Reward Types
- DGM - Double Geometric Method. A hybrid between PPLNS and Geometric reward types that enables to operator to absorb some of the variance risk. Operator receives portion of payout on short rounds and returns it on longer rounds to normalize payments. [1]
- Prop. - Proportional. When block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how much shares each of them has found.
- PPLNS - Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.
- PPS - Pay Per Share. Each submitted share is worth certain amount of BC. Since finding a block requires <current difficulty> shares on average, a PPS method with 0% fee would be 50 BTC divided by <current difficulty>. It is risky for pool operators, hence the fee is highest.
- SMPPS - Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like Pay Per Share, but never pays more than the pool earns. [2]
- ESMPPS - Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but equalizes payments fairly among all those who are owed. [3]
- RSMPPS - Recent Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but system aims to prioritize the most recent miners first. [4]
- CPPSRB - Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay.
- Score - Score based system: a proportional reward, but weighed by time submitted. Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time t since start of current round. For each share score is updated by: score += exp(t/C). This makes later shares worth much more than earlier shares, thus the miner's score quickly diminishes when they stop mining on the pool. Rewards are calculated proportionally to scores (and not to shares). (at slush's pool C=300 seconds, and every hour scores are normalized)
Visual examples of the various payout methods
Table Explanations
- GH/s - Conjoined hashrate of everyone mining at the pool. Note that pool hashrate is largely irrelevant but can be seen as a popularity measurement. Note however that it is a theoretical security issue if one pool gains above 50% of the total computational power of the network, thus consider joining a pool based on other metrics.
- Merged Mining - Merged mining allows miners to mine on multiple block chains at the same time with the same hashing, at no cost to the miner.
- Transaction fees - What happens to the transaction fees. Transaction fees are a voluntary fee which can be added to a transaction which is used as an incentive to add the bitcoin transaction to a block. The fee determines the likelihood and of inclusion in any given block. Some pools keep them, some distribute them among miners, some may do other things with them.
- Reward Fee - The percent of your reward the pool keeps for itself, usually to help pay server costs and to reward the pool maintainer(s).
- Difficulty - The share difficulty the pool uses. Most pools use a default difficulty of 1. Some pools allow you to select your own difficulty, useful for larger miners. Some pools use a dynamic difficulty that changes to be perfect for your own hashrate.
- Pays Orphans - An orphan block is a block that is not in the currently-longest block chain. The pool receives nothing from a orphan, but some pools pay you out of their pocket when an orphan block is mined.
- Pays Stales (PPS) - Some pools pay stale shares, some don't. A stale is no longer valid because there is a new block on the network. High stales are the fault of the pool usually, so some pools pay for them too.
DGM Pools
*MPPS Pools
- ↑ Miner-local getwork proxy available.
PPLNS
- ↑ P2Pool supports merged mining but payouts in the merged chain are not pooled.
- ↑ People are donating to P2Pool miners to encourage people to use it. The P2Pool author also accepts optional donations.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Miner-local getwork proxy available.
PPS Pools
Proportional Pools
Score Based Pools
See also