Looking for a few testers

[Steve Sokolowski]

In regards to fees, they are higher for several reasons. The first is that pay-per-share pools provide value for miners by eliminating variance, so people are generally willing to pay more. Miners know exactly what they will make without the possibility of losing money because the pool has bad luck. The BTC Guild, for example, charged something like 7.5% for PPS, although I don't know if they still offer it now.

Second, we think that people will be willing to pay more for the other features the pool provides, like Coinbase payments, payouts in any coin, customer service, our pictures and an actual phone number being posted on the contact page, better charting and electricity tracking, transparency, and stability (we have never had unplanned downtime, though during testing we do have to sometimes switch out code until launch).

The final reason is that, as you can see at poolpicker.eu, we are earning significantly more than the highest listed scrypt pool, even with our "lost" blocks and the inferior hardware we're waiting for replacements to arrive in the mail. What you see in the top bar of our site is after the fees are subtracted, so we could probably charge 20% at this point and still be the "cheapest" pool. I still don't know why we can make so much more. I think that many pools are using off-the-shelf open source software, and if they are, then that software is in a pretty rough state. A lot of pools also lose money to slippage by selling coins too late, and I'm sure that some take more off the top than they advertise that they are charging. It might also be that we have many more coins than other pools.

As to getting more testers, that would be great. But don't get more than about three or four people for now. Since we don't have millions of dollars in funding, we don't have the resources to simulate huge loads and need to add a few people at a time in the beginning.

[Janus67]

Thank you for the indepth response! As you guessed virtually all the rest of my pool experience has been PPLNS which explains my confusion. I suppose that also explains why the fees are quite high in comparison to other pools (most other pools are less than 2% while this one is essentially 5%?)


Oh -- if you are still looking for more miners I may have a couple guys I know from another message board that have about 120MH combined or so of scrypt asic power. Let me know if you want them as well for testing and i'll reach out to them.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I am looking for a few users to act as testers and mine for the Prohashing pool.

As a tester, all that we would ask of you is that you connect your scrypt miner(s) to the pool and provide us with feedback on the pool’s features and any errors that you may encounter during testing. There is no requirement for the speed of your miner.

In you are interested in testing, please reply in this thread and I can set up an account for you to start mining.

[cryptorific]

Would you like to me put a call out on r/litecoinmining or something? Unfortunately I couldn't find any miners in my area with scrypt asic's. And the two KNC's won't be here probably until the end of september.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Sure, why not? The pool is still making 0.0006, while the closest competitor, Wafflepool, is making 0.00049, a 20% loss. Hopefully, pointing that out might encourage some people to join in.

Ideally, we would get a few more testers before the weekend, because there are three days this weekend for me to fix any new issues that they may uncover.

[cryptorific]

I've post to r/scryptmining http://www.reddit.com/r/scryptmining/co ... nnovative/ since r/litecoin mining hates multipools since they all payout only in btc. Hopefully i'll get some response.

[Steve Sokolowski]

You know, when I think about that, I wonder if this pool would be loved by litecoin miners because miners have the opportunity to be paid in litecoins. Perhaps that might make them more interested in supporting this pool, even if it's just because they don't like the other pools that have fewer options.

[cryptorific]

I would think they would like it too since it's the best of both worlds, they get the profit of a multipool and get to support litecoin by keep its price high and getting more litecoin than they would get just by mining litecoin directly. I just get the feeling that a post there would just get deleted by the mere mention of a multipool without them looking into the fact that litecoin would benefit from this one on balance.

[Steve Sokolowski]

That's fine. It looks like you got a few testers to join. Ideally, we would get about five or so, then run for a week to see if the testers reveal any bugs. We can also ask them (or hopefully they'll post here first) what they think and what improvements can be made.

By the way, you might be interested to know that you can now see the reason that coins are "excluded" in the coin status table. Most of the coins that are excluded are excluded because their variance would be too high with a low hashrate (less than one block per hour with current settings). Chris is going to make those error messages easier to understand later. Your profitability goes up as we get more miners, because more coins become eligible for mining, and that gives us a lesser chance of having the most profitable one excluded.

[Janus67]

Hello, I was directed to register from reddit via PM and when I attempted to do so I was denied the ability because 'there are already 10 registered members'

I have a 40MH/s asic if that matters