...Is there any effective way to offer a better deal than some of these pools, like Antpool, while you keep the transaction fees if desired by the miner?
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IMO, much of Antpool's hashrate comes from the same thing that gave Internet Explorer such a large market share: The "average" person just doesn't know any better. ...
I fully agree. Why not capture that audience though? It could be done. It requires aggressive work though. And I have a hunch there are many would be happy to help. There are also other ways to indirectly, and completely automated, generate income that are completely benign to the web user while increasing pool profits back to those users.
It's probably where one has to cross the line between making an income and giving back to the community. There are ways to do both.
1) It's got nothing to do with bitcoin
Mining is for confirming transactions by finding blocks.
(Even though most pools produce empty blocks - AntPool, F2Pool, Eligius, Bitminter, Slush, etc)
PPS has no requirement for finding blocks, it's purely a pay per share as you submit them to a pool.
(That's why cloud mining scams work)
PPLNS means everyone on the pool shares a reward when we find a block, and if we find more due to good luck, everyone gets that luck, if we don't find any then no one gets anything - i.e. it's directly related to bitcoin, since that's how bitcoin rewards work.
Also, although that evens out over time, it's a direct motivation for miners to do the right thing on the pool.
That's also why I have the CKDB block page the way it is - showing all and every attempt at submitting blocks.
That's what matters, finding and distributing our blocks and of course knowing about them all, good or bad.
2) It requires a safety net of currently around a few hundred thousand dollars. I don't have that
Although long term, I would have made extra profit from PPS, a month e.g. like December I'd have had to find 221 BTC to cover PPS
PPS is risky for a pool and can easily lead to financial failure.
PPLNS guarantees that an honest pool will continue to run as long as there are enough miners on the pool.