Q's About mining pool theory

Hey Guys,

As some of you probably know, I’m new here and have been trying to learn everything I can about Zcash, cryptos, and mining. This community has been fantastic so far, and I really could not have gotten my first rig up (or trouble shot problems) with out you guys! So, thanks in again, and in advance. This time, my questions is in regards to mining pool theory. I couldn’t find any great resources (I’m probably googling the wrong questions) so I thought that I would try here.

Q: Do the amount of resources (H/s or sol/s) per device connected to a mining pool have an effect on the over all performance of the pool and reward for to individual miners?

Example: Pool A: 1300 devices @ 130 MH/s vs. Pool B: 6500 devices @ 130 MH/s.

I’m no expert on this but from what I’ve seen and read so far on most altcoins, the gist of it would be that on a pool with a smaller hashrate your payments would be, in general, a bit more spaced out but bigger in value (as the pool will find less blocks per time unit but split them among less miners) whereas on a bigger pool you’d get more frequent payments but in smaller values (because even though the pool finds more blocks due to higher hash-rate it will split each block among more miners).

In long term you should gain the same amount of coins on either pool.

I guess this is a over-simplified description of how things work; other factors may influence the overall picture and how much you gain as well (e.g. pool stability and downtime/uptime percentage, pool fee, if the pool is being honest with the miners or is skimming, the payment algorithm type of the pool - e.g. PPLNS, PPS, etc. - as compared to whether you’re staying on the pool for a long time or keep jumping around pools, etc.).

2 Likes

Hey @tuxer,

Thanks for your response. A larger share of the mined coin based on the worker’s share of the total pool output seems fair, but I’m still curious as to how the mining pools actually work.

If they operate like a single virtual processor unit, then individuals with sub-par mining resources (Connectivity & Hash Rate) would adversely effect the over all performance of the entire pool.

Not sure what you mean by “single virtual processor unit” here.

A pool’s goal is to mine blocks. It does so, if any of the miners on that pool found and submitted the best share (on the whole network, not just in that pool) for the current block.
When that happens, it will distribute the reward afferent to that block to the pool’s miners according to its algorithm (PPS, PPLNS, etc.).
If a miner has low hash rate or bad Internet connectivity it will submit much less shares and in consequence get paid less; I don’t see how that could ever affect the pool since whatever little hash rate he’s contributing in the form of shares submitted, still adds up to the total pool hash rate.