I’ve been looking at the architecture for Chia, and trying to understand pools.
If someone wants to be a pool operator, they would receive 7/8 of the block reward for any blocks created by the pool participants. How will the pool know what fraction of the reward to distribute to the participants?
I understand that as a farmer, you can submit a proof of space to the pool - but that is a one time thing. If the farmer deletes the plots later, how will the pool know?
I feel like I’m missing something here.
In the POW space - it’s pretty easy to know how many hash jobs were submitted by participants. What is the equivalent “proof” for chia?
Seems like “filters passed” is probably the most fair option, because just having plots doesn’t necessarily mean they were potentially able to win a block.
BUT we will just have to wait until Monday for our starting point from the dev team
I agree - and was thinking maybe something like that. But - there will need to be some kind of cryptographically verifiable way to ensure the value passed to the pool is not forged.
Is there a forum where the devs discuss things like this? I would think this should be a public discussion. Once the devs delpoy it, it’s a bit too late - no?
They’re active on Keybase, but unsure if they’re talking about this specific effort.
I believe their stance on pools is that they’re making the protocol for plotting for them, and possibly the payout mechanism, as part of the official project, and then they are releasing an example pool web server that shows it all working. As I understand it, this is a lot more than most other cryptos do, generally pooling is not something baked into the crypto itself…
I had a suggestion for a shift in the nomenclature - we’re using the word pool as it is common, but with any new thing everyone tries to do things differently - here I think using the word “colonies” could work nicely. When you have jurisdiction over space and you are infinitely harnessing the resource it is called a colony - could work out nicely here…
(now that the official pooling implementation is farther along, it’s clearer the answer to OP’s question)
As you allude to, pools will receive the same kind of proof that is sent to the Chia network, except with a different “difficulty” (which controls how common such proofs are). This is quite elegant, because now the pool can use exactly the same mechanism as the Chia network does to guarantee that its members have the space they claim! These pool-specific proofs are called “partial proofs”.
By dynamically controlling the required difficulty per farmer, a pool can ensure that each farmer submits a consistent number of partial proofs per day.
