Public Pool on Start9 Node

Bitcoin
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I set up my own pool (lotto style) using Public Pool on my Start9 node and pointed 1 BitAxe after a response to my query here. I figure it’s only 1.2TH/s reduction from the 17TH/s I dedicate to OCEAN thru Stratum.

My reasoning is to try and understand shares and how they are gathered and at what rate from a specific poosl. I read a little from PLebSource about what to expect from a BitAxe in terms of difficulty.

They say:

Your Bitaxe submits shares to the pool at a lower difficulty (e.g., 512), typically 1-2 shares per minute. Vardiff adjusts the difficulty to optimize your submissions, and the OLED lets you monitor shares in real-time

So in my query I linked to above @paul responded with logic about shares and difficulty so I went on to discovering more about it. Reason being is the BitAxe’s shares were in the very low numbers when pointing to the OCEAN pool…under 1000 for 7 days. That is no where close to the 1-2 shares a minutes Pleb suggested. I also mentioned in the post that I pointed to Braiins Pool b4 OCEAN and the share rate reported was very high (over 7 days +10000).

Public Pool: Now since I started typing this post the shares from Public Pool in triple numbers (220) already. Say 10 minutes. Drastic difference again.

So @paul do you have any experience with Public Node on your own node? Besides my curiosity of shares across different pools…if I were to to hit the 1 in 217Trillion and actually find a share…how does Public Node payout…I imagine directly to the BTC address that was used? No pool fees and sovereign.

Thanks

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Why shares look different

A pool starts your ASIC difficulty at some value, then lets the adjustment logic move it around within some pre-configured limits, to balance the volume of network traffic you consume with the point-accuracy of your measured hash-rate. The reason for having this logic is because it is obviously impossible for you to send the pool every single hash your ASIC does, but the pool can’t simply trust what you tell it, and needs verify that you have actually done the work (or in the case of a solo mining pool, it uses this to display your hashrate on a dashboard). It does this by borrowing Satoshi’s stategy of POW with a difficulty adjustment (with a slight twist – the difficulty adjustment in this case adapts only to the hashrate of your ASICs, rather than to the overall pool hashrate).

So say Braiins starts your difficulty at 512 (just to make up a number to illustrate the logic) and at 1.2 TH/s your ASIC submits 10-20 shares min for a given pool – you would see a few-hundred shares in 10 minutes. Ocean’s minimum would be much higher (say 8,000, making up another number here), so the very same 1.2 TH/s miner produces perhaps 15X to 20X fewer shares. That’s why you log < 1,000 shares in a whole week there, while Braiins shows > 10,000.

The key point: the pool multiplies each share by its difficulty. This is what I mean when I say hash-rate accounting is difficulty X share-count, not share-count alone. The payout of a given pool does that weighting internally, so ultimately your payouts simply depend on your hashrate. The shares are like the unit of measure that a given pool uses to calculate your hashrate. Each pool uses their own unit of measure. As an analogy, it is possible to weigh a jar of sand in Grams or Pounds. The former will give you a larger number than the latter, but the jar contains the same number of grains in both cases.

How payouts work with solo mining

(BTW, you can configure Datum Gateway for solo mining – no need to trust a solo mining pool not to rug-pull you)

With a solo-mining pool (as with Datum Gateway) you enter a base layer address somewhere in the configuration. In the case of an honest solo-mining pool, that address is placed directly in the coin-base transaction of every block template the pool’s stratum server creates for you to mine. In the case of Datum Gateway, you create the block template, and add the address to the coin-base transaction yourself.

If your ASIC gets insanely lucky and returns a header that beats network difficulty, the pool (or your node in the case of Datum Gateway) broadcasts the block to the network. 100 blocks later, the full subsidy + all transaction fees become spendable from the address.

Additionally, with Datum Gateway, you can use Bitcoin Knots to filter out spam from your block templates. From the perspective of self-sovereignty, trustless, mining decentralization, and fighting spam, Datum Gateway + Bitcoin Knots is obviously the superior choice over a solo mining pool.

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I just realized you were talking about running your own instance of Public Pool, sorry. My comments were about 3rd-party hosted solo-mining pools. I’ve not used Public Pool myself, but it would be equivalent to solo-mining with Datum Gateway when you are self-hosting it, so no real benefit of one over the other I don’t think. Both would be great options for having fun while fighting spam and mining centralization.

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Yep. You had me confused for a moment but yes… my thoughts exactly. Since I run Knots and a local Public Pool I figured I would come at mining from multiple angles. Knots+Stratum and Knots+Public Pool and educate myself hands-on :+1:

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