Quote from: kano on April 21, 2015, 10:35:13 PM

Quote from: organofcorti on April 21, 2015, 12:54:18 PM

Quote from: roy7 on April 21, 2015, 12:20:18 AM

Quote from: alh on April 17, 2015, 07:04:31 PM

The title of this thread includes "Hop-Proof". While I expect that is really just hyperbole, I wondered what it would mean to be "Hop Proof"? Contracts with the pool members to never use another pool? Kind of like getting married?

I don't think anyone ever properly answered your question so I'll give it a shot.

In this context, "hop" is a technical term related to ways you can exploit pools running certain older payment methods by changing between pools in a way that will increase your income at the expense of other miners on those pools who remain loyal to the pool and stay there all of the time. Eventually some alternate payment methods were developed which were hop-proof in the sense a miner can't enter/leave the pool in a systematic way in order to boost their earnings. The most popular is PPLNS, although to me the most interesting is DGM (by Meni Rosenfeld). (I ran a Terracoin pool for over a year that used DGM.)

So when p2pool says it is Hop-proof, it means you can't abuse the payment method. It doesn't mean people can't or won't still use multiple pools or move around to chase "luck".

If you are interested in more information, read Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems.

Nice explanation, roy7. Someone should bookmark this post.

I guess also there needs to be clearly stated that anti-hop functionality is deployed on some pools - slush for example - that means you will not be paid your fair share if you disconnect from the pool either on purpose or due to an outage.

The expected loss is related to the amount of time you disconnect vs the % of the average block find time that the pool pays (whatever that may be)
If you simply just disconnected and don't come back, then it would be related to a % of the average expected loss.

You could compare that to a 'lock-in contract' where you lose out by leaving, except you don't gain much by staying.
There is possibly a very small gain when others lose out by leaving - the amount lost by anyone who disconnected may be distributed to everyone who didn't - so if the pool is 5PH and someone with 5TH lost 100% of their payout, everyone might gain about 0.1% more on that particular payout on their expected 100% less orphans less fees ... of course that depends on how the payout is calculated.

I'm not sure anyone has proven that to be the case, Kano. From your description you could as easily be talking about PPLNS with a very small N, which is still a fair reward method, and for any fair system expected value of a share should always be B/D.

The expected value of shares submitted over a period of time including disconnections should be the sum of the shares submitted.