This message is for Pool operators (and for everyone who reads this anyway)
Before the official pool release, some groups (coughcough, hpool… etc) paved the path/gave clear ideas to Chia where to give the absolute power (not to a pool operator, that is).
Now, at this stage, except that deceptive price, farmers are happy enough to stay on the pools they have joined. They feel very little need to change. No, not true that bigger pools doing less well. They are very nimble to hot-fix on the go if tiny issues occur.
So now, to the point, what can a pool operator do to get more farmers on their pool?
No, it does not help to point fingers that your code is better than the others. Saying others are less competent than you will not bring more people to your side. People have the tendency to avoid anyone who complains.
To change all this, change your method. Think of fresh ideas. Pay in a different currency rather than paying in xch. Many farmers are scared to go to an exchange. If you pay upfront in eth or btc, for example, many will shift to you.
Some farmers in the US are scared to do an exchange because Gate.io is the only place allowing anyone with a USA address to trade XCH at the moment. I would use Gate.io if there were multiple platforms trading XCH for the US. Since there appears to only be one, I am steering clear of trading at the moment and will just let my XCH go up and down in value as the market fluctuates.
This would be illegal in most nations without a very expensive/difficult to obtain license. It could possibly be done through a PPS system but KYC would likely be needed and you’d have to take a large fee to hedge the risk/loss you take trading it.
Not sure if thats a dig at us or not but so far pools have done pretty well even if their running the reference code. There have been only a few short outages so far. That being said we predicted that most pools running the reference code could not handle most of the network and that still holds true, only a few % of the network has switched to reference pools and there have already been issues. It will be up to pool operators to work on the fly to accommodate the load they are bearing.
As for a pools code, if the code is good and is processing partials properly/speedily then obviously the pool should be fine showing farmers their stales. You can guess why some pools don’t. Many Chia miners have experience ETH mining and are used to having a pool show stales to monitor the health of their mining.
The 2 reasons I am replotting a large-ish share of my farm on FlexPool is because you guys supported MadMax and also as a developer myself, I know that fixing other peoples things is harder when the unforseen arises then fixing my own things. Unfortunatly the unforseen is always right around the corner, and usually not something on the planning and mitigation board.
OpenCL implementation, that is it!