Oh, so you haven't actually done an analysis of why that means your pool is VERY likely to fail and everyone will lose all unpaid work when that happens?
Meni Rosenfeld's "Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems"
https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdfHave a read - you should at least understand what you are doing if you want to run a PPS pool.
Ignorance is bliss? (until everyone loses money)
That shows the statistical analysis of why you will go broke and thus proves that what you are doing is simply an attempt to get miners to switch and you will drop the 110% very soon or go broke (or you are cheating your miners by under paying them)
Hi Kano,
I love your pool. Used it for some time, until I moved to bitcoin.com. While I realize and understand the risk of ruin bitcoin.com is facing with this pool, for the moment they are paying me for the PPS every night at 10:00pm PST. It would seem to me that the entire risk to me as a user of the pool if bitcoin.com wants to buy my hash is one day of earnings. Once they miss a payment, I would simply move my hash back to a "responsibly run" pool like yours. I can assure you, since I have put my hash on the bitcoin.com pool, I am being properly paid, and I am paid what I expect to be paid based on the PPS model. So as far as I can tell, I am not being cheated, and his pool seems to accept more shares than most of the pools I have mined on.
That being said, help me as a noob in the bitcoin field to understand why it's a bad idea for me to take bitcoin.com's money? Right now with a hash rate that is just reaching 200 th/s it seems like I am risking maximum of say $170. That is at the 110% rate, and as long as bitcoin.com manages to run the pool for longer than 10 days, the 10% would cover a days loss, and the 10% would then become profit on the 11th day.
While I realize my math isn't nearly as fancy as what you had in the pdf it seems like it is reasonable to me. Any other thoughts?
It's actually quite simple.
In terms of your risk, yes until they stop paying you, you are getting 110% PPS.
If they delay or stop paying you, you indeed do have to be pro-active to stop mining.
They of course will operate on the assumption that few if any miners they have attracted will switch if payments are late.
But the real issue is that do they even understand the risk?
As a pool gets bigger, the risk gets greater.
But you've said that extra 10% covers the risk over what? 100% PPS?
Who else pays 110% PPS?
Low fee PPLNS pools should be paying similar to that, on average at the moment, with no risk of the pool going broke.
Well, according to the stats on my pool, we should average that also, but since it's PPLNS, it's block luck that decides the actual reward.
e.g. the pool averages were: last month 138% PPS ... December 73% PPS ... January 101% PPS
If they were transparent and said the reasons why they are paying 110% and how long it will be 110% then you could manage your risk.
But if they don't even understand Meni's statistical analysis of PPS pools and the risks, then you should be running far and wide away from them the second that a payment is delayed, and you've also then lost what you'd expect on other pools.
The last pool that did the same thing was BAN ... back in 2014 ... never heard of them?
Well they failed due to financial loss caused by paying ... 110% PPS ...
The exact same situation existed where people were saying how they get paid, so it doesn't matter.
Then the payments slowed down, and the 110% dropped to 105% then it all went to crap and it dragged on for ages while anyone who was left still mining there lost BTC.
While the situation now is different due to a lower risk of that happening due to higher % transaction fees, it's still not a small risk.
It's not hard to be transparent and say how they are funding this grave financial risk, but that's called bad marketing and of course they wont do that ... or even worse they don't even realise what they are doing ...