What features do you expect to see in the ideal community-pool?

Hello everybody :wave:
I read that the Chia developers insist that in pools users get not only money but something more.
What functionality do you think your ideal community pool should have?

PS. I am developing ecochia.io and now we are adding a marketplace for farms and services with reviews. Also, a daily lottery with the opportunity to win promotional codes on amazon, no commission days, and more.

Thank you so much for your answers!

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I would assume all the same stuff that existing popular cryptocurrency pools do. Copy and paste!

You could make a list of all the cool stuff that existing pools do, you have the start of a list in your post already.

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First of all, you owe the Chia developers nothing. They are free to start their own pools if they want. Your pool, your rules.

I do understand they are worried that without gaming the psychology of users through variable reward reinforcement, that making that sort of predictable low variance low reward stream obvious, the likelihood of farmers abandoning Chia is very real. Imagine you would play roulette but instead of the normal win/loss variance on the turn you would just put down your chips and you’d be given 36/37th of your stake every time, 0 variance. How long would you play?

That’s not how probability works.

educate me then, as that is how I think it works when variance goes to 0 in the limit.

Yes, of course, I can just copy. I’m here to find out if people have some unresolved problems. Small customer development :slight_smile:

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Unless you are referring to some sketchy casino roulette wheels that don’t distribute outcomes uniformly, the probability of hitting any unique slot is the same always. Variance is the amount of deviation from the expected value. Unless the wheel’s outcome distribution can be controlled somehow, it’s theoretically implied that there is no variance in the expected probability of hitting any unique slot.

If a single player plays a game, variance is high as they might lose everything or win up to 36 times their stake dependent on the outcome of the unbiased wheel.

For an infinite number of players (or one player playing an infinite number of times), the variance of the aggregate outcome goes to 0, and in the case of classic french roulette the players in aggregate will retain 36:/37 of their total bets.

For Chia, if the whole of the netspace belonged to 1 pool that charged 0 fees and distributed all income pro-rata of you plots, your income in each draw would be exactly 2*(your plots/all existing plots in netspace), with 0 variance.

The commercial success of lotteries that return substantially less than the total cost of the tickets relies on a psychological principle of variable reinforcement. They rely on variance and break down completely in absence thereof.

Reinforcement - Wikipedia

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I see what you’re saying. I miss interpreted what you wrote originally.

np. English is not my first language and I wish I could write more clear. It often takes me a few tries if ever to convey what I mean, and tbh I’m most certainly not always right to begin with. Together we learn.

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I think a low fee and reasonably payouts would be appealing to everyone.

1-2% fee is about the norm. Some get away with %3 because its a neich setup and its worth while for the user.

Payouts need to be a reasonable number to where you get a payout ever 1-2 weeks even on a small farm. That is one of the large negative things I found on pools is that there payouts take months to get to for the casual enthusiast.

One thing I always like was a normal pay out and then weekly or monthly on low payout for the small farmers/miners.

I don’t have any prior crypto/pooling experience, so apologies beforehand if I state only the obvious.

  • (push) notifications if anything is wrong with your farm. When it goes offline in my basement, I want to know about it asap.

This is really the only function I want to have working without a hitch.

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I’m not sure pool operators have that information in the Chia protocol.

Actually I think they must have. If a farm goes offline, it should not be getting any rewards anymore.
So if a pool could not detect this, then the protocol is nonfunctional.

Which is exactly the problem, I think.

The chia developers have programmed a pool commission from 0% to 1% in the pooling protocol. More than 1 percent will not be :slight_smile:

This is very important. The pooling protocol can track the activity of each plot, so yes, we will implement push notifications in our ios/android application about errors in plots and the farm as a whole. But this is an optional feature and not all pool operators will implement it.

Do you have a source for that?

Yes, this information is in the protocol, but not as a feature for plot analytics, but simply as the ability to track their activity. We have already discussed with the chia developers that this feature can be used to track farm activity and plot’s bugs.

Also remember that the reward is not exactly in proportion to your plots because the farmer with the hit actually gets a bonus (was it 0.25 XCH ?) and the remainder goes to the pool for distribution - am not sure it is very meaningful but it does increase the variance a little. I guess it gives the small farmer that “lottery” chance of a bonus as well as regular payments