(yes, I'm using my production site for development... my profs would have killed me!).
Your customers would share the same opinion when something goes wrong because of this.
A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?
If you want to keep a proportional reward system, you should get used to feeling like you are robbing your legitimate miners (while rewarding the thieves that mine for thievery). See
this article for mathematical details.
A question to the users on this forum - would you prefer a proportional reward system, or PPLNS? I feel like the current proportional system would be good for people who can't mine all the time, but it also means that the first users are going to get a lot more BTC than those who come later. Thoughts/opinions?
Myself I don't mine 24/7 but usually shut down at night so I might be interested in a system that would be best for that way of mining, if I was going to use your pool.
Is the proportional reward system best for that?
Yes, proportional would work best in that regard. Proportional gives you a cut of the mined block based on how many shares you contributed to a particular round. For example, if it took 200000 shares to mine a block and you contributed 5000, you would get 5000/200000 * 50BTC, or 1.25 BTC. With PPLNS, if you haven't submitted any shares in a while you may not get anything when a round ends.
This isn't how it works. PPLNS usually has
n equivalent to two times the difficulty, which means that even if a round is very long, the payouts are perfectly fair to any non-24/7 miner, and long rounds only increase the variance. Proportional pools, on the other hand, will pay out less to honest on/off miners during long rounds. The balance is given away to people deliberately trying to game the system.
As for development, this is a side project for me, so I've been keeping things quick and dirty while active users are minimal. My full time job is as CEO of a tech startup (Oikoi) in Waterloo, Ontario - check out
our website if you're interested! Once I build up a userbase I'll be creating staging/dev environments and running everything through a continuous integration server.
Most of my development has been with proportional rewarding in mind, so I haven't looked that much into PPLNS - it seems I may have had some incorrect assumptions. My backend can support it, so I would absolutely be willing to switch to PPLNS if the community would prefer it.