Should mine on Eligius or P2Pool, both of which pay miners
directly from the coinbase generation transaction. No middleman for the majority of payouts, can look at your miner's debug logs (or other tool) to see exactly who you're working to pay.
At the very least, mine on a pool with a good track record. I could see stuff like this becoming a trend.
"majority"
Except Eligius doesn't ... sometimes, and the coins can spend months waiting for the eligius middleman to send them to miners ... as you well know yourself.
Since, as with any pool, there's the question of how much you are paid ... there's also the obvious point about the long term luck of the pool, that is under the control of the pool.
Yes you may like to pretend that everything that happens at your pool is luck, but that's a lie.
For the last year (most likely years) your pool block change times have been terrible and part of the cause of the low "luck".
You have only recently made any reasonable changes regarding that (in the last month or so)
Your changes before that, in the previous years, to over come the shortcomings of your pool software, were (among other thing) to:
1) For 5 months only allow 32 transactions per block
2) For years and still currently, mine empty blocks every network block change, yet your block change times are still slow using this, bad for bitcoin, excuse.
You even effectively made the most ridiculous statement about your own pool payouts trying to point out a short coming of PPS
...
Antpool and f2pool also don't pay transaction fees to miners. This is going to become more important, especially after the next reward halving.
Your pool pays less than PPS with an absolute maximum limit of PPS ... so when reward halves, so does your pool payout ... just like it does for Antpool and f2pool and for the same reason.
... and as with most limit functions ... limits are rarely reached.
Trolling as usual without any real knowledge of the situation. Honestly, I think it's more an unwillingness to accept the knowledge presented rather than total ignorance... but the result is still the same.
I did specifically say "majority of payouts" for a reason. Eligius has a minimum payout, like most pools. P2Pool has one too, it's just less obvious and dictated by the max coinbase size by increasing share difficulties. P2Pool can include "every" miner's payout in every block because it makes those payouts larger by making the work harder. Eligius's offline wallet accumulates the small amount of coins that miners who haven't yet reached the minimum payout and does manual catch ups of the payout queue when this amount gets to something reasonable. The offline wallet is also used for times when the coinbaser is unavailable immediately, such as the quick block change optimization below. Every Eligius payout since the beginning of time is verifiable 100% using the blockchain and the pool APIs, and people regularly do so and it is fully encouraged. If there is a satoshi out of place, I'd be happy to hear about it.
Even with the offline wallet, the payout queue allows miners to get generated payouts once they reach the minimum payout. So a miner that isn't able to reach the minimum every block will still get coinbase generated payouts for the majority of their payouts. To date Eligius-Ra (iteration of the pool that I took over management of) has mined ~10,224 blocks and made 172 non-generated manual payouts. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
Eligius's supposed block change time delays in the past as measured by you and others was nearly 100% caused by connection prioritization. Zombie miners leeching off of block changes that are doing little to no actual mining relative to the rest of the pool have their connection priority dropped to nothing. Effectively these connections wouldn't get any data pushed to them until well after 99% of the pool had received several work updates and when the coinbaser had caught up and all (not realtime) pushing GBs of work to over 100,000 active connections. Eligius easily handles peak loads of over 250,000 miner connections regularly. Takes quite a bit of bandwidth to push work to all of these miners, on the order of multiple terabytes per day easily.
I recently decided that de-prioritization just wasn't sufficient and I just boot zombie miners now, freeing up tons of bandwidth in the process. Only personally approved users and/or IPs may idle on Eligius without mining without being booted in a FIFO order now with a set number of connections allocated to zombies (mostly people who have us as a backup pool, with some prioritization logic in there along those lines). Prioritization is still in play, and zombie connections still have low priority. It just is less noticeable now since everything can be caught up in milliseconds vs seconds. I'll probably boost priority on the nifty poolbench stat eventually, but I currently don't override my setup for any connections aside from not booting approved zombies.
I don't believe the 32 transactions per block situation took place while Eligius was under my management, with the exception of blocks generated with PoT transaction counts to counter a bitcoin CVE, which were blocks with a PoT number of transactions, not just 32. The only time any limits anywhere like that are placed on Eligius's blocks is when I'm doing work on one of the core bitcoinds and a sub-section of the pool is utilizing a secondary node with less horsepower and more strict relay settings and such to ensure continued smooth mining for the few minutes it takes to get the core node back online.
As for empty blocks, any pool or miner *not* using the 1-transaction initial work speedup on a network block change is just stupidly wasting miner resources, IMO. Pool immediately gets miners on the right block, and as soon as GBT returns with an updated transaction list gets miners working on full blocks. The fact that Eligius (and most other pools) find these coinbase-only blocks proves to value of such an optimization. They do no harm to bitcoin since they fulfill the primary purpose of mining, which is securing the network. All blocks are now deeper in the chain (more confirmations) because of the new block. You don't want to hear that though, and would rather spend time trolling and spreading FUD about it.
Admittedly, ckpool, being C based (and with the less obvious advantage of most ckpool-based pools being smaller on a connection-count basis than Eligius) would probably benefit greatly from such an optimization and have block change times second to no other pools besides HO-mining/SPV-mining pools. I was actually considering moving Eligius to ckpool until I was made aware of bugs that can potentially cheat miners in some situations (no time to confirm this, but the code appears to do so during some vardiff changes), has kludges like submitting blocks that don't meet the network target, and doesn't include a basic well known mining optimization (described above). Fixable stuff I suppose, but not worth it.
Transaction fees are included with Eligius, so... not sure what that comment was about. Just more trolling, as usual. And you do realize that *all* pools will pay half as much after a reward halving, right? I thought that was well understood? I mean, if your pool is still paying based on pre-halving amounts I'll be pointing some hash power your way until you go broke...
Fun fact: I had kano on ignore because the incessant trolling is ridiculous, but can see quoted posts... kano, man to man, seriously... what is your beef? I'd much appreciate a one on one discussion on why the hell you feel the need to follow me around and bash me and Eligius constantly. I really must be missing some underlying cause because it's crazy, man. I honestly do not know what the hell I've done to offend you to deserve such crap.
