I’m sure most of these have been mentioned (I haven’t read the entire thread) but here are a few things I like to see in a pool:
Confirmations left until block is paid out.
Time since last block was found.
Estimated profitability based on payouts shown hourly, over 24 hours and possibly over 72 hours (last one isn’t necessary but a nice touch). ZEC, BTC and USD would be appreciated.
Low fee (Which you already do, awesome!)
Incentive. This is a difficult one. One pool offers 1 full ZEC to the miner who finds the block but still has extremely low hashrate on the network. I think that’s a great incentive personally but it doesn’t work well if you’re not finding blocks for weeks on end. But I do feel like something should be offered as a incentive especially since so many people flock to the biggest pool. I’m definitely of the mindset that a pool should reward it’s miners for choosing their pool.
I’ll post anything else that crosses my mind the longer I stick around.
We are working on this and will show how many confirmations out of the required 100 have been processed.
Time since last block was found:
Good one - will add. Although, we have a ‘Blocks’ tab that shows time of the last block. I agree, it would be nice to see this on the dashboard.
Estimated profitability based on payouts shown hourly, over 24 hours and possibly over 72 hours (last one isn’t necessary but a nice touch). ZEC, BTC and USD would be appreciated.
Not sure how to do this as the ZEC/BTC and ZEC/USD exchange rates fluctuate quite a bit. Will look into it.
Low fee (Which you already do, awesome!)
Yes, this was our main selling point at the start and we will keep this fee for a while. Later we will switch to 1%, though offer loyalty and volume discounts.
Incentive. This is a difficult one…
Yes, absolutely agree and part of our strategy. Once we have reached a decent size and we increased our fee to 1%, we will offer incentives for large hashrate volumes and for loyalty, i.e. customers who stick around without disconnecting. We will have maximum discounts that can at the most result in a 0.5% fee again, to bring it in line with our launch fees.
Estimated profitability based on payouts is something nearly all other pools provide. Maybe take a gander at some of the other pools to see how they’ve implemented this feature. I realize you may not be able to see their actual code, but it should at least spark ideas on how it could be implemented. A simple disclaimer to indicate that this is estimated and how it’s estimate would also suffice to let people know it’s not exact. It would obviously need to pull the pricing information from somewhere like Coinmarketcap.com (or similar) and it would need to pull that information at regular intervals. You actually already do this on your main page, correct? You just need to take that number and use some basic math against with amount being paid.
I’m happy to hear you have a plan in place for incentivizing. I’m not a huge fan of raising the fee from where it’s at, especially once more miners join in. That seems more like a cash grab to me than anything. But 1% isn’t horrible. Assuming the incentives are great.
We are running our own server farm and know how miners feel, which is why we started this in the first place. We realized there was room for a better pool and we went ahead and created one.
Regarding profit estimates and projections - we know some pools are doing that and legally it is very dangerous. If a pool tells people how much money they will make, that pool is giving financial advice. And that is an activity that needs to be regulated on almost every jurisdiction.
There is no legal issue if it’s an estimation and explained as such. Hence the disclaimer
The danger comes when you definitively state an amount and advertise it as such. Example: “You will make $1/hour” is not the same as “You might make $1/hour”. You’re not legally bound in any way with the second statement.
A general disclaimer such is more than sufficient to protect against any legal issues. I can definitely appreciate why you might be hesitant, but I believe you’re over-thinking and over-extending the purpose of the calculated payouts over a time period.
Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding due to my wording as well. Profitability calculator is not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a breakdown of how much has been paid out hourly, daily and possibly weekly. Those numbers are based on what you are paying out to me already. It would adjust based on the current market value of course. There’s slight estimations based on the first hourly number of course. But again, a disclaimer stating it’s estimated absolves you of any legal responsibility.
there are many api out there where you can get this information. From marketcap you can grab zec/btc, btc/usd and btc/euro.
With a simple cron job that runs every 5 minutes you can easly grab this information and store it in your db.
If you need any help on making some good calculations on estimates or any dev/IT analisis or consulting give me whistle
In any case, really good job! I really appreciate the minimalistic design of your pool, logo is effective and clean, i wish you best of lucks!