In most of our pool guides, we look at profitability and review the most popular mining pools available for a given crypto coin. Today we will tell users how to choose the right pool to suit their needs.
When we talk about the right pool, we don't mean the size of its capacity or the commission, we mean the payout structure and type of reward. If you are new to mining altcoins or even Bitcoin, then understanding the payment pool terminology can be quite confusing. Here in this guide, we will explain the pool reward structure.
Whether it is a Bitcoin pool or an Ethereum pool, each pool has its own payment models. Today, pools most often pay per share.
A share in mining is your share of participation in solving a block, which is proportional to the power of your equipment.
The most well-known pool reward structure is as follows:
- PROP - proportional payment,
- FPPS - full payment for the ball,
- SMPPS - total maximum payment per share,
- ESMPPS - adjusted total maximum payment per share,
- CPPSRB - limited fee for delayed payment share,
- PPS – simple payment per share
- PPLNS – payment for the last N share
- PPS + - payment per share +.
Among all the above, PPS and PPLNS are the two types of payment models that are most often used by mining pools nowadays.
Before we explain the payment principle of both PPS and PPLNS, we will make a short note about mining pools.
What is a mining pool?
Mining pools are centers where a group of Cryptocurrency miners share their computing power with the network in order to solve blocks faster. Rewards will be distributed equally depending on the share of participation that pool participants contributed to the search for the block.
Pool mining was introduced in the early days of Bitcoin mining when solo mining became unviable due to the enormous computational complexity. The more powerful your equipment, the more ball (micro-solutions) you send to the pool. The more ball you send, the more you earn. To allow pools to pay miners, they began using their own payment schemes. The two most popular options are PPS and PPLNS.
Reviews about 2Miners
After reading the reviews from 2Miners clients, the situation is not so rosy. Most reviews are negative comments and remarks about the work of the pool and its management.
The latest reviews from 2Miners note the discrepancy between the specified ping and the rude attitude towards users on the part of support.
User reviews about the work of 2Miners
In addition, the far from isolated accusations of blatant fraud by 2Miners are very alarming. According to users, the pool often steals blocks.
User reviews about the work of 2Miners
There are also many comments regarding the underestimation of fees for miners by 2Miners. Users have noticed strange situations when a certain farm mines at one speed, for example, 500 Sol/s, but by the time it receives a block, its speed skyrockets to 500 KSol/s, which allows it to get a larger share of the reward. At the same time, the remaining miners are left with nothing. Such miracle farms appear approximately 2-3 times a day.
User reviews about the work of 2Miners
Positive feedback about the work of 2Miners in the minority
, but still there. Although they are so structural that they are very similar to custom ones.
User reviews about the work of 2Miners
In general, the mining pool is quite good in its functionality and capabilities and is most likely perfect for those who are just starting to learn mining to train their skills. But the negative experience of pool clients, which results in low ratings of the site, naturally leaves its mark on the reputation of the service and the desire of potential users to use the pool.
What is the difference between the PPS and PPLNS models?
PPLNS
PPLNS means Pay Per Last (luck) N Share - payment for the last (pool luck) N share. This method calculates your payment based on the number of shares you sent to the pool during mining. The method includes an offset system based on the time, or number of shares, transferred by the miner to the pool.
Your pool may find blocks sequentially or overtime, it may have huge differences in block finding and all of this will ultimately affect payments.
PPLNS heavily involves a luck factor , and you will notice huge fluctuations in your 24-hour payout. If you maintain your farm in one pool, then your payouts will remain the same, and will only differ when new miners join or leave the pool.
For a more detailed explanation about the PPLNS method, we suggest you read this topic.
P.P.S.
Pay Per Share - payment per share. The pool pays you based on the average number of shares you contributed to the pool when searching for blocks. PPS pays you at a fixed rate and is a more objective method that completely removes the luck factor.
In the PPS method, no matter which pools are lucky in finding blocks or not, you will receive a 100% payout at the end of the day.
This is because each miner has a standard set of payouts based on their hash rate. The payout will not be more than 100% or less. With this PPS method, you can easily calculate your earning potential.
On the other hand, with the PPLNS payment system, on average you can get more than 100% (or less). Everything will depend on the overall luck of the pool, on how lucky the pool is when searching for new blocks.
Payment of rewards and commissions on 2Miners
2Miners automatically calculates payments to miners every 2 hours
.
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An important condition is that your current balance must be at least the minimum payout amount for the selected coin. So, for Ethereum the minimum payout amount is 0.05 ETH, for coins mined using the Dagger Hashimoto (Ethash) algorithm - 0.1, for coins compatible with the Equihash algorithm - 0.01, etc.
The minimum payout size can be seen on the main pool page of each coin. The screenshot below shows an example for Ethereum.
Minimum payout for Ethereum
The entire accumulated amount of coins is paid to the wallet address specified in the mining settings. Payment of coins to another wallet is not possible.
The size of the commission on 2Miners depends on the selected type of remuneration:
- PPLNS pools charge 1%;
- On SOLO pools – 1.5%.
The commission is deducted from the miner's income before payments are made.
Should I choose PPS or PPLNS?
This is one of the common questions that all miners initially face. Should I choose a "Pay Per Share" or a "Pay Per Last N Share" pool?
If you are a person who rarely switches pools, then PPLNS is definitely for you, as such pools are good at rewarding their loyal miners.
Pay Per Share (PPS): Whether you need fixed payments at the end of the day to lock in profits or for any other reason, then our recommendation would be PPS. Pay Per Share works well for large farms that can compute quickly and have stable statistics based on their hashing power.
PPS is good for large miners, but very bad for pool owners,
since there is a guaranteed payout for the work regardless of whether the pool solves the block or not. For this reason and because of those who change pools too often (not loyal miners), most pools have switched to the PPLNS payment model.
Pay Per Last N Balls (PPLNS) : If you want to accumulate and store more coins, we highly recommend PPLNS. For every block that your pool finds, you will receive a share based on your hashrate, including the pool's luck factor (when the pool finds blocks quickly). Unlike PPS, with PPLNS you will receive payouts more frequently and you will ultimately be rewarded more with PPLNS than PPS.
However, due to the huge variance, it is very difficult to calculate your mining income. PPLNS is good for both mid-range miners and pool owners since payouts are based only on blocks found.
If your pool is luckier, you'll see payments more often. It is for this reason that miners stick to pools where there is large hash power, assuming that the pool finds blocks very often.
You can find more comparison of the payment system of mining pools here.
QNX RTOS: PPS - Loosely coupled inter-task communication
The PPS service has proven to be so reliable, convenient and easy to use that it is used in new solutions and products, such as, for example, Smart Energy, QNX Car and even the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
In this article we will get acquainted with PPS in practice, we will talk about the features of the technology, and at the very end it will be shown that PPS is a real cosmopolitan among inter-task interaction mechanisms, and many programming languages support it out of the box.
What is PPS for?
Using PPS allows you to simplify the construction of systems consisting of many components. In the future, these components can be changed, supplemented and even removed without reworking the entire system as a whole and without changing other components. Different teams of developers developing applications using different technologies and programming languages can develop components that interact with each other without any knowledge of each other.
The main advantages of PSS over other methods of intertask interaction:
What is PPS
First of all, you need to launch the pps manager:
The manager, of course, has command line arguments, but there is nothing fundamental for us there. Anyone can read the description in the reference manual. When performing all subsequent exercises, we will assume that the pps manager is already running. Now let's try to create some object, for example, figure
:
This is all. Now the object can be read:
This way you can see the name of the object. The object does not yet have properties. You can add them, for example, form
:
You can add another property, for example, color
:
Be careful, the following command will delete the object and recreate it with one property:
I hope you know the difference between > and >>. Any property or several properties of an object can be changed or added at any time:
Any property of an object can be deleted:
If the object itself is no longer needed, then it can be deleted:
I think that Habr’s readers are literate enough people to understand the meaning of the examples and rewrite them in their favorite language.
And now, it seems to me, it’s time to explain the meaning of the name PPS - Persistent Publish/Subscribe.
Persistent
The PPS service stores data in RAM while running. But at the same time, PPS ensures that data is saved between reboots in non-volatile storage. Typically, data is stored in a file system on disk or flash memory. If necessary, the developer can organize the storage of data on non-standard media.
Publishing
It is perhaps worth noting that multiple processes can simultaneously open the same object for writing and change attributes. This can be useful if different processes are responsible for different attributes.
Subscribing
We also already know something about subscriptions, but not everything. You don’t think that PPS is so simple and trivial. Yes, there's definitely a dog rummaging around here somewhere. And she rummaged through the subscription. There are subtleties of subscription, such as blocking read and delta mode. Let's look at some of these possibilities.
Blocking read
By default, reading from a PPS object file is non-blocking. This is normal behavior for other file systems. This was done on purpose so that standard utilities behave as usual. The easiest way (but not always the most successful) to get changes to an object in a timely manner is a blocking read. ?wait qualifier
.
Let's conduct a bold experiment and change the properties of an object in one console, and monitor these changes in another. To do this you will need two consoles. If the Photon graphical environment is running, then everything is simple. If you work in a text console, then switching between them is carried out using the key combinations Ctrl+Alt+n (here n is the key with the number 1, 2, etc., and not the function key F1, F2 as in Linux, for example). And so, we create an object:
And in the second console we open it in blocking read mode:
Note that the cat utility does not exit, but blocks on read. Now in the first console we type a couple of commands:
The second console continues to output:
It’s especially clear to do all this in Photon, when there are two consoles in front of your eyes. You can exit cat using the usual Ctrl+C.
You can switch reading mode on the fly. The following C code illustrates this feature:
Notification of new data
There are two ways to receive new data from PPS in a timely manner:
Subscription modes
There are two subscription modes:
It is worth noting that in full mode the entire object is always read with all its properties that exist at the time the object is read. This means that if between readings the same property was changed several times, then the last change will be read.
The following example shows reading an object in delta mode. On the first console we create an object:
On the second console, subscribe to it in delta mode:
We change two properties at once:
And we get one change:
Server mode
A PPS object may have a server, i.e. such a process that is paramount among publishers. It is also called a critical subscriber. To open an object in server mode, you must specify the ?server
. The rest of the subscribers become like clients.
If any of the clients changes a property of an object, then only the server will receive the notification and change to the object. The client identifier (a number) is also added to the object identifier, for example:
How do I know if a pool is PPS or PPLNS?
Mining cryptocurrencies can be a profitable process. However, it is very important that you know what payment scheme your pool uses before you start mining. Most pools have this information on their FAQ (questions and answers) page or Payouts page.
If you cannot find this information, your only option is to contact pool support. We hope the information on this page helps you choose the right pool. Happy mining!
Login to the official 2Miners website
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Official website of the 2Miners pool
To get acquainted with the site, go to the official 2Miners website. Here we have some good news - you don’t need to register to work with the site. All information is immediately available to the user.
The 2Miners start page has a laconic and pleasant design.
In the first window, the user sees the total hashrate of the pools in the context of various mining algorithms, as well as brief operating conditions and achievements of the site.
There is a toolbar at the top of the main page. Here you can select the desired interface language, read the FAQ section and training materials, there is a search bar for a miner by address, and there is also a quick access button to select a mining pool. This block will also be available when scrolling down the page.
Home page 2Miners
Which way is better? PPS VS PPLNS
With so many aspects to consider, it's natural to ask which is best. But comparing standard payment plans is not easy.
PPLNS pools can generate greater returns in the long term, but they are more susceptible to short-term changes in network difficulty. Conversely, PPS pools may promise stable returns from the start, but you may get more bang for your buck over the years by looking elsewhere.
As they say: unlucky in love, lucky in cryptocurrency mining 
How to write a postscript: examples and methods of use
Hello dear reader!
Text and writing have one goal - to be remembered and to evoke the right emotions in the reader. Has it ever happened to you that it was reading the epilogue of a book or article that was memorable and made you think more than the main content? It's all in our brain. He remembers better what was said at the end. For example, a postscript.
