-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 7
Pool Terms
When talking about the pool, it helps to understand the various features in the pool and how they relate. If you are unsure of what a certain term means, like "Rolling Submission" or "Soft Max Limit", this wiki will serve as a reference.
Rolling submissions is how the pool handle submitting the mined entries to the Factom network. The pegnet reference miner requires a node that syncs with minutes. If the minute syncing is lost, the miner is dead in the water. Prosper pool does not require syncing by minutes, and uses a rolling submission strategy. Any time during the block if we find a share that has a chance of doing well on the network, the pool will immediately submit that share, rather than waiting until minute 9.
If your hashpower begins to dominate the network, tweaking might be necessary. The soft max limit will help prevent overspending, but overspending still can occur. A 36 block (6 hr) exponential moving average is kept of the network difficulty to determine whether or not to submit a share.
The rolling submissions strategy is ideal if your miner will only encounter less than 50 "good" records per block. If your pool has enough hashpower to cross this number, then your pool will overspend. To counter this, a simple solution was put in place, the Soft Max Limit. This solution is not perfect, and a more complete solution might be needed.
In short, the soft max limit will keep track of all submitted shares for a given block height. As we submit, if we have submitted 25 shares already, we will only submit a new share if it is above the lowest we have. If it is lower, we block the submission and save the EC. This will never impact your rewards. If the share is above, we insert it into the top 25 list, and submit the share. In testing this feature becomes more effective as your hashpower increases exponentially. If you are submitting ~30 records or less per block, this does nothing. Once you hit over 100 entries per block, this will immediately start saving ~40% in EC costs, and as you go into 1000+ entries, the EC savings get over 80%.