Thanks for your interest in our pool!
CoinLab is working to build an HPC cluster where miners can earn Bitcoins by performing HPC work units, like Protein Folding, CGI rendering, and Astrophysics simulations. When HPC work is not available, miners will fall back to mining Bitcoin.
In order to do this, we need to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem: we need to have lots of GPUs connected to sell HPC work, but miners aren't going to switch to our pool unless there is something in it for them.
Because we're a startup and our budget is tight, we're offering 95% PPS plus "Loyalty Points". The 5% fee lets us cover server costs or when we find a block but another block beats us into the chain. Every share you earn gets you 1 Loyalty Point, which, once GPU mining is no longer profitable, you can redeem that Loyalty Point to earn a profitable rate for 1 share (assuming your computer is reasonable energy efficient, and you have average energy prices). If you mine for 6 months at 2GH/s, and then the price drops, you'll be able to mine profitably for another 6 months at 2GH/s (or 12 months at 1GH/s, or 24 months at 0.5 GH/s...).
We can offer these loyalty points because we're going to be able to charge a higher-than-bitcoin rate for HPC work, and pass part of these extra earnings on to you. Eventually, we plan to offer HPC work to everyone, but until we reach capacity, we are going to give miners who joined our pool first priority. We think they are valuable, because we (and many others) believe that when ASICs come online, difficulty is going to go up ~10x, making GPU mining no longer profitable. Note: to redeem Loyalty Points, we will require you to run our custom HPC-work client, so we can perform these more valuable work units with your GPU.
Joining our Protected pool is probably in your interest if:
- Your miners are GPUs
- You think mining earnings are going to drop drastically as difficulty and the block reward halves.
- You decide the option to continue GPU mining profitably after earnings drop is worth the 5% fee. (we think we're offering miners a very attractive deal).
- You're excited about earning Bitcoins for doing pro-social HPC work like Protein Folding, and want to be among the first to get these jobs
- You want responsive customer service.
- You want to maximize long-term BTC earnings
Our pool is probably not for you if:
- You don't think the Loyalty Points price protection is worth the 5% fee
- Your miners aren't GPUs or you plan on selling your GPUs as soon as ASICs come online
- You want to maximize short-term BTC earnings
Here's a link to our main pool thread. "The Fine Print" in the OP describes the rules of the pool:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-coinlab-protected-pool-99643
Hope to see you join our pool
Chris