i thought merged mining was some secret ninja sauce where your hashes counted twice, ie. mining 2 coins at once. not load-balanced, but actually getting a net of >%100.
also, your comment on the community mining pool which is already at 475MH? so you're saying that we could be apart of that, so our low hash numbers wouldn't matter, we'd just get an even cut of that pool? and obviously the BTC gained would still go towards buying ZS.
i guess the obvious questions are:
- what are your profitability numbers looking like? link please.
- how often are payouts?
- what does 0.5 BTC buy us, and for how long?
- what happens when there is a problem, ie. late payouts, technical issue resulting in lost mining time for us?
Hey,
I'll breakdown the answers by topic here.
Re Community Mining: Yes, you'd be teaming up with the other communities that use our system, and the returns are divided according to the shares generated by each user. The concept is that by teaming up, your first miners aren't risking wasting their hash, and in general returns are brought more regularly as well as the possibility of mining higher difficulty coins.
Re profitability numbers: our transparency re profitability is done via the convertable balance of a miner on our account screen. So while you're mining, even before a payout, you can see exactly how many of a given alt you've mined. This way each miner is able to keep track of their exact amounts themselves. We will be implementing a page that displays our daily average returns, sells, and buys, in the very near future.
Re the .5 BTC: That pays for initial hosting costs, developer time to build your community's pool, and maintenance/staffing. Its a figure designed to protect us for the first month in mining, as not every community's pool is successful. Right now, for example, we have a bonuscoin multipool, however bonuscoin has been delisted and there are no longer any trades happening, as such the miners went off that community pool a couple of months back. We kept it alive so long as the exchange was operating in case their community came back. Essentially, your pool will operate so long as their are miners active on it and your coin is alive on exchanges.
Re Technical issues: They do occasionally happen, but we pride ourselves on accurate hash recording and have very little downtime in our history on the back end. The onus of course remains on miners to set failovers in their rigs in case the worst occurs, as there is no such thing as a perfect system.
Re Payouts: We've just instituted a scrypt system this week that enables us to do payouts once approximately every 24 hours with very little manpower involved. The beauty is, that we're doing buys/sells all day every day using our high return trading methods, so even if there is a payout delay, miner's returns are not impacted. If we experience a payout delay (I do not expect them to be a regular thing), we'll try our best to notify users in a timely manner. With close to a year of operation behind us, we have an established history of always ensuring our users are paid their earnings no matter what. From time to time, if we are expecting a serious pump or price rise in the coin we're mining, we may delay payouts for a very brief period in an attempt to maximize returns to our users.
A multipool, as opposed to a standard "get your rewards as each block confirms" is a very complicated beast. We have to balance many variables to ensure regular payouts and maximized returns to our users. In that regard, I feel it's very important to stress to here that there are occasional hickups in any system, even the biggest pools and exchanges must occasionally enter maintenance mode, etc.
Hope that clears up your questions!
Best regards,
Chris