Quote from: coblee on July 10, 2011, 10:27:16 PM

Recently, I've been trying to find a pool that has the most fair payout system that deters pool hopping. Slush system works ok but it's really bad for people that are not doing this 24/7. Deepbit deters pool hopping but the delayed statistics is annoying. I came across Eligius' Shared Maximum Pay Per Share (SMPPS - http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Shared_Maximum_PPS) model. This model works well but I believe there is a flaw. When the pool is running lucky, all is good. But when the pool is running unlucky, there is less incentives for people to join the pool because they know that they will not get their full PPS reward because a part of the earnings will need to be shared with other users that were owed rewards from previous unlucky blocks. This could potentially lead to a vicious cycle where if the difficulty increases and the pool's hashrate does not increase to match, the pool will earn less BTC and would not be able to cover the previous debt.

For example, imagine if a SMPPS pool is unlucky and currently running a 100 BTC deficit. Why would I want to join this pool? For every 1 share I contribute, I would have to likely share it with 2 others for the 50 BTC earned. Let's say the next round is an average round. The pool earns 50 BTC, but since the deficit is now 150 BTC, I will only get a third of the payout right away and need to wait for the rest assuming I will eventually get them. So why not just join a SMPPS pool that is currently lucky? That way, I will get all the PPS rewards that I contribute. I believe this leads to pool hopping not due to long rounds, but due to lucky/unlucky pools.

I have a proposal for a better PPS system that I'm calling Recent Shared Maximum PPS or RSMPPS. The idea is simple. It's basically SMPPS, but instead of paying out the reward to all unpaid PPS proportionally, RSMPPS will favor recent blocks. So it will first proportionally pay out the unpaid PPS for the current block (the one that was just found). If there are any remaining rewards, it will pay them out to the next recent block that has unpaid PPS shares. It will keep doing that by paying out unpaid PPS shares from earlier and earlier blocks until all 50 BTC are paid out. If there are any left, it will keep those for the next unlucky round. This system will have no disadvantage for new miners joining the pool, because rewards will be first paid to the people that actually worked on the current block. So there's no debt burden on new users. And old unpaid PPS shares will get paid out if the pool gets lucky enough. With this system, it's possible for the pool to never get lucky enough to pay out really old unpaid shares. I think that's fair.

What do people think?

So I may have missed something in the last three pages, but I don't see how this really fixes anything.

You correctly pointed out the issue with SMPPS, but even with your system, I don't see the difference.

Let's say you are running a RSMPPS pool that 'is behind'. I am a miner that is looking to be paid fairly.

There is another SMPPS pool out there that 'is ahead' (or some other cheat proof pool, or solo mining, or whatever).

Which am I going to choose?

This round there is a 50% chance that we will solve a block in < N time (where N is difficulty).
There is also a 50% chance that we will solve a block in > N time.

If I enter the 'fair pool' (cheatproof or SMPPS that 'is ahead') my expected earnings from mining here are exactly what they should be.

If I enter the RSMPPS pool, my expected earnings are lower because:
+ If we solve the block in more than N time, I will be underpaid for my shares
+ Not only that, but if we solve several blocks in a row slowly, it makes it even less likely that I get paid what I am owed in a reasonable amount of time.
+ Not only that, but a logical person would never mine at a *SMPPS pool that 'is behind', because of point 1 and 2, so they would quit and you would actually end up NEVER getting paid.

Does this make sense, or am I missing something?