Re: Abusing Bitcoin mining pools: strategies for egoistical but honest miners

Interesting article, I brought the subject up back when the first pool switched from current power to the contributed method, but I don't think anyone responded.

Switching back to connected mode would completely solve this problem. I liked connected mode (and puddinpop's pool in general) better, anyway -- you get larger payments less often. Maybe once a contributed-mode pool has stalled, everyone will move to a connected-mode pool.

It is a neat psychology + game theory situation. People seem to prefer the contributed method to connected, but as soon as shares are owed (so instantly) the right move is it switch to a connected pool if it is available. But if the herd all prefers contributed then you will be on the connected server alone and now you don't have the benefit of reduced variance. As some 'serious' miners decide to accept the variance and move to the slightly higher EV pool others may follow and variance will drop at that pool and now there are only psychological reasons to stay at the contributed pool.

As we know from poker though people can persist in low value emotionally pleasing situations for a long long time.

Eh? What is the difference between the "contributed" and "connected" methods? I haven't read Ryo's paper, so maybe I'm missing context.

In the contributed every time you find a hash below some 'easy' target you get a share that is paid when the pool finds their next block, if you stop mining you will still get paid something if you previously earned at least one share provided the pool finds one more block.

In the connected method you get paid if you are connected and mining when the pool finds a block. You are paid in proportion to how much power you are providing compared to others at that moment (really not a moment more like 2 minutes I think it was). You could think of this as the contributed method with shares that expire really fast. There is plenty of in-between room, make shares decay slowly or disappear after a day or whatever.