Base payouts on exactly the last N shares submitted, where N < the expected number of shares that will yield one block.
Yes, that means on a long round that takes for example 3N shares to reach, there's no credit at all for the first 2N shares submitted. Tough cookies. They had as much a chance as any other to be rewarded, there was no way to know in advance they wouldn't, and there's no incentive to leave after contributing them because the future is unknown and has as much positive expectation as ever. Ignore Sunk Costs.
What if a round takes less than N shares, say N/2 shares? Reach back to the previous N/2 shares – those that already paid out once – and pay them again. This situation too was just as unpredictable as the chance the next N shares will yield no blocks, so people can't gain any advantage by timing their entry or departure.
Already thought of this. Someone pointed out it's even less fair than the score-based approaches.
Only making the expected return per next-share-contributed be totally independent of the pool history/round-lengths can strategic entry/exit be made profitless. One way to do this is to pay a fixed amount per share no matter what the relation to successful blocks.. but that requires the pool to have a reserve and insure the long dry spells.
MaxPPS is like this, but makes the "reserve" per-user so they can't cheat the pool by withholding blocks.
Underpayments on the long blocks will be made up retroactively regardless of whether a miner has continued on the pool or not.
Then how does this punish pool hoppers? It just delays their payout, but does not diminish it?
It's not supposed to
punish pool hoppers (it's their right to hop-- so punishing them would be wrong). They simply don't earn any more than someone mining normally, so there's no incentive to do it.
1. Would it be possible to combine the earnings of both pools so those of us mining on slower rigs can reach the 1 BTC cash-out amount quicker?
The "big upgrade" I'm working on will be able to combine the pools to work together. The minimum payout will also likely be reduced.
In the US pool, there is mention of two different metrics: value and earnings. When I check the
http://eligius.st/~artefact2/us/ website, I can only see my unpaid reward, which is basically the total of the lowest of both value and earnings.
2. Would it be possible to display both the earnings and the value in the report so I have an idea how much more BTC I can expect to gain on future long blocks?
This is planned for the permanent version of MaxPPS.
I think one complaint people have is the lack of transparency we have in the process. Your US pool's HDD was running out of space, so you shut it out. You mentioned it would be good for another 48 hours, then a few moments later you shut it down anyways. Those 48 hours would've made the difference for me and I'm sure many others of getting near the the minimum payment quota. You gave us no ETA on when the US pool will be re-opened, which is a first step for us to begin mining so we can generate enough shares to get our first payment.
It was running out of space fast, and I had the opportunity to move it somewhere relatively quickly (~12 hours). All real-time discussion, including what's going on with the pools, takes place in our IRC channel.
Is the EU pool at risk of closing down due to lack of HDD space also?
The Europe server is far more powerful and has far more space than the US server. I'm not worried about it.
