Topic: FPPS or PPS Pool with instant same day payout (Recommendation) (Read 617 times)

https://arta-door.com

Well considering I know ViaBTC pays kickbacks, which are illegal is most jurisdictions, it may not be the best pool to mine at

I know this to be true since: someone managing a mining operation that was mining at ViaBTC considered coming to my pool, but only if I paid them kickbacks like they claimed ViaBTC did.
Alas I rejected them and they stayed at ViaBTC

As sustainable business model would help operators. PPS is detrimental to the network imo effectively leasing your hashrate to a pool to do as they wish with it in most cases. For PPLNS to work you need to provide an environment that supports consistency in payout and have a long decay so work isn't lost. Planning for all possible variables actually strengthens PPLNS compared to PPS in reward an with consistency. Obviously you can dismiss me as biased with our SPLNS "+" score on Laurentia Pool. 

But...the reverse is also true. For whatever reason the small PPLNS pool has only been hitting 1 block a month but due to luck it's only on some of the biggest fee days. At the 6.25 point per block fees are now a lot more important. Even an hour or two apart can cost you 10%.

Block 632,485 had 1.198BTC in fees mined 14:50:58 UTC (Today)
Block 632,491 had 0.396BTC in fees mined 16:21:25 UTC

Ouch.....if you were on a long PPLNS round and found 632,491 instead of 485. But......WooHoo extra beer if you found 485 instead of 491. And....whatever if you are on a large PPS+ pool.....

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And bitminter.com a very small PPLNS pool is shutting down. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitminter-bitcoin-mining-pool-shutdown-mining-2020-07-01-website-2021-06-01-788753

Unless they find a block in the next 30 days how much BTC did people loose mining there instead of a nice PPS pool or a larger PPLNS pool over the last 10 months? Even if they find a block all that work that was done before the 1/2ing is getting paid with a 6.25 block. These are the losses that the people who scream only mine in PPLNS pools or only mine on low fee pools fail to see or account for.

Stay safe.

-Dave

Alas, there are clear financial risk issues with rental.
It is to the rental miner owner's advantage, and the rental site, to withhold blocks, not all blocks, just some, making it hard or impossible to detect.
(lesser diff changes means being paid more)

The forum is full of altcoins scams, yet a large % of the forum have no qualms getting involved with them thinking only about (dubious) financial advantage.
Clearly it is no stretch of the imagination that people would withhold blocks to their financial advantage also

Thread on the subject:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/pps-block-withholding-and-rentals-1002086

How about: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52190610.

I did not necessarily mean funky as bad / stealing in and of itself but also along the lines of funky as something is wrong and the 4 people left mining there never noticed. Bravo Mining had the had the same thing when they shutdown but kept their stratum ports open. Stopped communicating here, website down and for a week before the stratum ports that were still spitting out and accepting work on an old block stopped responding.

And that's great that you "found and blocked" cheating miners And that you block rental sites. It's your pool do as you wish. There have been many people who have found blocks using NiceHash and MRR (myself included) not going to debate what you want to do.

-Dave

I'd say that's just a guess?

... I can give very clear examples of exactly the opposite, that has happened.

During Nov-2017 my pool found two very high difficulty blocks in a run of 5 blocks, the two 875% and 928% - total for the 5 was 1936% yikes.
There was a factor of having around 50% of the pool hash rate coming from rental at the time.

To analyse this problem, I contacted a few of the largest miners on the pool (that represented a very large % of the pool hash rate), got them to check all their block find records in the systems they ran (and also in their miners) to make sure it matched the blocks they found on the pool, I wrote a second independent, accurate, binary block hash check from scratch and added it to my KDB code, then reran 3 months worth of the pool shares (I log all of them) through the code on another server, overlapping the time of the 'issue' to see if the front end pool code had somehow missed one or more blocks.

The result was: no it wasn't a problem from the pool's non-binary block hashing - being the last straw on the subject for me, I banned rental mining ever since.

Jul 2018, slush, who was much bigger, had a run of five blocks with a total worse value ... 2109% ...
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.41534985
Their response was effectively to ignore it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.41900729

Many of the following posts are about the 400PH miner who should have averaged about 2 blocks a day and the pool stats showed none by him, 8 days after the above bad run.
Their reply was that the stats are "For Fun"
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.43143004

Easy to say, impossible to do, if someone has large enough hash power they rather solo mine, someone who has a mid sized or small hash rare won't take the risk, there is almost 0 incentives for miners to support small pools, they want to make $$ with as low risk as possible and everything else means nothing to the majority of them.


Wrong, you mine to kano.is i mine to antpool ( will never do  ), my connection goes down for 3 days i lose 3 days of mining, your connection goes down around the time kano hits a block you lose all the pow submitted prior to that (could be a month, 3 months or anything).

You commented on the guy who lost a few hundred dollars on kano pool, if he was mining on a large pplns pool his loss would have been very low, large PPLNS pools are close to as safe as pps pools given the small ramp time whereby you don't risk months of pow.

I remember when some pools shut down gracefully here over the years, giving weeks / months of warning and people were still pointing their miners to the pool to the last second when the operators were saying you are not going to get paid, go elsewhere. Yet people kept them there. I have been guilty of pointing my stuff a pool as backup that was offline for months so I never checked. And so on. So yeah, the smaller pools are costing people money who are not on top of things or have other issues. The smaller pools are more vulnerable to big players messing with them. Smaller pools tend to fly under the radar if they are doing something funky. etc.

Somewhat rambling thing, I posted something similar a while ago but...

I actually touched on something similar a while ago, on how a government / cabal of banks / really rich person could do it to slow down / destroy bitcoin growth. Back of the napkin numbers 2016 blocks every 2 weeks / 4032 a month. Let's use 1.25BTC in fees per block since that gives 7.5BTC total per block.

7.5 * $10000 (figure a higher price) gives us $75000 multiply that by 4032 blocks gives a bit over $300,000,000 but once again. Sticking with round numbers. Take $300,0000,000 and multiply it by 1.15 and you are at less then $350,000,000 but lets run with that number.

$2 billion USD I can run a mining pool that does FPSS at 15% above (the 1.15 multiplier) and never finds a block for 6 months.

How many small pools can I put under with that? How many larger ones would be crying in pain?

In the process I could destroy every other SHA256 coin with the mining power that would be pointed to that pool. Transactions will slow to a crawl for weeks waiting for difficulty re-adjust down while everyone points to my "pool".

Towards the end I do point the hashrate towards BTC. Then after 2 or 3 difficulty re adjustments back up I turn it off and walk away. How many people throw their hands up and walk away at that point.

Allowing for staff and overhead since this is a "professional" thing lets add on another $200 million. Since I would have to buy a lot of BTC at "retail" lets add on another $200 million and lets just add on another $100 million for the price of BTC going above $10k and staying there.

In this admitted fantasy world I have spent $2.5 billion (if I never sold any of the alts I mined, actually got 90% of the worlds hashrate and a few other things) and done the following:

1) Killed just about every small pool
2) Hurt a lot of bigger pools
3) Decimated all SHA256 coins
4) Slowed down BTC for a long time

However, if I was actually a "bigger" pool myself I could have been playing this game to fuck with the competition. Now that BTC is on the way to recovery how many people  will mine at my 5% fee pool because I stuck with them as the big evil pool that did all this was playing there games.

Sorry if it's a long rambling post. Just felt it should be said again.

-Dave

The answer is rather simple, throw hash at small PPLNS pools so they aren't small any more. Oh and don't fragment the PPLNS scene even more by creating another small pool.

The last reason of mining for 5 months and losing out because of your network outage caused you to ramp down is true of massive PPLNS pools more so than small ones. The ramp time on a big pool for pplns can be in the matter of hours. The bigger the pool is the smaller the ramp, even 5ND was small when difficulty was much less in the past. I can remember kano pool having a ramp time of 36 hours in the good ole days.

Or you could mine for a few months and then the pool operator modifies the N value for payment and you lose all the work you did, or a small PPLNS pool decides to shut down before hitting a block when the last block it found was a while ago, or you mine for 5 months and on a given random day your internet connection goes down for 3 days and so happen that is the time the pool hits a block, i could spam the thread of reasons why mining on small pplns is rather risky, unless you do this for a hobby, nothing except for either very large PPLNS pools or a PPS pool makes any sense, that is the reason why large pools are getting bigger.

The problem with anything that has to do with money is the fact that monopoly and centralization will always find it is way to it, a rich co-operations like Binance can afford payment in PPS+ for free for 0% for a whole month, given the hashrate of that pool, the capital invested is HUGE, and then they will settle with 2.5% fees on FPPS IIRC, so 1.5% more compared to small PPLNS pools is not worth the risk to most miners, and it will only get worse for small pools with a small capital, that is sad but true.

I guess the nay-sayers didn't read what I said


I wasn't referring to my pool size.

Also, none of the pools that pay the modified PPS methods keep the same reward level when fees go down ...
That's called running at a loss, which the PPS/*PPS* pools avoid by making sure they get a high enough % of the pool's total,
which is the point of my comment to start with, the PPLNS pools can set a smaller fee for that reason.

Mandatory reading about the statistics of payout for those who haven't read it:
https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf

Also on a small pool when a block is found you get a much larger slice of the reward.

It's always been the case that if you need a constant drip drip of regular daily/weekly/monthly income then a payment system that delivers that is going to right for you. Over longer periods of time, however you will make more on a pplns pool, luck being equal.

However, once the pool gets small enough that it's not hitting at least one block per diff change then it becomes very hard to stay the distance, although it can be very satisfying to do so if the small pool has a very lucky sting of fast blocks.

It's not like the bigger pools have been that lucky lately either, a quick glance at slush, viabtc and antpool show varying degrees of luck, and it's all luck, finding a block, getting a block with large transaction fees.

Some pools also hit you with fees two ways. E.g. viabtc's PPS+  charges a 4% PPS fee on the block reward and a 2% PPLNS fee on the transaction fee reward.

All pools are subject to the following:

So here's a table of Bitcoin block finding probabilites:


Meaning that, for example, there is a chance of hitting a 300% block 1 out of every 20 block found.

Kano pool although it felt like forever between  the last block 5 months ago and the most recent block, it wasn't even 300% and the expected number of blocks over that period of time was somewhere between 10 and 15 depending on difficulty and pool hash rate.

Yeah since the jump.
let me double check this.

So you now have two risk factors.

normal luck.
fee luck.

the pps+ fee always pays. the 105 to 116% fees.

you never miss them not once.

day after day.

a six block a year pool now needs to hit those six fees during high fees times.

Fortunately since the 1/2 ing
kano pool is a lucky pool.

they hit a 8.3 block paid about 8.217

which is over 125% payout.

8.217/6.25 =  131%

in fact kano.is is god like since the 1/2 ing.

we have made 2008 blocks since 1/2 ing.

Since you chimed in. Lets use your pool as an example (was thinking more just for theory but)......

Bob is mining on some FPPS pool that has a 3% fee. Alice is mining on your pool with a .9% fee (which is a small pool as I specified above).

Fees are high in relation to block rewards now. They were even higher last week. This week they dropped and there might have even been a few blocks that were not full. Even if they were not full instead of 100sat /vb the transactions were clearing with 5 sat/ vb.

So all other things being equal. Bob is happily mining away with his 500TH, Alice is happily mining away with her 500TH. In the olden days Alice, *should* be making more then Bob.

But, it's 2020 things are different then they used to be. A bare block is only worth 6.25BTC so fees make a big difference. The block you mined last week had 2BTC in fees.

That is close to 1/3 of a block.

How much could the potential loss be for Alice if a pool such as yours, having perfect 100% luck getting 1 block a month instead of hitting the 2BTC fee blocks hits a string of 1BTC fee blocks.

On the same note for NOW Alice mining on your pool could be having a much better month then Bob if you get very lucky and find more blocks then average.

It's going to be a larger and larger issue for smaller pools as the time goes on. If you get a bunch of blocks that still have good "block finding luck" but bad "large fees luck".

As I said it's an interesting math problem (that is outside my ability to figure out, I barely got out of my statistics class with a B- 30 years ago). Yes I understand it's pure luck as to the fees that are out there in the mempool when you find a block. Much like finding a block is also luck based. That does not help Alice pay her electric bill. Bob knows more or less what he is going to make.

Stay safe.

-Dave

edit: mikeywith posted above while I was typing this, kind of said what I was trying to say better :-)

A very interesting point, Loyce had scraped all the blockchain data needed to conduct such a study, I have the tools and skills to do what you want, the problem is I can't seem to figure out a perfect and fair way of doing so.

This kind of study could probably work only by comparing two pools and not the whole PPLNS vs PPS pools, another problem would be the fact that some pools are PPS+ while the others are FPPS, where the former pays the block fees in PPS while the latter pays it in PPLNS so the profit from the transaction is subject to the pool ability to find blocks in the first place as Novepool has explained - if someone knows how one would EXACTLY go about all these factors I would be willing to conduct the study.

Although based on my own experience which can't be used as evidence since many factors could have affected it, I made more BTC mining on a PPS+ pool despite paying a larger fee, it has been about 2 years since I moved nearly all of my hashrate and the gears I manage on PPS+ pools (currently testing Binance pool for one of my clients), before moving to PPS I divided my hashrate power between PPLNS and PPS+ pools and IIRC in the course of 4-6 months PPS+ was the better option, but again, many factors could have contributed to the results, and for the record, the reason I moved to PPS was not this tiny little experimental I had.



What seems to be easy to guess is that PPLNS pool with small hashrate that finds a block once in a blue moon will be the less profitable compared to large PPLNS pools (pool fees ignored), since the fees reward spikes only last for a few days or weeks at best, those small pools's chances of hitting a block during that short period of time are slim, while large pools will most certainly manage to hit a few blocks with handsome fee rewards.

When a pplns pool (other than antpool) that finds multiple blocks each diff change, charges a 1% fee, it means that the pool keeps a total of 1% of all the block rewards for the found blocks, thus miners get 99% of the total block rewards (including txns fees) - which is higher than any PPS/FPPS/PPS+ pool.

I think you misunderstand how PPLNS works.

Just a minor comment to this. After the latest 1/2ing it does make more of a difference. Especially after last week when fees were very high. It's going be happening more and more with fee spikes where yes PPS and it's variations are going to work out much better then small pools that are doing PPLNS and all the other methods.

Would be an interesting math problem [that is way above my ability] to see how someplace like VIA with it's high fees would compare to some PPLNS pool that only finds a block or 2 a month  / week if they miss the big fee blocks. Not that they miss blocks or are below a normal point on the luck curve but, if instead of getting 2.1BTC or 1.8BTC in fees they only get .9BTC or 1.3BTC at what point does the risk become so high that PPS just works better.

Stay safe.

-Dave

I stand corrected, there is indeed a difference, but given the fact that transactions fees are the way too tiny in respect to the block reward, getting the transactions fees in PPS or PPLNS makes a little to no difference, especially when mining with large pools that actually find blocks, if however, you mine with a small pool that offers PPS then yes maybe you want to make sure it's FPPS and not PPS+.

Thanks for the clarification.

I would like to add a slight clarification.

PPS+ and FPPS are not exactly the same.

PPS+ means that the block reward will be paid theoretically but the transaction fee will only be paid when they find a block. This also means that your rewards will vary slightly as the transaction fee will differ between each block.

For FPPS it will pay the block reward AND the transaction fee theoretically. How each pool calculates the “theoretical” transaction fee will differ. At NovaBlock, we take the average over the past 24 hour period to ensure it is fair.

This is why you could find some discrepancies between earnings in pools everyday.