after 1M shares) which would mean my effective fee is 3.89%...

exactly!

Should be active again. If you need any more assistance, please PM me or Chlorine.

Account has been deactivated. (due to repeated login failure or abuse).

Can you guys help me out?

And as others said before your "effective fee" is the exact opposite of beeing transparent. 

Please see https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.672212 for our argumentation. As said earlier, we try to be as transparent about this as possible.

If you'd like to talk about some objective reward-efficiency metric that all pools can use to advertise themselves, please start a new forum thread for that.

C.