In general, though, I believe I will be doing a variant of your list option #2. Up to X BTC in fees to miners, remainder held by the pool. This will let Eligius keep with its informal policy of returning accidental transaction fees to their owner (with signmessage proof for all inputs), minus X BTC. After a certain amount of time has passed with no claim then the balance could be released to miners. It is very obvious that any transaction with a large transaction fee is likely a mistake at this point.
I do believe that long term Eligius will need a % of the transaction fees (NOT BLOCK REWARD) for expenses to survive.
Yes. Set this up initially, when transaction fees are small, e.g.
- Eligius claims 10% of transaction fees, for pool expenses -- maybe even higher initially, like 50%, but plan to decrease percentage over time
- Plus a safety valve, if fees exceed 25 BTC in a single block (or pick your number)
1. Add transaction fees to the 25 BTC rewarded to miners at the top of the share log when a block is found, thus paying more shelved shares using transaction fees.
Yes, this is a nice option.
Fees to miners experiment number one has been implemented.
Currently 100% of fees are rewarded at the time the block is mined. Unfortunately the fees portion can not be included in balance estimates accurately on the stats side, but are reflected when the block is rewarded.
This is implemented as of and including pool block height 261279.
While from this point on I will ensure that fees will be rewarded to miners in one form or another, this particular method is experimental and subject to change and tweaks as needed. Eventually I do believe a % of transaction fees will need to be kept for pool operating expenses, but for now that is not needed and 100% goes to miners.
I will run this experiment for some time (few weeks probably) and evaluate its performance and reception with miners at that time and proceed one of two ways: Leave this method in place permanently, or continue on to the next fee distribution experiment. All would be dependent on how well miners like the setup and how well it works in practice.
As of now, this should average roughly a 1% bonus to payouts using a fee average for the last 1000 network blocks.
Thanks for using Eligius!
-wk