I’m a curious George at times so here goes. I have a few BitAxe’s pointed at Ocean through my own service (Datum, Knots) on my Start9. I have noticed that moving from Braiins pool to Ocean that the Shares amount (less than 1000 for 7 days) is very, very small compared to when on Brainns. I think Braiiins was into 10000+ (without Datum in the loop) over the same period. Before I get into how OCEAN works internally in the “Shares In Reward Window” I’m curious if others notice shares amount be low (if you have a low TH/s ASIC) and do you think that effects rewards/payouts? My thinking is it does because that’s how TIDES works.
Think of shares as equivalent to blocks on the main chain. They have a difficulty adjustment which, like blocks, affects the rate at which they are mined. Ocean has (IMO) their minimum difficulty set a little too high (Braiins uses a more reasonable value). The effect is a lower number of shares within a given unit of time, which also generates a more volatile hash rate graph. Ultimately, though, the number of shares within unit time alone isn’t what defines your contribution – it is a combination of the number of shares + difficulty within unit time that does. A better metric to compare is the average hash rate over time. Obviously if you see a big difference there between Braiins vs Ocean, then that would be a concern. The share count alone just indicates that the two pools are sampling at different rates.
Just my own update. The Tides diagram seems a good guide, your miners ramp up to a certain level and then you slide from one reward window to the next, retaining the earnings per block you’ve earned (as long you continue to mine at the same level). As per the diagram you will continue to be paid after you stop mining until the reward window moves on again. Ocean blocks and Datum blocks trigger a payout.
Yes sir. I concur. I watched a bit of The Mechanic and I see where he mentions each share gets paid 8 times and of course the share window is 8 blocks worth of shares. It took a few days for OCEAN to find a block last week. Roughly 5 days but payout/rewards worked as he mentioned.
BTW - Have you ever looked up your own ranking? The Pool page is full of good info for sure. Everything is transparent as they mention. Another thing to take note of is who the power houses are…ZettaPow, Just for Krypto, Penguin, Bitcoin to the Moon, Munich International Mining, etc…those miners are really pumping in the Ph/s for sure.
There are interesting stats on the Pool page, total participants (1394 presently) , ALL user activity. Your ranking…I rank 701 out of 1394. More interestingly is the power users and their data.
I thought I was rocking with the Shares In Reward Window being 2.68G and Estimated Rewards In Window 8000. Come to find out I’m smaller than an ant compared the the PH/s workers on OCEAN.
I had a miner offline for a couple of days while i got a replacment, and my stats just sank like a stone. Then I realised the Ocean pool hash rate has increased by about 20%, must be an industrial scale mining enterprise has joined the pool. My block rewards are more than halved since this happened. Anyone else seeing this?
My understanding so far is the Shares In Reward Window is about a 8 day window. So as the window moves the share rewards change. The Estimated Rewards In Window comes into play as more blocks are hit inside the 8 day? Window.
A few days ago there were 4 datum blocks pretty close together. The initial payout in Estimated Earnings Next Block was paid out…then when the next 3 blocks came in the they were paid from the Estimated Rewards In Window.
So now if another block is hit before the Lightning payment is made the Estimated Payout Next Block kicks in and adds to Unpaid Earnings. Rinse repeat
Make sense?
Note: Hash rate comes in here somewhere, I think in the Shares In Reward Window. Once I get my head wrapped a little tighter around it I’ll have a better understanding but that is what I’ve deduced so far.
ps- Like I mentioned to you earlier…look at the pool page and you will see the “players” that are contributing in PH/s. My screens shot are an embarrassment compared to the “players”.
Set the filter to 1 month on the pool dashboard graph and you’ll see what I mean, they have moved from 4 Eh/s to 11 Eh/s in the past 5 days or so. 2 of my miners have been on 24/7 in this period. This change in Eh/s has to be why block earnings have crashed, possibly as the shares earned are a much smaller part of the overall pool amount now. The top earner is now 24% of the entire pool shares, the top 3 = 40% in total. At these rates it won’t be worth pool mining on Ocean with hobby miners. I’ll give it a few more days but my block earnings are going down every day atm. Solo mining suddenly looks more attractive.
EDIT: You might look at it another way depending on your needs: The average block find time has dropped to 15 from 35 hours. So yes…less pool percentage, smaller increment payouts but more payouts in the same Unpaid balance. Just a thought.
Question: If you went solo would you just go to your own Public Pool?
I’m not sure what to think of the change as it kind of centralises the Ocean pool to a handful of industrial types, and will likely knock out a lot of small miners. I’ll wait and see what the payments look like, and see if they say anything publicly about what they’re trying to achieve. If it’s no longer viable (and I suspect it won’t be) I’ll set up a miner to solo mine via Datum as a test. I might also experiment with Public Pool, and move the miners over to whichever suits best. I believe solo mining will do away with the need for CLN or LND nodes, as I think block payments go straight to a wallet address, but which again goes against the need for decentralisation. As ever, you’re always learning in bitcoin, Lightning, etc.
Maybe Penguin and Peak mining have a strategy? Ton of things it could be though…miner rotations from different pools, repairs/ breakdowns. Good luck in your decision making. I’ll be giving OCEAN a 2 month fair shot before I adjust my probability expectations
Am I missing something important about Ocean’s share difficulty adjustment logic? My intuition tells me that the higher the percentage of the overall global hash rate that is applied to a given pool, the more frequently that pool finds blocks, and therefore the less volatile the payouts for a given member of the pool will be (i.e. members receive more frequent smaller payouts on average as opposed to less frequent larger payouts). Or do you see evidence that the higher Ocean’s hash-rate goes, the higher they adjust up their own internal minimum difficutly per share? Even if that is the case, though, it just means your individual volatility (i.e. the time between when you find shares) would stay the same or increase, but it wouldn’t change your average percentage of Bitcoin’s overall global hash rate.
Said another way, all other things equal (i.e. no changes to the base-layer difficulty), the higher the difficulty for a given share, the more sats it is worth. Over a long enough time frame, the amount of sats you get payed on average (all other things equal) should remain the same for a given amount of real hash-rate, regardless of how volatile your real-time estimated hash-rate graph looks.
The only place where greater hash rate has a negative impact on an individual miner is when the overall global hash rate (i.e. the sum of all mining pools and solo miners combined) increases, which causes the base-layer difficulty to adjust upward. This is what, over time, causes small ASICs to become less and less effective. If hash rate moves from one pool to another pool, but the global hash rate remains the same, this should have no impact on the average amount of sats mined over time for a given amount of individual hash rate.
With respect to what impact greater hash rate moving to Ocean has on the mining centralization problem, I think it depends on whether that hash rate is connecting via Stratum or Datum. If large amounts are going into Stratum, that increases centralization (because Ocean is the one creating the block templates). While not ideal, this actually still benificial to Bitcoin in another way, since Ocean runs Bitcoin Knots for their template creation on the Stratum protocol, and therefore as their pool hash rate takes a greater share of Bitcoin’s global hash rate, the greater the resistence it adds to spammers getting their garbage into blocks.
If the hash rate moving to Ocean is connecting via the Datum gateway, however, then that is actually a decentralizing force. This is because Datum requires the member to build their own block templates. The more miners who move from other pools to Ocean, the greater the percentage of Bitcoin’s global hashrate is being moved away from the highly centralized entities that are building most of the block templates for the network today.
I asked Ocean were my miners’ block reward numbers going down b/c of the increase in the pool’s hash rate, and they said more blocks = smaller payouts. I’m now waiting to see if they are hitting 3 times as many blocks. The last 8 blocks found have been Datum blocks. The last Ocean block was 20/06.
Hmm, I know I should have paid more attention in math class. Makes no sense but then I don’t know enough about their algo’s but it does kinda fall inline with what I conjured about less pool percentage, smaller increment payouts but more payouts.
