Quote from: irrational on March 30, 2014, 07:47:12 PM

Quote from: DPoS on March 30, 2014, 06:39:38 PM

this pool doesn't seem to payout the way it explains itself.. been watching it like a hawk the past week and seems payouts has a mind of its own

a detail on the mechanics (not the theory) would be useful since it doesn't seem to behave in practice as it is intended... basically it seems all accumulated work gets held ransom regardless of current block luck cycles which in theory should be paying out portions past your pay threshold but in practice it just sits there and says you are going further and further behind as if all your current work is old work that has to wait for super luck to include you .. and that doesn't even seem to trigger it either

it is broken

That is how it's designed to operate. Each share will never receive 100% of it's value paid, so therefore each share will forever sit around in some partially unpaid state. It's a highly convoluted way of charging operating fees without using the word "fee".

Not that fees are bad, they're needed to cover all sorts of things - especially in (effectively) a PPS pool... just misleading the way it's currently advertised.

Ok...

I'm gonna try to explain this.

Miners submit shares. They are converted to an IOU value, which is equivalent to the fair PPS value. However, they are not paid at that time, they are stored in a share log, last-in, first-out.

When a block is found, the pool goes back into the share log, and "pays" as much shares as it can. If the block was unlucky, some of the earliest shares submitted for that block will be unpaid. If the pool was lucky, it will go over, and pay some shares that were unpaid in an earlier unlucky block.

But those shares are not immediately payed, for various reasons. Instead, they go in a payout queue, and when a miner will have accumulated enough to-be-payed shares, they are payed out.

Notice that the pool has not kept any money. It distributes all the money it finds, not more, not less. So it is NOT a fee.

That is CPPSRB. Now the pool has ANOTHER special thing, which is HOW it pays the reward out. The Eligius operators have devised a novel way of paying out, which is to pay out directly from the generation transactions. It has the advantage that the pool never handles money directly, so there is no "hot wallet" an hacker could compromise ans steal.

It imposes some restrictions on how payments are made though. One is that you cannot pay somebody "anytime", only when you find a block. Another is that the coins thus generated will not be able to be spent for 120 blocks instead of 6 as usual.

So, when a user is ready to be payed out (has crossed it's treshold), it is put in the queue, the ones who recieved their latest payment the furthest first, and when a block is found, the first users in the queue will be payed until the reward is entirely consumed. (so a given miner may be pushed back in the queue if another miner crosses it's treshold and has not been payed for longer than him)

It sometimes happen the pool cannot determine who should get payed in the next block. Instead of throwing it away, it instead mines to an offline address, from which the pool operator will do a manual payout from times to times. In essence, it reverts to a "regular" pool, where you have to trust the operator to not run away with the money, because they control it. However, it is still more secure, because the wallet is not online.

Under normal behavior, the payout queue should always be short; a few blocks max. However, when the pool is in failsafe mode, since it finds rewards, but does not pay them out, the queue grows. However, a manual payment is always done every week or so to sort things out.

I hope this clears things!