Every single miner on TM is a minipool leader. Your odds of winning the jackpot go down as more miners join, but the rewards go up, just like the jackpot on any real-life lottery. Every single miner has an equal chance of winning the jackpot regardless of how many people (if any) are in their minipool.
You pay a 1% fee that goes to the person that referred you rather than to the pool like every other fee'd pool does. So if USER1 has users 2,3,4,5 in his minipool, he will receive their 1% fees to do with what he wants. I offer a portion of my referral bonus as a minipool jackpot that only the people mining under me are eligible for.
Users 2, 3, 4, and 5 also receive the 1% fee from the people in their respective minipools. User 1 never sees a bitpenny from the referral bonuses that the miners in his minipool (2,3,4,5) earn from their respective minipools.
So of course only User1 benefits from the people in his minipool, that is the entire point of having a minipool. Just like User2 is the only one to benefit from his personal minipool, even though he is in User1's minipool as well. The money doesn't keep moving up the chain, as it would in a pyramid scheme. I know at least one miner who equally divides his referral bonus up and redistributes it back to his minipool members.
You pay the 1% fee regardless of if you are in a pool or not. Once that fee is paid, it belongs to the pool-owner. Most pool owners pocket the fee (Tycho is a RICH dude with his 3% and 10% fees), but MrSam redistributes it in a way that promotes a community feel and makes it seem that miners are actually working together rather than against eachother.
That being said, you
don't lose out on any btc by not having people in your minipool mining under you. You make exactly what you would make anywhere else, less the 1% fee that everyone pays. The only difference is that if you
do have people mining under you, you get a small amount of bonus btc.
Unfortunately this can move some people to create a forum topic to promote their minipool or spam their referral link in their posts to others' threads. This has been covered in eskimobob's thread several times over, it is annoying, the majority of us TM miners it is ridiculous. But we can't control the actions of others.
It's just a different way of handling fees, sure we could just mine at a no-fee pool and keep our 1% for ourselves, but this pool actually makes mining fun and promotes a feeling of community between the miners. Even a cpu miner could make an actual bitpenny here and there with a person or two in their minipool. You may not agree with it, you may think it is stupid, but
it is not a scam. Unless somebody could please point out where a user is actually being scammed out of money, that claim has no weight behind it. The pool operator has even been giving .5 btc away every day day from his own pocket as the launch special jackpot.
The pool's name is Triplemining because
it is possible to earn triple your normal income, not because you will. If you can't differentiate between those two things, you're going to have to sue just about every company in existence.
I called around for deals on car insurance about 6 months ago, Geico was actually 20% more expensive than my current provider instead of the 15% less they claim it could have been, I didn't agree to their terms and instead stuck with my original provider. GEICO IS A SCAM AND WILL RIP YOU OFF. Hopefully I can use this Triplemining situation as precedence in court when I sue those bastards for scamming all their customers.
If the OP has any evidence of Triplemining being a scam, other than "n/t," I would absolutely give it an objective look. I certainly don't want to be scammed out of money and if there is some actual evidence of this happening, I would be grateful to see it. But for a mod to make a baseless accusation via sticky while providing absolutely no evidence or explanation/information,
as though it were an absolute fact, is both unethical and libel. But hey it's just a forum on the internet for pretend money so who cares about those things, right?
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