The payout is a single transaction about 30-50K bytes - and usually with a low 42k sat fee.
Ah, so it can be a single transaction. Ok, this is clear.
I put it in our work so that our next block after it's sent out will confirm it.
However, it can be confirmed before that - like of late since blocks are not very full all the time and thus fees are low.
Edit: Of course, all our work is with unconfirmed transactions - you can't include a transaction that's already confirmed in another block
How is the work of pools controlled? How other pools know we have some work (unconfirmed transactions) pending? Is there some governing network to synchronize the pools? Or is all the alignment / syncing done by the pools themselves?
When pools are looking for the next block, do all of them look for the same block (so content of the block is known and fixed before the block is found) at any given time ? Or do they just look for "their own" block that is getting its number only after it is found? Still, on what point is it decided what transactions are included into a particular block?
That's the BTC Blockchain - that everyone must adhere to the majority rules governing it, to ensure their block is accepted by everyone else.
We all look for a block at the 'next height' and record in that work the
hash of the previous block (among other things).
Whoever finds it first, tells everyone else about it, then we all switch up a block and continue on in the same manner.
Transactions are just whatever, whoever knows about them, but when you find a block you have to provide details (in one way or another) of all the transactions in it to everyone else.
Then everyone else will flag those transactions as confirmed and the inputs spent - so they can't be spent again.
There's only one catch in the whole process.
If 2 (or more) pools/miners find a block at the same height at about the same time.
It's very simple how it's handled though:
2 pools send out their blocks.
Everyone else gets these 2 blocks in some somewhat random order based on how connected they are to the 2 pools who found them.
Whichever block you get first is the one you will (usually) switch up to and work on.
Some time after this, someone will find the next block ... and that will decide the previous winner, it will be whichever of the 2 blocks they included the
hash of the previous block in their block.
Thus it's implied that whoever found their block first, in the original 2 duplicate height blocks, is most likely to get it out first to the most of the other pools/miners and is most likely to win.
Of course that's not guaranteed, someone could get lucky and confirm their own block, even if no one else saw it first, but it's usually the case
Edit: and of course this could happen with the next block also and thus have a chain of undecided blocks - but that's ever so unlikely, but will again be solved the same way.
