Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Elastic block cap with rollover penalties
by
Meni Rosenfeld
on 12/06/2015, 15:55:21 UTC
My expected income per block is now 0.06637 BTC, 42% higher than when I was in a mining pool.
My expected income per block that I find is 6.637 BTC. It's true that my expected income per block found by the network at large is 0.06637, but I find it confusing to refer to it as "expected income per block".

There is a very strong incentive to betray the large mining pool. I have not done any additional calculations, but I suspect it is also profitable for every individual miner in the larger mining pool to leave and solo-mine, or at least join a smaller pool.

Thus a sensible large mining pool operator should not mine supersized blocks. Meni, I realise you've come to this conclusion another way (higher income means higher difficulty), but this is yet another reason why rollover penalties discourage large mining pools from mining large blocks.
Right. Mining pools, in this view, are essentially a way for small miners to band in a cartel to create blocks which are individually hyper-sized (but supersized for the pool as a whole), hoping for a greater profit. Hyper-sized blocks are not a Nash equilibrium (every miner hopes that the others band up, and enjoy their supersized blocks without contributing himself), and thus pools that try to form around this objective will quickly disintegrate. A big miner needs to be monolithic to have any hope of creating supersized blocks and not disintegrate.