Quote from: DaveF on Today at 11:23:57 AM

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The last PPLNS block your pool found was back in January. How much BTC are people mining there not going to make vs mining @ a PPS pool because the next block you find is happening after the 1/2ing although they make less per share they still got all their PPS shares until the 1/2ing paid at a higher rate. And some unknown time in the future when you may find a block they will get a higher % of 3.125+fees. 4 Years ago at the last 1/2ing how much BTC did people loose because they were mining at your pool for months with no block. Yes after that you had a good bit of luck which has now been followed by some really bad luck.

There is a thing as opportunity cost of money. A large PPLNS pool with less variance overcomes that, a smaller one like Ocean or yours does not.

As Phil said a bad month and he could be into pocket for thousands, 2 months and he is in for even more. Others are in the same boat.
Had they been using a PPS pool in that scenario there could be enough BTC coming in to buy another miner.
The flip side of that is that mining in a PPLNS pool might have generated more BTC.

The risk / reward varies for person to person.

Indeed - for small pools the risk is much higher or earning MORE or LESS.
But really, for a few hundred PH it's easy to manage variance, unless you are in some power scam where you have to fork out $ every day,
or you've never heard of economics and never lived in the real world, and can't help yourself blowing that extra BTC you make during the positive variance on hookers and blow and fast cars, rather than keep it for the negative variance.

In my case I've invested about 25BTC into mining and power and got back about 10BTC.
Oh well - not like I really care, it's Bitcoin I want to support, and running the pool is how I got that BTC.

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Using the 'Or even as employees in any good company, your wage depends on how the company performs (and how you perform)' statement that you made:

in some jobs you don't care how the company does you are a drone stocking shelves or answering calls or whatever. No bonus, no stock options, just that paycheck at the end of the week. That is PPS. If the company implodes on Friday in a couple of days you are at the next job being a drone stocking shelves or whatever. Making more or less what you did before with no real loss.

If you are higher up you get bonuses or stock options or whatever that is PPLNS. But if the company implodes you don't get that bonus at the end of the year because the company is gone and your stock options are now worthless.

-Dave

But that misses the point of what bitcoin is.
That's like assuming every company is drones with no bonuses.

Bitcoin has the fun fact that, unless you find a block, you have done no work to secure the blockchain.
PPS takes the cost of block variance and charges you for that, thus a higher fee, on the verifiable assumption (using proof of work) that you are actually mining ... but also assuming (unverified) you are not withholding.

While I will agree that most miner owners do have the bitcoin understanding of drones, bitcoin itself is inherently, by design, variance based.
Like almost every company out there, big or small, return has variance, but for some reason most bitcoin miners can't understand and handle the real economic world.
I guess you'd place them with all those people who start up companies and fail, coz they also didn't properly research/understand what they were getting involved in,
but in the bitcoin case they dive into PPS due to that lack of understanding.