Quote from: bitsink on May 12, 2017, 09:47:01 PM

Here are some thoughts about pool payments:

We are all working hard, cracking blocks and we want to maximize our ROI. I get that.

1. The pool makes payments with every block and does not offer to set a payout threshold. I know - kano is not a bank. At the same time these numerous (often dusty) payments are being processed free of charge in our mined blocks, displacing payments which are actually offering to pay fees, reducing our payout. While the pool is not a bank, I believe a compromise could be found to reduce dusty payments to increase the available block space for paying transactions. The pool already holds the coins accumulated over 100 blocks. With some users setting a threshold, this would increase the "buffered" amount somewhat, but is it really such a large risk?

2. When spending these small amounts, the resulting transaction is bloated due to the larger numbers of UTXOs, requiring larger transaction fees when the coins are spent. Yes, this is from a user's perspective and irrelevant from the mining perspective, but most of us surely also actually use bitcoin. It just seems like an unnecessary inefficiency.

I've mentioned it a few times that it's 2nd on the TODO list (but it moved to 3rd due to something else recently)
It wont be a clear threshold, I've mentioned the design before, but to expand a bit, it will be a weekly or monthly depending on your total rewards.
Only the top X (something like 100 and some exceptions) will be getting per block payouts.

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3. Even without the option of setting a payout threshold, there is some optimization potential in the payment code: Sometimes it happens that duplicate payments are made in the same block (same sender, same receiver, but two transactions in the same block). Obviously these payments originate from different found blocks, but it really seems redundant to send two transactions instead of just combining them into one.

That makes no sense at all.
I send out the transactions, I'd then have to double spend the 1st transaction and make a new 2nd transaction that combines them.
That also breaks the ability of clearly tracking payouts to block rewards, that some people want.

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4. I am also surprised that kano does not seem to payout any newly minted coins. This is one reason for some to mine in the first place.

A coinbase coin is worth no more than any other coin.
That's just weird delusions of some people dreaming about CP and virgins

The other useless reason given is some bizarre idea that it reduces 'taint'
Taint is a term made up about bitcoin by morons who think bitcoin should be centrally controlled.
The idea that the 'big' guys can reverse transactions or 'flag' transactions coz they did some stupid shit with their system that allowed a hacker to get into it and 'supposedly' steal some of their bitcoins is beyond ridiculous.
Anyway, there's no 'taint' possible in how I do block based payouts coz it's the 1st transaction from the coinbase transaction.
The 'dust' goes to addresses that effectively can't be flagged for 'taint' either.

Then just to throw some more dirt onto the idea of 'taint'
blockchain.info used to say that any pool that gets an orphan (without trying to spend it) is a double spend risk.
Yeah you gotta love those morons who think about central control of bitcoin and come up with stupid shit like that.

Big coinbase payouts are bad for a pool.
The best example of that was the old defunct Eligius.
They had terrible orphan rates caused by 2 things, shitty code and big coinbase payouts.
The only other real pool that does coinbase payouts is p2pool and since it has a distribution network of every person running a p2pool node, that resolves the problem of using coinbase payouts.
Coinbase payouts also mean that either the payout scheme is detrimental to the person who finds a block and the miners in the work before the block is found (like that recent pool added) or the pool over pays people sometimes ... which is definitely a bad thing to do.

If you want big coinbase payouts, go to another pool. I wont be doing them.