Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [Bitcoin Advent Calendar] Decentralized Coordination Free Mining Pools

From: Jeremy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2021 17:31:42 -0800

Hey there!

Thanks for your response!

One of the reasons to pick a longer window of, say, a couple difficulty
periods would be that you can make participation in the pool hedge you
against hashrate changes.

You're absolutely spot on to think about the impact of pooling w.r.t.
variance when fees > subsidy. That's not really in the analysis I had in
the (old) post, but when the block revenues swing, dcfmp over longer
periods can really smooth out the revenues for miners in a great way. This can
also help with the "mind the gap" problem when there isn't a backlog of
transactions, since producing an empty block still has some value (in order
to incentivize mining transaction at all and not cheating, we need to
reward txn inclusion as I think you're trying to point out.

Sadly, I've read the rest of your email a couple times and I don't really
get what you're proposing at all. It jumps right into "things you could
compute". Can you maybe try stating the goals of your payout function, and
then demonstrate how what you're proposing meets that? E.g., we want to pay
more to miners that do x?