Topic: How can 0% fee pools make money? - page 2. (Read 6456 times)

thank you, we will work on that ASAP.
I appreciate the feedback.

I think the sliding photos, need to be more consistent. They are all different quality, and size. Apart from that it is quite good. 

Yes, we just started.
However I truly believe that we have a great product, unlike anyone currently out there.
I've mined on the big pools, and our interface is way better in every sense of the word. (at least I think so).
We were miners first, and we took a look at what we would of wanted in a pool and we incorporated those things into our site.
We are adding new features everyday.

I understand what you are saying, and I agree... it's a long & winding road ahead, but everyone needs to start somewhere.
We truly believe that the product will speak for itself.


Thank you for taking a look, we appreciate it.
Best of luck to you as well.

~Charles

You just started right? You only have 2 BTC miners, and 0 LTC miner. 

Good luck.

I actually run a 0% fee pool. In fact, we are currently paying a 3% Bonus on solved blocks. (as a promotion)
We are doing this because we are NEW. We are trying to grow our miner base.

Our business model is that we want to provide an equal playing field for everyone who wants to mine both bitcoin & litecoin.
We want to share evenly in the profits with those of us who help us out. This makes a sense of community and makes it so that no one person is better than the other, we all have an equal stake in the mining process. Yes we host the pool (in house with cloud-stack technology) Yes it does cost us money & electricity and time to run and maintain a pool, especially one that is as rich and robust as ours. However we want to make our money in other places.
By offering mining contracts, by offering seminars on bitcoin & litecoin, by holding workshops and educating the public. An educated consumer is the perfect consumer. We also plan on making money by utilizing our social media interface & by selling advertising to crypto currency related businesses.

So while I can understand why someone would be skeptical about 0% pools, I can assure you that we have other ways to make a profit.

We want our miners to come first, we are miners ourselves.

I am not saying all 0% fee pools are like this, I am just sharing with you our vision as a new pool in a competitive market.

We are not a big pool by any means, but we have a lot to offer and we think that the majority of you would like what we have done.
Please feel free to take a look, your support is greatly appreciated.

Charles - Btc Ltc Rush
http://www.btcltcrush.com

p.s. we are in the process of purchasing our security certificate, please disregard the error for now. accept the certificate. thank you.

Eligius also keeps shares done by people mining with invalid addresses - say you connect your miner with a gibberish work name, work you do will go to the pool's coffers.

I am very suspicious of 0% pools.  Running a large pool is full time job and computing and data center space isn't cheap.  While I suppose there are people that are willing to work 10 hour days for free, and spend thousands per month of their own money and hope that donations cover it,  it does seem odd doesn't it? Mother Theresa of Bitcoin?

Add in that pools are now multi-million dollar business's.  A pool with say 15% of hashing power has revenue of $219 million per year. (30 blocks a day, 365 days a year, $800/coin)

How many CEO's running a $219 million dollar business would do so purely on donations and cover expenses out his own pocket?

How would it be done?  Withholding blocks or withholding shares would be detectable (although you could mask shares by not reporting %'s instead exact numbers).  The maifia solved this problem long ago.  Skimming.  The easiest way to have a dummy "house account".  Credit 1 dummy share for every 100 shares would dilute the earnings overall by 1% and deliver $2million a year in earnings. 

Creating a dummy share for every 1,000 real shares would pay $219,000 a year in earnings.  (plus donations)

A skim of $2million, or $219,000 well within variance and luck and virtually undetectable.

You're quite right, pools cost a lot of effort and money to be kept online.  So it is indeed a good question, how do they survive.

Let's take a few pools:
- p2pool: this is open source software.  The software is free, but you need to run it yourself.  So not "free", you'll have to host it yourself.  Also, it has a 1% donation to the author "fee", altough it can be disabled, which has to be done explicitly.
- ghash.io.  Owned by cex.io, they use it as a marketing method, they make a lot of money renting hash power.  Hard competition for honest pools...
- eligius: they are driven by donations.

So yes, free pools are to be questioned.  But in general the big pools do it for the money (direct or indirect), the smaller pools do it to support bitcoin (and from donations...)

And yes, you must trust your pool.  Pools can abuse their position very easily.   There have been several cases (bitclockers, bitcoinpool) that are known for cheating on their users, so some have been caught.

In my region there is a saying: "Not even the dog wags its tail for free".
Some pools charge more than 5%, some are free. Most pools publish their reward: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools
Some pools (i.e.: eligius, ghash, p2pool, itzod) charge 0% to users and even share the transaction fees.

Pools are expensive services to maintain, where is the deal for 0% pools?

Information gathering like Google? Fees hidden in the rawarding calculation?
Ghash could have a "production control strategy", but the others?

Who or what can stop a pool operator from adding a line of code in the users rewarding script, to multiply his own miner shares before the final calculation?