I would say say ocean is not the best choice for the #plebminer with intermittent hash. Lightning payouts cool but payouts a couple hops from the coinbase are cooler. The biggest issue with ocean is the dilution of shares over time when hashing intermittently and the in ability to take advantage of high fee environments. With an fpps pool I can fire up hash when the conditions are favorable and get paid. I think custodians are very useful tools, no kyc of course. The other issue with ocean is the privacy. All hashers are open to public analysis.
Discussion
Great information! Thank you!
Have you heard of Demand Pool? They have been talking about a new PPLNS scheme that doesn't punish intermittent hashrate. I haven't looked into it yet but definitely will.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/slice-making-pplns-work-for-demand-response
I have not heard the privacy argument before. Do you have specific concerns about your ocean account getting doxxed or surveilled?
You can just say yes if you don't want to elaborate. 😅
First off, there is an incentive to reuse addresses rather than rebuild shares on new address after each payout. If you make a mistake and link your identity to one utxo, you dox them all. For lightning payouts I guess that's not as much of a concern. Also, because the address is linked to your exact hashrate it would be easy for someone to determine what kind of equipment you have. It's just a lot of information out in the public that can cause trouble in the future. Takes some consideration. The pool I use has automatic paynym payouts, so I get low transaction history utxos, kyc free, to new addresses every payout and they don't have my xpub.
What "dilution" of shares? You'll get paid the same for a share, other things equal, on OCEAN as on an FPPS pool. The difference is that the payment from OCEAN is spread out over ~8 blocks.
If you're hashing for a while and then stop, your payouts will slowly dwindle. But that's not because your shares are getting "diluted": it's because the shares remaining be paid taper off.
As for lack of privacy, another word for that is transparency.
The pplns (tides) payout structure punishes pool hopping. Having intermittent hashrate is essentially the same as pool hopping. If you hash for 1hr, on an fpps pool you get paid for the value of those shares at that moment, you hash for 1hr on ocean, the value of the shares decreases as other contributors continue to hash and you don't, the value of your work is diluted because stopped contributing. Combine that with a very large window of 8 blocks and it really only makes sense if you can hash continuously.
fpps pays you a fixed rate per share.
Tides pays you based on your share contribution as a percentage of all shares for that block.
For variable hash your payout doesn't become worse, but it does become variable. Of course tides hash payout is variable for fixed hashrates too.
My first ocean experiment I got lucky, 8 hours of hash got me 3x what I was getting daily from braiins once my entire 8 block window was payed. Later over a 3 month window test I got payed more than the previous 3 months with braiins even though fees were lower during the ocean months. I definitely had days and weeks where I got less on ocean than the old fixed rate but over time it was more.
Maybe Braiins is a bad fpps pool.
Well, no. I switched from Brains FPPS to Ocean during winter when I was hashing only part of a day (around 14 hours) and I when I analyze my payouts in monthly periods I can see increase on Ocean side around 10%. I need to do better calculation with moving averages but the difference is significant. Now I can run 24hours non stop with slightly lower power limits and still maintain good average hash rate.
If you do not need to sell you Bitcoin to pay for electricity or living and just stack sats then Ocean is the pool to go. On average in 2-3months time you will get more than on any FPPS pool. There is always cost of convenience. There is a cost of those daily payouts.
The FPPS SBI proxy pools are paying more than Ocean. There are active tests running for 10 months showing a significantly lower payout from Ocean. It definitely depends on which pool you use but Ocean pool does not pay out the most.