Hi all,

For the last month, I've been mining on the three main yiimp based auto-exchange pools (zpool/ahashpool/hashrefinery)

From digging into the bitcoin payment transactions made by those pools for payouts, I note that all three seem to be sending a significant fraction of the payment to a recurring address which is not a miner on the pool.
If this is an address used by the admins for payment of their profits, the amount seems overly high, so I was wondering if anyone knew what these payments were for?

Taking the non-miner addresses I point out below and pasting them into the wallet lookup on the respective pool site confirms that they're not simple miner payments unlike the other high value payouts, they have no mining history in the pools.

Here are a few examples from recent payment transactions:

zpool:
transaction details: https://btc.com/a5009c46d5c84ce0fb38ab6d4a993f04835002f51c874497c45bd56944b73245
total transaction = 12.65 BTC
non-miner payment = 0.888 BTC (7%)
non-miner address: 3PXm62KkfoGyTTCBJLoBhMjBAjmaVJzE9W

ahashpool:
transaction details: https://btc.com/14fc5341f9fe6cf586cf918ac82f1bdcef5cf7463dc870208d500122792c9259
total transaction = 16.47 BTC
non-miner payment = 7.106 BTC (43%) !!
non-miner address: 322Wa5sFRHTkVQkvK9AYMpfUifUeG5gkvG

hashrefinery:
transaction details: https://blockchain.info/tx/e33e7026a8ca23ffa3f6e16c9d9d0ec9df1371ea4c257939aa42e04077584637
total transaction = 0.876 BTC
non-miner payment = 0.031 BTC (3.5%)
non-miner address: 1QEALjQWTYawwiaLKKdrcGihjBNJtXpbxq

If these are indeed profit extractions, maybe someone could explain why they're so high - those pools declare fees in the 1-2% range.
Clearly the admins could hide these payments simply by separating them from the miner payment (and paying another tx fee), so it'll be interesting to see if those addresses remain in the transactions lists going forwards, now I've posted this.

Any miners on these pools can do the same lookup themselves, simply click on the link for one of your recent payments, scroll to the bottom of the list of payment addresses (which are normally ordered by descending value) and you'll find an out of order large one at the end, typically the same address for the respective pool as listed above.

The values don't seem to be a constant percentage, but they're bigger than I expected for pool fees, especially for ahashpool.

I'm not making any accusations here, just trying to understand what I see so I can make an informed decision on which pools to use, so if anyone can shed light I'd appreciate it.

Thoughts?

winfij

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