Topic: [ANN][The Original Multipool - Scrypt/SHA256/Scrypt-N/X11] multipool.us - page 140. (Read 424232 times)

"A: PPLNS stands for "Pay per Last N Shares." It means that whenever a block is found, payouts are given to everyone who submitted shares before a certain cutoff. Due to the coin hopping nature of the mutliport, this pool uses time-based PPLNS, rather than share-based. You can view the time cutoff for each coin on the Pool Stats pages."

So after I switch i enter this cutoff time right? When it passes, all my shares are lost?

Second thing I cant find cutoff time on pool server stats for LTC.

Which pool address are you connecting to?

No, it's possible that this was the issue... on LTC I have little to no stales. Every time we go to the others like WDC though I drop down to 25-30% luck (with a massive amount of rejects, 70% or so).

What does this mean for ltc direct miners? Ltc is currently most profitable. If I switch lets say in 2 hrs to another multipool coin and no block is found till then, will it mean that all my shares go to oblivion?

FWIW, I'm showing a profit of 0.021 for the last 24 hours with ~1.2MH.  That's about 3x Bitcoin profitability.  I don't see how I could have possibly made 3x that on Middlecoin, that would put them at 9x Bitcoin.

LTC also had a jump in price and a lowering in difficulty, which is the reason its profiability went to 4.  It was around 3.4 this morning IIRC.

I'm going to disable LTC from the multiport for the next 48 hours and see how it affects profits.

12 hours isn't really a statistically significant time period..  Did you get your reject issue worked out?

That may help... I ran a split test between here and Middlecoin. After 12 hours, 0.027 was earned here and 0.063 earned at Middlecoin with the same hash rate. That's a pretty massive difference, and I have the feeling it's because of LTC.

I'm currently looking at what it would take to get the LTC pool onto p2pool.  That would lower the variance quite a bit for our LTC payouts.

I've looked at it, but I believe the block reward goes from 200 down to 1 at block 5,000 or something crazy like that.

It's going to fizzle out like a bad fart.

Flound, have you taken a look at Extremecoin? Just from casual notice, it seems to handle difficulty changes pretty well, and has a decent steady hash power behind it.

What is with the implementation of automatic exchange of the most profitable coin for LTC or BTC? Thank you.

I am under the impression that these settings do not have *any* effect when using stratum...

Can someone please share your settings and reject % for the fast coins (like the current WDC)?

I set expiry: 1, scantime: 1, queue: 0

I get ~70% rejects like that. With expiry/scantime both at 5 I get 75% rejects...

Note: this is with ~7 MH/s. Is that normal?

The change of finding a block in 10 minutes is half the chance of finding one in 20 minutes.
If the average round length was 60 minutes, you've done 1/6th of the work, and have 1/6th of the chance of getting a reward.
The expected return is exactly the same as mining LTC full time, but the variance is much higher, and that is a valid concern.
How is this complaint any different from low-hashrate miners complaining about mining in a pool with 512 difficulty?
Yes, they will miss many rounds, but the rounds they do submit shares for will make up for it, and the average will be exactly the same, but again their variance will be much higher.
Personally I have a low hash-rate, and would rather stick to the fast turnaround coins to reduce my variability, but the complaint that the work is 'wasted' just doesn't make sense.

I think MAINLY the problem I have is when we go to LTC for only like 10 minutes, and then move on without finding a block.  It really is wasted shares because the chance of finding a block in the 10 minutes is so small.  I guess my priority would be making it so we can exclude LTC from our multipool.

Ok, but we don't decide to stop mining it, the mulipool switched us to another coin...

Yes, miners should be compensated for the work they put in.

It's not fair for the dedicated LTC miners either. All the shares they submitted over the 3 days they mined won't get paid out. If a block is found 1/2 hour after the mulipool switches to LTC then they will get a very small portion of the winnings as most of it will have gone to the mulipool users. And if the mulipool hadn't switched to LTC, they may have gone another 3 days before finding a block.


"deeply flawed system" - I find it funny when people say this, just because someone wrote a long study on how someone could potentially play the system. I'm sorry but I just don't think that this is true in reality. Do you think there are thousands of people sitting in front of a computer 24 hours a day, jumping from pool to pool to try to maximize their winnings. Maybe there are, I just don't think it's as big a problem as people make it out to be.

Besides, your mulipool does exactly this, it hops from one coin to another so it is not a "normal" pool. PPLNS works well on a pool where everyone is mining the same coin and coins are found in a more reasonable amount of time. If a round time is one hour and you have a reasonable chance of finding a block within one hour it makes sense. When a round time is one hour but the chances are very good that a coin won't be found for days (ie over 24 rounds) I personally wouldn't mine on such a pool. I think this is why there are so few dedicated miners on LTC. If there was a large number of dedicated miners this wouldn't be a problem.


1. I'm ok with PPS although I think this would be way too risky for your pool
2. I'm not a programmer so I can't help you there, although I would think that taking the winnings and dividing it up among all the submitted shares should be fairly simple.
3. Only the slow coins would generate a lot of shares

well said

PPLNS is good system, we should stop wasting effort on this discussion. This is not a problem.

The real problem is that there is a perception that our average long term profitability is lower then just mining LTC. Is it? I don't know. Sometimes we definitely have bad days that don't even cover electricity costs. But we have good days too. Is it better on average to stay with the pool or mine LTC?

It would be helpful if we can get a chart showing pool profitably vs LTC profitability. So we can see 1 month view for example.

That is not a universally agreed-upon statement.  Payout algorithms should distribute block rewards fairly and there is more than one way to do that.  Proportional has been showed to be a deeply flawed system, which is why almost no pools use it (and the ones that do are gamed by pool hoppers).

If you think the current system distributes block rewards unfairly, please explain exactly why you think that.  Use numbers.  Feel free to refer to a particular block on the pool if you like.

Practically, I have little motivation to change the payout algorithm for the following reasons:

1. I believe that other than PPS, it is the most fair to all parties (dedicated coin miners and multipool miners)
2. It would require a fair amount of coding to change, and I have other priorities
3. Any payout method that requires me to potentially keep millions of shares in the db for 10+ coins (i.e. proportional) is going to result in the need for a larger DB system and increase fees for all users.

All mining shares should result in a payout. Shares that go up in smoke is electricity with zero return. It doesn't pay the bills. If the steady miners pay for gas for 80% of a truck haul, and port 7777 for 20%, even if 7777 isn't driving when they reach their destination they should still get paid for their 20%. Mining is gambling, if people pool their money to buy a lottery ticket they all get paid even though only the winning ticket gets the money.

In reality, *ALL* of the work other than the winning share is wasted power.

And you do get paid, all you have to do is keep mining on the pool and be here when a block is found.  Why should multiport miners get paid if the LTC pool finds a block on its own, 3 hours after MP moves off?  Do you think that's fair?  What if the people mining LTC have been doing it for 3 days with no blocks found?  Should their reward be halved just because the multipool switched to LTC for 1/2 hour?  That could easily happen with a proportional system.

PPLNS is a proven, fair way of distributing rewards to dedicated miners.  With short, time-based rounds you lose your shares quickly after you stop mining, but your payout also increases to a full payout much more quickly as well.