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Topic: [POOL][Scrypt][Scrypt-N][X11] Profit switching pool - wafflepool.com - page 109. (Read 465716 times)

sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
I'm a big fan of wafflepool, have been from start. Personally as a few others suggested I feel 1% to 2% is too much of a jump, a 100% fee increase is massive when the edges are already so thin between various mining pools. 1.5% be much more of a fair compromise I feel.

Since waffle opened the guy has prob made about 3 bucks an hour in labor put in. Now he actually wants to make some money and 2% is too much? Heh. Get real. Running a pool is a thankless job with every hacker out to get you and criminal ddos ready toruin all your work in seconds. And i am not even mentioning the clueless users who ask retarded questions over and over without using google for 10 minutes. It makes a pool op just want to say frick it and walk away.
Agreed. Handle such a large pool as wafflepool is not that easy.
legendary
Activity: 2072
Merit: 1001
I'm a big fan of wafflepool, have been from start. Personally as a few others suggested I feel 1% to 2% is too much of a jump, a 100% fee increase is massive when the edges are already so thin between various mining pools. 1.5% be much more of a fair compromise I feel.

Since waffle opened the guy has prob made about 3 bucks an hour in labor put in. Now he actually wants to make some money and 2% is too much? Heh. Get real. Running a pool is a thankless job with every hacker out to get you and criminal ddos ready toruin all your work in seconds. And i am not even mentioning the clueless users who ask retarded questions over and over without using google for 10 minutes. It makes a pool op just want to say frick it and walk away.
hero member
Activity: 630
Merit: 500
You guys have such a huge hashrate that you drop the value of mining/day/mh substantially on any coin you mine as soon as you start mining it and then further reduce the value by trading them right away for BTC. Am I wrong>? 31 GH is more than the entire global hashrate of a lot of coins and often almost half of many other more established coins

That's not exactly correct.  There's one huge miner, aka THE WHALE, that has about 15-20GB of hashing power at his disposal.  He comes & goes whenever he pleases.  Basically doubles the pool hashrate whenever he shows up  Undecided

Which may be good for pool on a whole as block confirm times are greatly lowered and orphan rate drops Smiley

I would guess that poolwaffle has taken steps to tune the coin-switcher when hashrates jump drastically higher and to adjust to not staying on any coin too long and raise that coin diff to an unbearable diff.

IMO multipools are good for cryptocoins as they jump around and lower transaction confirm times as they move among many coins.  MP's helped MOONcoin get to the hardfork block quickly and KGW got switched on which lowers large effect on diff when MP's do mine them...

Trading coins as fast as you can for immediate profit at current market value does affect the markets quite a bit ...
sr. member
Activity: 249
Merit: 250
You guys have such a huge hashrate that you drop the value of mining/day/mh substantially on any coin you mine as soon as you start mining it and then further reduce the value by trading them right away for BTC. Am I wrong>? 31 GH is more than the entire global hashrate of a lot of coins and often almost half of many other more established coins

That's not exactly correct.  There's one huge miner, aka THE WHALE, that has about 15-20GB of hashing power at his disposal.  He comes & goes whenever he pleases.  Basically doubles the pool hashrate whenever he shows up  Undecided
hero member
Activity: 630
Merit: 500
@phzi said:
I think people generally like more stats =).  IMO, that's a big part of the reason why WafflePool tends to attract hashpower like it does. Luck would definitely be nice to have public. What I am asking for would require a new row every difficulty change that recorded how many shares were accepted at that difficulty and how many blocks were found (if any).  If you felt like throwing that in JSON or something, I could probably build some calculations and a front-end.

----------

So does this mean that you would be working from a github repository if poolwaffle were to make front-end an open project and allow users to submit proposed code changes and he would be in charge of commiting them.  I am in favor of this as it would reduce his work and give him more time to work on other areas that are more critical.

Someone taking on front page project and public stats and to beautify it would be awesome.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 500
The qualifications are:
1) We only save full data for the last 1hr of stats, so if we don't find 2 blocks within the same hour, we don't have an easy way of seeing how many shares on that particular coin were mined.  That really only happens on either litecoin, or dogecoin if we skip mining it for a decent bit of time, almost all the rest of the blocks have luck tracked.
Basically, I am interested in a snapshot periodically of the shares we have mined at every difficulty on every coin.  And if we found blocks at that difficulty/coin (many rows would be 0 for a KGW coin, presumably).

2) The luck is based on the found block difficulty, which is not necessarily the difficulty the shares were at.  For example, if we mine dogecoin as difficulty is on the rise (say some shares at 1k, and then some shares at 1.1k), then stop mining because diff is too high, wait a bit until it drops to 800, and immediately find a block.  The luck is based on all of the shares being submitted against a 800 difficulty blocks (which is incorrect for luck calculations, but good enough for my purposes).
I totally understand.  And I know the data I am won't look like much on its own.  I am interested in calculating basically, "expected profitability" based on shares mined at each difficulty.

I just worry with showing these stats that people will freak out.  Better option is for me to properly track luck values (just another thing on the list), but that has some (smaller) subtleties as well, since we buffer inserts into our database for share submissions, so data will be off based on when the block comes in compared to when shares get inserted (although very slightly).  Maybe I'll work on this in the coming days, luck would be nice to have publicly available.
I think people generally like more stats =).  IMO, that's a big part of the reason why WafflePool tends to attract hashpower like it does. Luck would definitely be nice to have public. What I am asking for would require a new row every difficulty change that recorded how many shares were accepted at that difficulty and how many blocks were found (if any).  If you felt like throwing that in JSON or something, I could probably build some calculations and a front-end.
sr. member
Activity: 322
Merit: 254
@PoolWaffle:
Any chance you could you make available a table with:
EndTimestamp | Coin | Difficulty | Shares | Blocks Found

So, most of this is available (for the recent data) on the Stats page in terms of block by block stats.  I've got a luck graph on my admin page that I might be able to make cacheable to be public, but would take a bit of time.  There is pre-cached luck as well on a per-block basis, but unfortunately it has some qualifications just based on how it was added, but I could easily add that to the stats for blocks found.

The qualifications are:
1) We only save full data for the last 1hr of stats, so if we don't find 2 blocks within the same hour, we don't have an easy way of seeing how many shares on that particular coin were mined.  That really only happens on either litecoin, or dogecoin if we skip mining it for a decent bit of time, almost all the rest of the blocks have luck tracked.
2) The luck is based on the found block difficulty, which is not necessarily the difficulty the shares were at.  For example, if we mine dogecoin as difficulty is on the rise (say some shares at 1k, and then some shares at 1.1k), then stop mining because diff is too high, wait a bit until it drops to 800, and immediately find a block.  The luck is based on all of the shares being submitted against a 800 difficulty blocks (which is incorrect for luck calculations, but good enough for my purposes).

I just worry with showing these stats that people will freak out.  Better option is for me to properly track luck values (just another thing on the list), but that has some (smaller) subtleties as well, since we buffer inserts into our database for share submissions, so data will be off based on when the block comes in compared to when shares get inserted (although very slightly).  Maybe I'll work on this in the coming days, luck would be nice to have publicly available.
member
Activity: 78
Merit: 10
I'm a big fan of wafflepool, have been from start. Personally as a few others suggested I feel 1% to 2% is too much of a jump, a 100% fee increase is massive when the edges are already so thin between various mining pools. 1.5% be much more of a fair compromise I feel.
hero member
Activity: 630
Merit: 500
@suchmoon you replied:
I wouldn't trust anything that can be changed by knowing just my address, which is not supposed to be secret in the first place. I can put it in my signature like utahjohn here and that should not mean I don't get paid today.

my reply:  I had not considered that before I proposed the idea Smiley  Indeed this could be used as a vector for pool attack ... but isn't "userpass" submitted with every share submitted and would negate the effect of someone else hijacking your address to change your threshold? And thus attacker would have to be mining for you I don't understand the inner workings of stratum protocol.  Correct me if I am wrong.

And explain to me how this could be a problem and potential exploit, it would still be shares going to your payout address ...  
newbie
Activity: 23
Merit: 0
We've been the lowest fee profit-switching pool since our start, but we do have to raise the pool fee from 1%, to 2%.

In an effort to keep with the transparency that this pool has always tried to put forth, a full explanation of the reasoning/rationality follows.

Essentially, it is nearly impossible to run the pool the way I'd like it to be run at a 1% fee.  Of that fee, a huge portion comes off the top immediately to exchange fees.  Using cryptsy as the example because most of our exchanging happens there, we lose 0.3% immediately.  We also lose a bit (depending on the coin) to transaction fees to get coins from our account, to the exchange, a bit more from the exchange to our bitcoin account, and a decently large chunk in bitcoin fees (this has gone down in 0.9, but its still a decent amount with our volume of low-priority coins) when we run payouts (and a lot more on sundays when we run 0.001 minimums).

After all of these fees, plus hosting costs (which have doubled due to the DDOS and constant attacks on our boxes), DDOS protection, server monitoring, etc, we're left with an extremely small amount for actually running the pool.  At the end of the day, with me working on the pool for 40hrs/wk (a very conservative estimate), I'm looking at what amounts to a manager's job at walmart.  Except the manager at walmart doesn't get woken up nightly due to server pages.

Essentially, for me to be able to justify the amount of work I put in on wafflepool, I need to raise the fees.

I've been wrestling with the decision for a few weeks now, and during the start of the DDOS/attacks was at the point of saying "fuck this, its just not worth the stress", but decided to fight through it and get 3hrs of sleep a night for the week.  We're back, and today is our best profit day in a while (thank god for bad luck streaks...), but its at this point that I need to raise the fees to make it worth it to run in the future.

2% seems reasonable to me.  It matches almost all of our competitors (who were smart enough to do it in the beginning), and isn't a huge change to the end user (1% to 2% isn't a major change in profitability).  And allows me to sink more work into the pool without feeling screwed at the end of the day.

Again, sorry it has to happen, feel free to rant about how this is the end of WP/multipools/etc, it wasn't a decision made lightly.
Not a problem IMO. 2% is very reasonable considering the service. I'll continue with the waffle.
legendary
Activity: 3654
Merit: 8909
https://bpip.org
How about a pt= selectable payout parameter in the "userpass" config of miners then you could still have peace of mind, still have minimum and maximum limits.  Let the user have the responsibility to decide what is a reasonable risk of loss, after all pool mining and trading is risky anywhere.  
So if I mine to your address with pt=500 for a little bit right around payout time what happens then? Smiley
This is definitely an issue with any sort of password config option. (Unless it is something that can be easily handled per-connection like difficulty).

Not sure how you would handle payouts per connection and in any case (sorry, I re-read your post and realized that's exactly what you're saying). I wouldn't trust anything that can be changed by knowing just my address, which is not supposed to be secret in the first place. I can put it in my signature like utahjohn here and that should not mean I don't get paid today.

As far as I know there are only two options for per-user payment schedule:

1) Have logins instead of anonymous mining. A big can of worms by itself.
2) Have users sign a message with their private key. Would not work with shared wallets.

Frankly I don't think it's worth time and effort to go that route. Poolwaffle knows his users and his stats, and should stick to a schedule that fits most users and his own comfort level. I like the N-day idle idea though.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 500
Not to derail this thread (rather, to hopefully prevent it much further):
And really, how about cutting out the pointless insults already?
I suggest you re-read your posts directed towards me and count the number of insults that you lobbed in my direction.
I said nothing that attacked you personally in my last few posts.  Since you seem intent on sticking around this thread, I am trying to ask politely if we can keep civil and productive?

--

@PoolWaffle:
Any chance you could you make available a table with:
EndTimestamp | Coin | Difficulty | Shares | Blocks Found
?

Populated every 10 minutes (or even every hour), with:
EndTimestamp - population time,
Coin - coinid (mined since the last interval),
Difficulty - difficulty the coin was mined at,
Shares - total shares accepted at this difficulty for this coin (since the last interval),
Blocks found - number of blocks found within these shares, if any.

I would be interested in using this data to run some statistics on "luck" variance.

You guys have such a huge hashrate that you drop the value of mining/day/mh substantially on any coin you mine as soon as you start mining it and then further reduce the value by trading them right away for BTC. Am I wrong>? 31 GH is more than the entire global hashrate of a lot of coins and often almost half of many other more established coins
It's a rough world for altcoins, this is really just a reality.  scrypt ASICs are becoming a reality, and are looking to be more significant more quickly then most originally predicted.  You can definitely expect 1TH scrypt farms being "common place" on the network this year.  This happened with bitcoin too - very few sha256 altcoins survived.  You can expect many altcoins to experience private chain drops and complete buy book clearouts.

Only the strongest chains will survive for any given proof of work algorithm.

How about a pt= selectable payout parameter in the "userpass" config of miners then you could still have peace of mind, still have minimum and maximum limits.  Let the user have the responsibility to decide what is a reasonable risk of loss, after all pool mining and trading is risky anywhere. 
So if I mine to your address with pt=500 for a little bit right around payout time what happens then? Smiley
This is definitely an issue with any sort of password config option. (Unless it is something that can be easily handled per-connection like difficulty).
hero member
Activity: 630
Merit: 500
How about a pt= selectable payout parameter in the "userpass" config of miners then you could still have peace of mind, still have minimum and maximum limits.  Let the user have the responsibility to decide what is a reasonable risk of loss, after all pool mining and trading is risky anywhere.  

So if I mine to your address with pt=500 for a little bit right around payout time what happens then? Smiley

setting your payout threshold that high would be idiotic LOL  Letting that much sit on pool would be more than I would risk the loss of.   Again poolwaffle would have to decide what min and max threshold are limited to Smiley
legendary
Activity: 3654
Merit: 8909
https://bpip.org
How about a pt= selectable payout parameter in the "userpass" config of miners then you could still have peace of mind, still have minimum and maximum limits.  Let the user have the responsibility to decide what is a reasonable risk of loss, after all pool mining and trading is risky anywhere.  

So if I mine to your address with pt=500 for a little bit right around payout time what happens then? Smiley
hero member
Activity: 630
Merit: 500
How about a pt= selectable payout parameter in the "userpass" config of miners then you could still have peace of mind, still have minimum and maximum limits.  Let the user have the responsibility to decide what is a reasonable risk of loss, after all pool mining and trading is risky anywhere.  
newbie
Activity: 10
Merit: 0
You guys have such a huge hashrate that you drop the value of mining/day/mh substantially on any coin you mine as soon as you start mining it and then further reduce the value by trading them right away for BTC. Am I wrong>? 31 GH is more than the entire global hashrate of a lot of coins and often almost half of many other more established coins
sr. member
Activity: 322
Merit: 254
I really appreciate the support guys, totally expected way more "everything sucks, you suck, and I'm out".  The main thing the added % allows me to do is to spend more of my time working on WP (whatever that entails - better stats, scrypt-n, general fixes, new coins, etc) without walking away feeling like it wasn't time well spent (this is poorly phrased, but you hopefully know what I mean).

While I do like the idea of delaying payouts (less fees), one thing I've always tried my best to do is make sure your funds are in my hands for as little time as possible.  If an exchange gets hacked (this happens) and they lose the coins, I can very honestly say "there really wasn't much I could do about it", and I think for the most part, people wouldn't be pissed towards WP.  On that note, we try to get coins off the exchanges as quick as we can as well (within reason), to avoid this problem.  At the same time, if WP's wallet box gets hacked, or some catastrophic thing happens where the server dies, and all our backups die at the same time, I want to have the least amount of your funds on that hard drive as possible.  In that case you'll definitely be pissed (understandable), but you can at least be a little comforted that it was 12hrs of lost earnings, rather than 3 days.  I've had users request delaying the payments on their accounts to larger thresholds as they don't want small payouts, but I've always politely declined.  Having the piece of mind that I hold your coins as little as possible is worth a huge amount Smiley

That might be an interesting small site if someone wanted to set one up.  Just a payment aggregator (maybe there already is one?).  Give users an address, and you buffer payments into that address until either a threshold is reached, or the user manually requests payouts?
full member
Activity: 168
Merit: 100
poolwaffle deserves to be fairly compensated for his work, but you are delusional if you think it is going to enable him to find some magical formula for higher profitability.  We will all be earning 1% less here from now on [...]
Well, I know there are several profit increasing features that PoolWaffle has not had the time or resources to work on.  With increased revenue, maybe we'll see some of these functions come to life.  That's what I was suggesting (and would take a bet on).  I have talked to PoolWaffle previously about some fairly significant upgrades that could increase profits measurably - and I understand they have been on a TODO list.

comeonalready: Can you please avoid double posting?  It makes threads much more irritating to read.  Edit and multi-quote are great features just waiting to be used.  And really, how about cutting out the pointless insults already?

I suggest you re-read your posts directed towards me and count the number of insults that you lobbed in my direction.  How about you respect this place as being a forum for others to discuss the topic at hand?  

Follow your own advice if you can.  

And if you don't like my double posts, each of which is a reply to a different person, then too bad.
hero member
Activity: 700
Merit: 500
poolwaffle deserves to be fairly compensated for his work, but you are delusional if you think it is going to enable him to find some magical formula for higher profitability.  We will all be earning 1% less here from now on [...]
Well, I know there are several profit increasing features that PoolWaffle has not had the time or resources to work on.  With increased revenue, maybe we'll see some of these functions come to life.  That's what I was suggesting (and would take a bet on).  I have talked to PoolWaffle previously about some fairly significant upgrades that could increase profits measurably - and I understand they have been on a TODO list.

comeonalready: Can you please avoid double posting?  It makes threads much more irritating to read.  Edit and multi-quote are great features just waiting to be used.  And really, how about cutting out the pointless insults already?
member
Activity: 98
Merit: 10
We've been the lowest fee profit-switching pool since our start, but we do have to raise the pool fee from 1%, to 2%.

In an effort to keep with the transparency that this pool has always tried to put forth, a full explanation of the reasoning/rationality follows.

Essentially, it is nearly impossible to run the pool the way I'd like it to be run at a 1% fee.  Of that fee, a huge portion comes off the top immediately to exchange fees.  Using cryptsy as the example because most of our exchanging happens there, we lose 0.3% immediately.  We also lose a bit (depending on the coin) to transaction fees to get coins from our account, to the exchange, a bit more from the exchange to our bitcoin account, and a decently large chunk in bitcoin fees (this has gone down in 0.9, but its still a decent amount with our volume of low-priority coins) when we run payouts (and a lot more on sundays when we run 0.001 minimums).

After all of these fees, plus hosting costs (which have doubled due to the DDOS and constant attacks on our boxes), DDOS protection, server monitoring, etc, we're left with an extremely small amount for actually running the pool.  At the end of the day, with me working on the pool for 40hrs/wk (a very conservative estimate), I'm looking at what amounts to a manager's job at walmart.  Except the manager at walmart doesn't get woken up nightly due to server pages.

Essentially, for me to be able to justify the amount of work I put in on wafflepool, I need to raise the fees.

I've been wrestling with the decision for a few weeks now, and during the start of the DDOS/attacks was at the point of saying "fuck this, its just not worth the stress", but decided to fight through it and get 3hrs of sleep a night for the week.  We're back, and today is our best profit day in a while (thank god for bad luck streaks...), but its at this point that I need to raise the fees to make it worth it to run in the future.

2% seems reasonable to me.  It matches almost all of our competitors (who were smart enough to do it in the beginning), and isn't a huge change to the end user (1% to 2% isn't a major change in profitability).  And allows me to sink more work into the pool without feeling screwed at the end of the day.

Again, sorry it has to happen, feel free to rant about how this is the end of WP/multipools/etc, it wasn't a decision made lightly.

As far as I´m concerned, hard work has to be profitable. If you need to charge 2% for your work to be profitable, so be it. If the pool is more profitable that the competition even with the increased fee, the fee size will be irrelevant.
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