Quote from: philipma1957 on October 23, 2019, 08:23:25 PM

I will say this if you are ramped up to 2.1ph on Kano pool stay there dont leave his pool the math is in your favor to stay.

I don't think Kano's block-finding bonus is high enough to make it even with moving to a large pool between now and the halving.

I'll take a wild guess and say the diff will average 16T between now and the halving. That means a 2PH miner should make about 6.3BTC between now and the halving if fully ramped up.

Average time for 2PH to find a block is 397 days. I think you're chances to find a block in the 200 days before the halving is around 40%. So, if you're a gambler, your expected reward from the bonus is about 0.2BTC*.4 = 0.08BTC.

If you take the 2PH and move it to another PPLNS pool with high enough hashrate to ramp up in less than a few days, you earn the nearly same 6.3BTC, plus 3.14BTC during the ramp down. That is assuming exactly 100% luck and hashrate doesn't fall so low you miss getting blocks at all or the ramp down extends past the halving. If the hashrate at Kano is the same after the halving and diff is 19T, then it would take 236 days to ramp back up, but since the block reward is 1/2, the expected reward is 3.14BTC when fully ramped up, or 1.57BTC if ramping up. So gained 3.14BTC pre-halving, and lost 1.57BTC post-halving, net gain of 1.57BTC.

Quote from: Philopolymath on October 23, 2019, 11:19:01 PM

PPLNS is SUICIDE.......One bad block (300% or more) can kill MONTHS of your earnings... and you get ZERO ramp down..and it happens OFTEN.

Well, setting aside that your whole post is off-topic, your issue is about high variance with a small PPLNS pool, not with PPLNS. A 5000PH pool will find around 220 blocks a month at current diff, so variance is way less and your chance of going a month without a block is pretty much 0. Once a PPLNS pool gets small enough that you don't find a block between diff adjustments, then you'll end up losing significant earnings if diff is increasing. Kano has posted about that many times.

My point is that I expect that any small PPLNS pool under 100PH or so would lose miners leading up to the halving because of the potential profit from switching. Current miners at smaller pools adding gear would also profit more from pointing their new gear to a larger pool. After the halving, I think people will come back so hashrate could be significantly higher post-halving than now.