A question for ThePiachu, what is the lowest bounty you can set for new work?
0.1BTC, and please keep in mind that the Pool keeps 20% of the bounties, so the final reward will be 80% of the initial reward.
Ok, thank you. I didn't know that the pool kept 20% of the bounty. That certainly needs to be included in the bounty calculator. Any plans to lower the bounty? This would be especially good in light of the discussion about multiple patterns for a single public key.
Speaking of, I don't think this statement is correct:
Except that total BTC per GKey for miners will be lower, because miners need to keep hashing to get whole reward; although that user don't care about next results. But it was just an idea and I understand it may be a bit tricky to implement.
The "value" of the work being done is still the sum of the values of all work being simultaneously searched for. The difficulty of the work is reduced when you add additional acceptable patterns. Imagine a dice game where the house will pay if you roll a specific number. Put in terms of the vanity address search, here is a possible "piece of work:"
Goal: roll a 5
Difficulty: 6
Reward: 1 BTC
Value: 1/6 = 0.1667 BTC/roll
Now, imagine they offer two rewards:
Goal A: roll a 5
Difficulty A: 6
Reward A: 0.8 BTC
Value A: 0.8/6 = 0.1333 BTC/roll
Goal B: roll a 2
Difficulty B: 6
Reward B: 0.2 BTC
Value B: 0.2/6 = 0.0333 BTC/roll
The total value of rolling the die at any time is equal to Value A + Value B = 0.1337 BTC/roll. You can calculate it another way, if you don't believe that:
Goal: roll a 2 or a 5
Difficulty: 3
Reward: 0.8/2 + 0.2/2 (50% chance you'll get either one of the rewards in 3 rolls) = 0.5 BTC
Value: 0.5/3 = 0.1667 BTC/roll
In fact, you could add a third goal with zero reward and it would still be worth your time to roll the die! In reality, though, adding that third goal adds
slightly more difficulty to the problem, because you need to add that to the list of patterns to be checked, and submitting the solution isn't free. For this reason I would impose some minimum bounty for a new pattern, albeit much less than 0.1 BTC.
In summary, adding an additional pattern lowers the total difficulty of the work. The miner does not need to keep hashing to get the full reward: they found the reward earlier since the difficulty was lower.
