I don't get how trying to finding the next BTC block is connected to getting cashu tokens.

Is the idea that you'd be using a pool and instead of the pool paying out on chain, or over lightning, that they'd issue you cashu tokens instead?

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Yeah the pool is a cashu mint. Your cashu balance slowly ticks up as you get paid ecash rewards. When you have enough saved up redeem via lightning or an on-chain UTXO.

That's vanilla ecash mining pool payouts. I'm working on something even cooler, ecash mining shares. I go into detail in this talk: nostr:note1z7ne9dd8yahmtvxyak3wz3mks7fx5c3lnl90levepdccmqdtpyrs2ucr0y

Impressive. I look forward to following your work even though I don't have a miner.

I don't totally get the epochs and things like what happens if the pool doesn't find a block in two epochs? Do all the old ehash tokens then become worthless? Or do you swap tokens from the old epoch to the new one (and lose your value if you fail to do so)?

I feel like some kind of diagram of that life cycle would be helpful in explaining how it works so plebs can understand where the risks are and whether there's anything they can do to mitigate them.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree I need to work on making that part more clear.

The epoch length is configurable by the pool. I haven't gotten far enough to know what a good default is but Ocean, I believe, targets an 8 block window for the share maturity period. So if blocks are found on schedule each share should pay out 8 times. With a large window like this the pool has to get really unlucky for any shares to be worthless, but it is possible.

This site has the best explanation of PPLNS that I have found: https://mintpond.com/b/prop-vs-pplns-vs-pps-mining-pool-reward-systems

The PPLNS visualization is randomized but you can usually see a share that never pays out as well as many shares that pay out multiple times. I should screen record a gif to make it easier to share on nostr.