Re: Looking for a few testers
Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 6:51 pm
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.
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.