PPLNS prevents pool hopping abuse but works well for miners mining at the pool for a quite some time.
I asked this in another thread, but would you mind shining a little light onto the crazy hashrate/difficulty excursions that I am seeing on the sumo pool several times a day recently?
I'm not a very experienced miner, in fact sumo.fairpool is the first pool that I've mined for any amount of time (couple weeks now) - so this may be obvious to more experienced people.
It seems overall difficulty stays 'normally' around 6-8k (might be a little off) and the total Hashrate for sumo is about 25M/hs
From time to time (generally several times in a 24 hour period) the hashrate jumps to 35-43M/hs and therefore difficulty increases to 9-11k. Usually this lasts several hours and then SUMO returns to 'normal'
Is the the result of large mining farms jumping from one coin to another ?
I'm sure it is the result of pointing a lot of rented hashrate to SUMO network.
Doesn't PPLNS make that 'not as attractive' or is their hashrate just so large it is inconsequential to them ?
PPLNS is the FairPool's rewards calculation system.
That said, yes, it is not attractive for them to point the hashrate to the FairPool, and they don't.
Consider this rented hashrate as a big farm doing solo mining.
As I'm new to this my Hash is only about 2Kh/s which brings me just under 1 sumo/day however during these big difficulty jumps I drop to under /5 SUmo daily. This brings my daily average down to .6-.7 according to how long these big guys stay around for.
I appreciate any knowledge you can give me about this. Thank you.
The SUMO network's difficulty increases, what in turn brings down your daily average.
This is unhealthy for the SUMO. But at least SUMO guys implemented so-called "anti-botnet" difficulty retarget algo to minimize such abuse's effect.
The situation is even worse for the most Monero forks, tons of which you see around nowadays.