It's true, last payment less than 54 uBTC was on 12th June What if someone send me less than 54 uBTC? 

He didn't "block any output with a value of less than 54uBTC"... he set the default value that nodes block to 54 uBTC.

I agree it would be better to be more dynamic.  Now I'm confused as to how this affects EMC (it just sounds like compatibility testing); why you need to send such small amounts; and whether you consider changing some configuration settings, which others have mentioned, to be "modifying" the client.

PPS in it's purest form requires the sending of small amounts.  Now, you can argue for various modifications to pure PPS to overcome this particular problem, but fundamentally it kills pure PPS pools.  It makes it impossible to get paid for 1 share (quite a bit more than 1 actually, but it's the same issue), so the pool is no longer PPS, but PPsS.

1 share is worth about 1/100th of a penny. I'm ok with bitcoin not being able to flood the blockchain with .01c payments.

You could, but as I said, that is a different matter all together.  A fundamental building block of PPS is the difficulty 1 share, since it's the basis of everything else.  Whether or not it matters if you can pay a difficulty 1 share is another discussion, not really germane to this particular issue.

47 difficulty is way too high for some miners.  Take a Block Erupter for example, at 300 MH/s - it will never get paid in your scenario.  Whether mining is worth it at less than 47 difficulty is a different exercise, though.  As difficulty climbs, the situation worsens for the low hashrate miners.


It did, until now.

Difficulty 1 = requires on average 2^32 hashes.  This is an utterly artificial distinction.  Satoshi could have made difficulty 1 require an average of 2^64 hashes and block difficulty would be 0.005355 today.  It would work just as well.  Hell if you wanted to you could accept sub 1 difficulty shares.  Not much point especially as miners get fast but you could. 

There is nothing "fundamental" about difficulty 1 hashes other than you have always done it.  Eventually given a high enough hash rate the value of a difficulty 1 share will be less than 1 satoshi.  What then?  Failure of the PPS pool model?


Um shares are probabilistic.  It will take a miner an average of 197,568,495,616 attempted hashes to find one which meets difficulty 46 target.  While the time between shares is random, in the long run a 300 MH/s miner will find one difficulty 46 shares for every 658 seconds spent mining.  A 300 MH/s miner, mining for a full 24 hours would be expected to find 131 diff-46 shares.  The miner will find 1/46 as many diff-46 shares as diff-1 shares in a given period of time however the diff-46 shares will be worth 46x as much.

Not sure if you are posting without enough sleep but you should know better than most that the only difference between shares (of any difficulty) and block solutions is reduced difficulty.  That is it.  Current block difficulty is ~21 million.  A diff 1 share is ~21 million times easier to find than a block.  A diff 46 share is ~456,000 times easier to find than a block.   The difference between diff-1 and diff-46 is negligible compared to the difference between either and full block difficulty. 

The more people who run a full node, the greater the decentralization[1][2].

Using the chain as data storage, rather than currency, costs everybody, because it increases the rate at which people are discouraged from running full nodes.  It increases the costs of that dataset that cannot be pruned, and must be carried for eternity: the unspent transaction output set (UTXO), the list of coins available for spending.

Right now, it remains within the realm of a hobbyist to run a full node, especially with the recent memory usage improvements in bitcoind.  But one day, that will not be the case.

By pushing back on data spam, we reduce the rate-of-increase on blockchain resource costs, and reduce the disincentive to run a full node.  We push back the day at which there are just a handful of archive nodes with a copy of the full block chain.

For some reason my mortgage broker refused to allow me to pay for my house with 30 million 1c coins...