I see, so the discussion about the concept got kinda drowned out by the arguments over math. The high-level stuff definitely go beyond my comprehension, but the theory seems sound enough. It's difficult to tell what level of engagement there might be with limited RoI, but it's worth looking into.
Is it better to continue discussing the concept in this thread, rather than resurrecting the 2020 one (and possibly the resulting math argument again)?
The idea that theymos suggested is brilliant but doesn't really solve much of the problem unless the share/bonds holders are "average community members who care about bitcoin", what if we deploy such a pool and then Bitmain ends up buying all the bonds?
The funding itself needs to come from the community, but then running a PPS pool is no easy, there are two things that you need
1- Enough reserves to avoid bankruptcy:Meni rosenfeld has a perfect formula for this, all you need to know is :
-Your pool fee
-Block Reward
-Bankruptcy tolerance.
The average pool fee is 2.5% as of today, the block reward is 6.25, Bankruptcy tolerance is optional, and how likely to bankrupt do you want to be? in the quoted topic the caclatuion accounts for 0.1% chance of going bankrupt, it can be increased or decreased however you like.
The formula is:
(Blockrewards *ln bankruptcy) / (2*pool fees)
Applying the above figures we get:
(6.25 *ln 1000) / (2*0.025) = 863
BTC in reserve to be subject to only 0.1% chance of going bankrupt
Could be a higher risk of 1% and that changes the numbers to
(6.25 *ln 100) / (2*0.025) = 575
BTCCould increase the pool fee to 3% and that gives us
(6.25 *ln 100) / (2*0.03) = 479
BTCgoing back to 2.5% fee and 0.1% bankruptcy chance after the halving
(3.125 *ln 1000) / (2*0.025) = 431
BTC2-Have enough hashrateThis is very important, in order to be effective in the ecosystem, you need to actually find blocks, it doesn't help to have a dozen small community pools that don't find a large percentage of blocks, also, since block finding follows CDF, all pools are subject to variance, the variance is greater for smaller pools, prolonged variance can easily end up destroying the pool.
Imagine a scenario where we as a community collect 431
BTC the next halving, and launch a community-owned pool only to end up with say 20 ph worth of hashrate, we would hit 3.11 blocks a year on average
The chances that we find only 50% of those blocks is 10.9%, the chance of finding only 75% of blocks is 24.9%, the chance of finding only 95% of those blocks is 38.8%, so the chances that we finish a whole year with it realized profit is pretty high.
Now say we manage to get 10EH worth of hashrate, everything changes, we should hit 1,460 blocks a year, the chances of finding only 50% of blocks is now (7.672567270428342e-100) pretty much 0% , finding only 75% of blocks is (6.983521049841958e-24) pretty much zero, finding only 95% of blocks is only 2.9% percent chance, so we will be almost guaranteed to start making profit in the first year.
So operating with a low hashrate is somewhat a high risk and higher chance for a project to fail, besides, it has little to no effect on "protecting the network" because unlike what most people think, just pointing your hashrate somewhere doesn't do anything, it's like all those folks who mine to their own node thinking they are securing the network, no you are not, you are just wasting power.
So now how would get 10EH worth of hashrate? going out telling miners "Hey come join the community pool" isn't going to cut it, we need one of two things
A- Run at lower pool fees: will require more reserves, longer ROI, not guaranteed to work.
B- Wait until there is real incentives for miners to actually use a community-owned pool.
Now B is only going to happen when one or some of the large pools try to do something stupid, miners will HAVE to move to a more honest pool, not for the sake of
BTC, but for the sake of protecting their own investments since keeping
BTC attack-free give it value, the opposite takes away from it, so they will be forced to use an honest pool.
What are we betting on right now is the fact that none of that large pools that make millions in profit will attempt anything stupid, we also assume that they take the right security measures so that nobody can have access to that hashrate and use it to do something stupid with it, hopefully, this remains the case forever.