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.
Hi,
thank you for your honesty and clear explanation of your choice.
I switched to your pool today because another profit-switching-pool was being DDos'ed, and at the moment my hashrate went at his top, the fees had been raised...!
Too bad for me, I should have jumped into your boat earlier
Thanks for your work anyway, keep it on the way you do it (because you like it), and don't be afraid to get paid for it : miners like me take a hard time to optimize their rigs, and each tiny % of real work accepted by a pool is like a little victory. So it's better for us if you keep the pool out of ddos and 99.999% up, and this has a cost.
