There are many models.
yvg1900's fee-based software works on a lot of different pools. It's closed source, but fairly open-ecosystem.
NaN's is similar, though it doesn't support quite as many protocols.
I tried a 10% dev fee on Riecoin decreasing every other day until 2%, and then open sourced it, and that worked out decently (but I wasn't trying to make a living off of this).
The prime stuff is currently a mess, but that's just a matter of time. Once some of the miners reach performance parity and platform parity, the thing left to compete on is price and pool support. At some point, the profit margin will get low enough that someone might take the nuclear option and open source their miner.
Prof. Andersen maybe I missed something here in the scenes. You have published a fast performance CPU-miner for Riecoin, right? I heard about the GPU-miner from you long ago, did you publish already somewhere?
I tried to find some infos about it but I only find about your CPU-miner. Could you guide me somehow?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
scrypt optimizations for nvidia - released open source after I mined privately on Amazon's GPUs for a week. :-) (now in cudaminer)
my blog post about it -
http://da-data.blogspot.com/2013/12/inside-better-cuda-based-scrypt-miner.htmlProtoshares GPU miner for nvidia: Released open source by sponsorship from Invictus Innovations
https://github.com/dave-andersen/cudaptsand recently ported to ypool: https://github.com/dave-andersen/cudaptsx
Protoshares CPU optimizations - Invictus paid to have the algorithmic part incorporated into Bitshares. I never got the assembly-optimized parts cleaned enough to think it was a good idea to put into the source tree -- it made the build too ugly for something that is designed to be able to run on any platform.
Riecoin, open-sourced after a week of 10% dev fee decreasing every other day:
https://github.com/dave-andersen/fastrie
Remains open source with a 2% dev fee that the user can disable at the command line.
Riecoin's an interesting one - my miner is pretty much the only one in use, but I don't earn 2% of all riecoin, I earn more like 0.2%. But I'm experimenting with all of these to understand better what the alt-coin economy is like.
I've never tried making a pool, because it sounds like really hard, thankless work.
I'm watching the XPM miner experiment with great interest because of that.
I think it's amazing that Christian and Christian so consistently release *really good* toys to the community. And I think it's equally important therefore to find a way to continue to make it worth their while to do so, because most other stuff that comes out targets the AMD crowd. I don't know if that's a dev fee mechanism, voluntary contributions, or what, but it's worth thinking about more.