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June 09, 2011, 06:03:11 PM |
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The merchant does not 'spend what you gave him', he simply forwarded unsolved work from deepbit to you. When you give the merchant the solution, the merchant gives the solution to deepbit and deepbit credits him with either BTC, $USD, or 'share credit'. The merchant gets paid when he 'withdraws' money from his deepbit, bitcoin pool, compute4cash, etc account.
You, not having a sufficiently fast miner approach deepbit (or another miner) and ask them to solve the work for you. They do this, but require payment in the form of BTC, $USD, or deducting a 'share credit' from previous work you did for them.
Mining Pool Operator creates random work... 'find $nonce for $data such that hash($data+$nonce) < $target' and will pay someone $1 to solve it. Mining Pool Operator can 'solve it' in 10 minutes at an electric cost of $0.01, but Joe Desktop Owner would require '6 months' to solve it at an electric cost of $1.30. Mining Pool Operator offers to solve that work for $1.10. Cost to Mining Pool Operator $1.01, profit $0.09. Thus the 'transaction fee' in this case is $0.10 which is only this high to make it clear who does what and why.
Merchant agrees to solve the work for $1, passes the work to a customer, whom hires Mining Pool Operator to solve it. Cost to customer $1.10, merchant nets $1.00 and Mining Pool Operator nets $0.09 and power company/ISP nets $0.01.
Clearly a high margin for the Mining Pool Operator, but this is where market forces come to play. SuperBitPool comes along and says 'I will solve it for $0.55' which forces MiningPoolOperator to reduce his payout to $0.50 and he will only charge $0.52 to solve it. Margins get squeezed until the difference between buy/sell price for work approaches the transaction cost and the 'value' of that work approaches the electric+capital costs.
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