Your comments
@happyserendipity: It's refreshing that you bring up that topic. Thank you for that!
There appear to be a number of factors for establishing a pool these days. Among them ...
Publicity
I'm doing my best to spread the word about the pool on sites like Bitcointalk, Reddit and several coin specific forums by supporting miners on topics not directly related to our pool. If miner's ask for a pool to mine on, I sometimes recommend joining our pool. This would be one of the ways for you to help the pool too.
I'm currently working on a Mining App for Windows and probably macOS (no promises though) that will allow average Joe to start mining without any technical skills whatsoever. The app will support multiple crypto currencies and default to mine on our pools which should help with acquiring new miners faster.
Miner Trust
To quote a fellow pool operator (supportxmr.com):
Out of 20 pool submissions for new pools on moneropools.com, 15 are dead by the time I first click the link they send.
Many of the remaining pools give up mere weeks later. Miners simply don't want to risk it.
It took me half a year to get supportxmr to gain some traction with miners. Until then I just dumped money in the project. Double payout bugs, constantly mining with nicehash on the pool to give people freedom, spending most of my free time and risking my relationship in the process...
The pools that do care and go the extra mile are going to take off.
We too had our share of problems involving ...
- Payouts on the Monacoin Pool going to the wrong recipients which was caused by a bug in MiningCore.
- Miner's complaining about payouts on the DASH pool that wasn't our fault at all because the culprit has been extremely wild swings in network difficulty
- Miner's complaining about not receiving payouts for a long time. Since all of our pools use the PPLNS payout scheme, we cannot pay miners until blocks are found. If the pool is young and therefore has a low hash rate it sometimes takes forever to find a block. The Monero Pool's current bad luck streak is the best example. Unfortunately most miners don't know much about how pools work and vent their frustration at the pool even though those things are out of the pools control. I can't blame them though. Under the hood mining and payouts are a complex topic and it's hard to find information on those topics written for non-developers.
The DASH difficulty roller coaster appears to continue: https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/dash-difficulty-chart. Just yesterday we had a difficulty spectrum between 13.1 and 24.6 Million. That's a whopping 87%. Going forward there's needs to be a way to cope with that. One approach would be to use the network difficulty average of all shares contributing to a block.
I'll see what I can do.
The bug has been fixed so it will not happen again but the funds are lost. I'm going to grant you another 15 mona from my own wallet tommorow.
@bavarec: You are absolutely right. I'm fully aware of your significant contribution. The 20 Mona you've received were paid from my own pocket as the the pool had already distributed the block rewards of the blocks you've mentioned to the wrong recepients which was of course an error.
Miners appear to be divided over this. Some strongly prefer real user accounts while others prefer anonymous mining. In the long run I'd like to implement both.
Currently it is not a matter of interest (I am interested) but a matter of capacity.
@bavarec: What do you mean? You can also ask in German.
@Mr. Chocolate: It makes sense yes but due to the aforementioned bug you were probably still paid not enough. What's your wallet address?
Customer support service by UserEcho
A share's score is equal to: shareDifficulty / blockDifficulty. This is the exact line of code that calculates it: https://github.com/coinfoundry/miningcore/blob/master/src/MiningCore/Payments/PayoutSchemes/PayPerLastNShares.cs#L155