Topic: Pool Reward Comparison (Read 4719 times)

Anyone made a fresh pool reward comparison lately?
Without block % contributed reported, it will require a little extra work to compare (shares submitted divided by shares in the block), but its still worth it to see how various proportional vs pps pools are treating miners.

UPDATE: The Business Savvy miner on Eligius wtfpps has apparently cut their losses at
"Balance * Unpaid reward : 59.27270700 BTC"
Hopefully in 7 days or so, they'll get something for their investments. . .
http://eligius.st/~artefact2/3/16ccjkuuQjQ64H9qssmXnj695DdBDR75wJ

The way eligius pps works, choosing a new address or addresses registers as poolhopping and will result in a loss of profit, so this business savvy miner has almost assuredly moved somewhere else (slush?)

Looks like the business savvy miner might have moved elsewhere, I hope they get the 56+ BTC the pool shows they owe. Unfortunately miners don't always get access to the facts presented in this thread before choosing a pool. Sidenote, hopefully the btc will get more valuable over the rime that miner is forced to loan it to the pool, that way the failed payouts could have been done "in the miner's best interests". Gotta love paternalism.

It looks like at least 1 pool operator has outsmarted the pool hoppers, without borrowing BTC from other miners or otherwise shorting their rewards below the proportional level. A simple reporting round shares change will prevent the problems, as I posted previously (quote below). Pool operators don't need to implement a convoluted pps system to "fight" pool hopping, which incidently gives the pool huge windfalls:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=18567.msg310250#msg310250

That positive emotional outlook will definitely help people for pool selection.

This thread is intended to compare CURRENT reward systems based on FACTS of how the pools calculate and distribute rewards.
You're free to post here, but don't be surprised if I nudge the thread back to these roots.
Please help fight censorship by posting facts!
Like that 60GH miner working 14hrs 49min and getting excluded from the block payout (in the quote above). . .

Plus the fact that GimEEE expects Priority Support for Professional Miners (sm) when he doesn't actually pay anything for it and this pool is little more than a fancy hobby. He should just go to one of these pools that are a business and get a contract with penalties in it for "skimming miners" and "withholding fair compensation" for "honest hard working ordinary miner people", yadda yadda yawnda.

I'm pretty sure they will be paid out, once the blocks are confirmed and everything.

I can see how the situation with the US pool being closed in the middle of testing a new system could be a bit upsetting, but I can also agree with those that think that you're causing a bit too much noise over this. For example, I'm pretty sure the Eligius thread still had "please test... experimental pool" in the title when this was going on, and I think that would indicate that things should be expected to not work properly all the time.

It wasn't. It's a glitch in the forum software. Now please move along, there's nothing to see here.

LOLS, where was I wrong?
Why was this thread censored?

You still don't get it, do you? Eeeverybody else is wrong and you're the lonely cowboy fighting for an earnest man's pay.

Stop mining at Eligius this instant and/or stop complaining or I will sue you for mental cruelty!!

The page I'm looking at shows the pool operator has withheld payment of over 28BTC of "earned" reward to this business savvy miner.
http://eligius.st/~artefact2/3/16ccjkuuQjQ64H9qssmXnj695DdBDR75wJ
I hope Eligius does pay this hard working miner everything they owe (if this isn't the op's miner anyways).
I did get paid by eligius eventually, but it took about 2 weeks, then the pool op rated me negative for publicizing his practices  :-(
Not to mention the forum mod diablo (and possibly others) abusing his authority to censor this thread and threads that link to it :-(
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23760.0

You're still not getting the system... there is no smoothing on short rounds. It's pay per share without a fee. The smoothing happens when there's a round that's so long that there are no accumulated funds to pay full PPS.


So, it fixes the the problem of normal PPS where the pool takes  an 8-10% fee on each share to cover for times of bad luck , and where the pool makes a profit if there are no such blocks.

Edit: Or, you could go look at the round with almost 4M shares, where Mr. 60Ghash got paid 27.8BTC for a 19% contribution, and with some multiplication of that percentage I would assume that the pool paid for a total of about 140BTC worth of shares in that round.

Ouch, almost painful to look at - http://eligius.st/~artefact2/3/16ccjkuuQjQ64H9qssmXnj695DdBDR75wJ
But it doesn't smooth the reward down to much less than the expected for his hash rate, I'll concede that.
It'll be interesting to see if the miners get caught up on payments with the long blocks coming without having to wait a week or two.


This new reward system definitely clears up the problem of pool operator not getting paid enough (quite a windfall - 34+ out of 50 btc on this one - http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000003bc639f3a98f337d105706583c0dc383ef75bc508240c6ae91c)

Seems the key to eligius pool operators windfall is going to be if potential miners don't get access to the facts of the payout system we've discussed in this thread. i.e. moving this thread from mining/pools to a more concealed forum location will likely help you hit more noobs with your pps system. Willing to use any tricks you can to try to make some BTC I see :-P

Th 60Gh/s second user is to consistent to be a botnet, the idle time of a research cluster or even a smaller pool that runs off Eligius, so it's probably a corporate entity who uses the pool either for its own purpose or (maybe more likely) for rented mining contracts. There was a miner with a similar hashrate on the EU pool, but who dropped off at the beginning of Eligius-3... so, if we assume that it is the same user who has returned I guess we can say that someone with very large investments in mining hardware and a sense of business has given the system his approval after watching it for a day or so.

As you posted to my chart in the other thread here is an update.
The system performs exactly es expected, I really like it.

Thank you Luke-Jr and Artefact2 for your work, smart Pool and great stats.  

Eligius is one of the best-paying pools out there for non-hopping miners (assuming there are no idle shares, downtimes or other technical problems).

Stop comparing single round rewards to their proportional equivalent. You should compare reward per time span (i.e. reward for 24 hours mining). Then, eligius will turn out to pay more than i.e. Deepbit (because of 3% fee and maybe some pool hoppers who exploit deepbit. Though I wouldn't know how to do it, as deepbit delays stats by 1 hour.). Depending on the number of pool hoppers at BTC guild, eligius will also pay more than BTC guild, even at 0% donation.

Of course, if you start 2 miners with equal hashrate right now and look at them tomorrow, you might earn more at deepbit if it gets lucky (check their stats page). If deepbit has average luck, and eligius is not currently on a longer period of bad luck (where it can't pay from savings), then you will get more BTC from eligius than deepbit.


(BTW - right now, eligius appears to be *very lucky*, with only very few blocks >1,000,000 shares. So the savings are probably big enough to suffer through a period of bad luck with longer rounds.)

He submitted 0.4 BTC worth of shares, so he gets paid 0.4 BTC. Simple. Your percent is an arbitrary number, with no relevance to the work done.

thanks, that definitely clears up the theory of hopping.
Maybe a simple 5 minute delay for the 2 pools publishing the shares submitted per round would effectively kill the hoppers profitability, eliminating the hopper benefit for the first 5 min.
Also, maybe the pool could throttle new miners for the first 5-10 minutes of each round. With btcguild/deepbit, this is almost half the round anyways.
Or, a miner entering at the beginning of a round only gets work as fast as they were at the end of the last round for the first 5-10 minutes. This would actually decrease the hoppers work and result in them not submitting shares effectively.

But, as I said, monitoring stats would be the best way to catch the hopper, rather than sacrifice non-hoppers having payouts far below the expected proportional payout.
Like this guy: http://eligius.st/~artefact2/3/16ccjkuuQjQ64H9qssmXnj695DdBDR75wJ
WTF, submitting 20% of block shares, but with a  0.4 BTC reward.
Must be the pool op (who gets the lost rewards anyway), or is there another rational explanation for why they keep mining there? (yeah botnet that can't be redirected to better paying pool, maybe. . .)
But that miner did get rewarded 0.73 in that block generation: http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000002ff87f817e00d3f86e063c9caa16e7c99ce329b7f3347e4ecf7
with 48.70949313BTC being held by the pool operator. . .
more fair than proportional payouts?

Yes. Check it out: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=17970.0

It's not really hard. poclbm and phoenix can be modified to hop quite easily if you know what you're doing.

A getwork request (which is everything needed to switch pools) takes approx. 1 second. (edit: Clearing the result/getwork queues and forcing the miner thread to stop work should be easy to do as well, so you don't submit "old shares" to the new pool.)

Most proportional pools don't have a minimum payout. Only BitClockers comes to my mind, they have 0.10 (that would be a lot for me, especially with pool hopping, but I'm only at 280mhash/s).

That's right - but they can't prove that you're hopping. You might just be lucky and have connection problems on long rounds. (Okay, sounds like a bad excuse   )
Also, I suspect most pool operators wouldn't like banning hoppers. After all, hoppers might solve a block as well, giving the operator 0-3% fees and transaction fees. Only the other miners are getting less. (They don't mind obviously, as proportional is still the favourite reward scheme.)

Hopping would still be profitable with this, I guess, as most pools are not close to being overloaded.

It's probably not 30% yet, as only few miners are skilled enough/care enough to pool hop.
And it benefits the pool, yes, but the pool benefits the hopper more. Hopping is a win for the hopper, and it's a win for operators of small pools that get some GH/s boost in the beginning of rounds. It's a loss for non-hopping miners.

If I understand this correctly, it should be easy to send a few shares to the pool every 30min, thus keeping them from cutting your reward in half. Also, I seem to remember that this certain pool allows to get rid of the 50% cut if you donate a certain percentage of your reward (like 2% or 3%) - a pool hopper easily gets a bouns of more than 2% or 3%.

I think I see, the sacrifice of higher reward in previous rounds (compared to proportional), is compensated by a smooth increase in rewards on later long blocks. Kinda like paying it forward to the pool. I like it!

Pool hopping being profitable is not all too feasible afaik. Has anyone seen any hopper scripts?
The profitable scenario would require the hopper to
a) constantly keep his miners at high speed (to compete with steady miners going full blast)
while
b) constantly mining on the freshest proportional pool (to get the pool-hop effect)
and also minimize lost shares from hopping.
This seems a little hard to code, and possibly harder to effectively implement without designing your own miner from ground up.
Wouldn't the hopper lose many shares from having the miner constantly switch pools every time it identified a "fresh pool", they lag from having to switch gears and reallocate it's efforts.

Not to mention their rewards are split between so many pools with various minimum payouts, etc. would be a pain to manage.

Theoretically, it is possible, I guess, but further isn't pool hopping easily detectable by the targeted proportional pool?
They'll see the miner has consistently lower rewards shares on all longer blocks, which I'm sure they'd notice if this pool hopping script existed.
Having open stats like artifact2 is definitely a good way to catch it though with more eyes on miners in general.

Also, couldn't the pools easily code the server to give shares to the oldest miners first (LP, etc.), thus rewarding the steady miners who remain loyal, while also allowing the hoppers to jump in and contribute but last in the queue to get work.
You talk about a 30% loss, but also as you say, every share of work done is a possibility for a solve, it's just as possible that letting the hopper jump in could result in a block solve from that extra work, thus actually benefit the pool.

Seems a pool could easily punish a hopper without punishing the whole pool, such as one pool that cuts 50% of the reward for miners who aren't working in any of the last 30 minutes of the block solve.
Basically, if hopping were a problem, there seems simple technical solutions.

Notice that in the most recent round, my contribution was just below 1%.  In proportional (btcguild, deepbit prop, etc), I would have gotten only 0.49885 BTC.  I actually got 0.77635355 BTC.

The system works.