Topic: Can someone explain BTCGUILD's PPLNS to me like I am a five year old. (Read 16374 times)

No, at Ghash.
I make a 8% more than BTCguild and 13% more than Slush, for the last 20 days.

It is not luck, as I compared the rewards/ my hashing speed and the blocks found.
It may be the no fee difference or maybe also the Ghash server creates better connection with my miners.

I dont know about Eligius have not tried it yet.

And you are mining at BTCguild?

I havent seen anyone with PPLNS making more than PPS.

I've also read about PPLNS being a loyalty system...

Does this mean i will lose all my shares if i switch to a more profitable pool or will my shares accumulate. Or are shares only calculated from the beginning to the end of a period.

one thing this thread didn't touch on was how 24 Hour Earnings is calculated for PPS and PPLNS ??

It always seems PPS will show higher there..  can someone please post the formula used for both?

thanks

Last couple of days have been horrid.  If this keeps up BTCGuild will go poof on the PPS side 

yup, they need to make more of an incentive to stay PPLNS than paying for stales. maybe a diffent share system than PPLNS.

Not to bash but pplns is not a great option to me personally. Why bother with luck when you can go pps with a reasonable fee?
It makes no sense to gamble on good luck when there is a 50% chance for it to go wrong on you. I prefer better odds then that. Maybe if diff drops in half i will try it again. Ha.. Like diff will drop in half. Pps for now.

Well I'm no farmer, just running 3 little GPU's for now; But, I cannot believe that the luck on BTC's PPLNS has been this bad. I saw the big run of 10-15 block shifts and was lucky enough to be in on it. But that has been about it since they implemented PPLNS. I figured i need to see 10 per shift or better to equal their PPS even with the 2% diffeence in fees.

I think we need to be hitting above 9 blocks per shift (especially when the shifts are over 1 hour long) to break even at the current difficulty.  I jumped back on PPLNS and am the #2 hasher (quite sad really with my small farm) and luck had been pretty bad for the last 4 days except for a short 5 hour run 2 days ago.

Thanks eleuthria. I think my problem is that I have not given it enough time. I am getting too hung up on the short term results. I keep using my 24hr. earnings as a bench  mark, so have been percieving that my earnings are lower on PPLNS.There have been a few runs of <9 blocks found on PPLNS, but on the whole it seems most shifts finding less than 8 blocks. I think I need to stop watching it so closely and let it run for a few days without switching back and forth.
 

PPLNS is a very simple system when you think about it correctly.  BTC Guild uses 'N' = 30 million.

When a block is found, the last 30 million shares (10 shifts) split the block reward.  Ignoring pool fee/transaction fees in the block, this results in:

25 BTC / 30,000,000 = 0.0000008333333 BTC per share.

So each time a block is found, the last 30 million shares are paid 0.0000008333333 (again, this is without doing the math for pool/transaction fes).  This is much less than PPS.  However, a share can get paid for multiple blocks, since each block pays the last 30 million shares.  The PPLNS Shift History shows you how many blocks paid to a given set of shares.

At current network difficulty, it takes ~8.5 blocks to equal the PPS rate.  If a shift finds 8 or less, it was paid lower than the PPS rate.  If a shift finds 9 or more, it was paid higher than the PPS rate.


The first week of PPLNS was pretty rough at BTC Guild on luck.  However, there have been 24-72 hour periods that paid an average of 30-50% higher than 100% PPS would have.  Luck since PPLNS began is very close to neutral at this point.  The only thing skewing that a bit is the DDoS that hit on 12/20 (and early 12/21), which affected Stratum more than getwork due to which servers were targeted, meaning people on Stratum (which is required for PPLNS) were more affected by the pool outage than getwork users.

i am using guiminer(polcbm), which employs stratum if I am not mistaken. either i a just have bad luck or i am the reason they finding less blocks (hehe). Every time I set PPLNS I get valid shares, but the shift pps rate and number of found blocks is on the whole less than when I set my workers to PPS. wierd.

PPLNS only works on Stratum.

straight from btcguild's site

I am a newbie, just started on this and joined BTC Guild about 1 week before they introduced PPLNS. I switched right to it as soon as they implemented. I went a few days, and noticed that the PPS vs. PPLNS was kind of about the same, leaning toward the PPLNS only slightly. The PPLNS Shift History in their stats page were reporting about the same number of blocks discovered per shift, with nominal variances per shift, meaning each shift was finding approximately the sam number of blocks. after 3 or four days, i noticed that my 24 hr earning average started slipping below what it was when I was using PPS. I switched back to PPS and my 24 hr earnings rose back up. So now I am not using their PPLNS.

Another explanation could be this: I noticed when PPLNS first was introduced, that there were some very heavy hitters in the system and found blocks were up about 2-3 blocks per shift (compared to recently) when these big players were in. In the last few days, I have noticed that the big players are not in the PPLNS. may have something to do with the per share earnings, thus a dip in my payouts.

Also: dificulty has gone up, and my hash rates have not

not sure what we can draw from the above, but I have gone back to PPS.

I've left pplns on for around a day now, It seems like I'm earning about the same as I normally would. I enjoyed reading your responses and feel more educated for them.

Thanks for all the info everyone. It has very helpful. So much to still learn

BTCGuild has been having some of the worst if not the worst luck ever recorded.  The last time they had luck this bad they were a Prop pool and I was mining with them.  I skipped over to a few other pools and they had 2 weeks of insanely good luck.  Since I switched to PPLNS they've had periods like the last 2 nights where 3600GH/s has not found a block for 12 hours and 9 hours respectively.

Yep I'm that good (or bad  )

It was simply bad luck since btcguild started pplns. Fyi.

You say you made much less doing PPLNS at btcguild? Are you running Stratum proxy? if not you aren't getting paid at all with PPLNS. I made this mistake for about 8 hours, set it to PPLNS and went to sleep, woke up with nothing. i'm too lazy to update miner software when i'm planning on powering down my farm in about a month anyway. if asics turn out to be bullshit i'll power gpus back on and update.