Quote from: kislam on November 10, 2011, 06:30:15 AM

OK, I have modified the pool reward method section. It now reflects my opinion regarding the suitability of reward method for a particular type of miner while trying to be un-biased. Please note that this guide focuses on finding the comfort zone for the miner. Highly technical mathematical proof has little relevance here - the primary goal of this guide was to actually avoid such technical discussion (which are available aplenty elsewhere in this forum) and offer an experience-based, subjective guideline to the newcomers who can get seriously confused with all the hype and over-the-top discussions. I have mentioned a few pools by name because that made it easier to explain with an example, and I don't believe the readers are naive enough to think they are the only pools to have the example feature.

It's your guide. I don't have to agree with your opinions, but I'm hoping at least the facts will be straight.

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Score-based pools punish the miner who, for whatever reason, does not or cannot maintain a stable mining operation at the pool for the entire duration of the round.

That's just wrong. They don't punish anyone. Saying they can be confusing (or unintuitive, or unpredictable) will be more reasonable.

And again, this is relevant to high-variance methods, but not so much for PPLNS. You can easily have PPLNS decay rate measured in days rather than minutes.

It is unfair to condemn all hopping-proof methods just because slush's pool has very fast decay. Part of the reason for this is that slush doesn't use a score-fee, so fast decay is necessary for hopping-resistance. The geometric method is hopping-proof regardless of the decay, so decay can be more gradual if the operator can absorb some variance. Also, the size of slush's pool makes the decay temporally faster.

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The average reward will even out over the long run, but that also means you will need to stick to that one pool over an extended period in order to reap the expected reward.

That's wrong. You could mine in a different score-based fair pool every day, and your total rewards will still converge to the average.

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zero-fee PPS

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. PPS needs to take a fee to maintain stability; and, conversely, PPS has a lot of advantages so it is reasonable to pay a fee for it. I think going forward we'll have stable 1%-2% fee PPS pools.

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proportionate pools do not have the intermittent issue

That's wrong. Even setting aside the hopping issue, proportional pools have higher variance than a PPLNS pool with the default parameters. So if PPLNS is bad for intermittent miners, so is proportional.