21 BTCPool payout schemes (PPS, PPLNS, FPPS, TIDES)
In plain words
A payout scheme is how a mining pool shares block rewards among its miners. The main question is who carries the luck: the pool (steady pay, higher fee) or the miners (variable pay, lower fee).
Classic schemes
- Proportional (2010): each found block is split by the shares of that round; vulnerable to pool hopping.
- PPS (Pay Per Share): a fixed price per share; the pool takes all the luck risk and keeps block fees.
- PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares): each block's full reward (subsidy + fees) is split over the last N shares; miners carry pool luck, fees are low.
- PPS+: subsidy paid like PPS, fees PPLNS-style.
- FPPS (Full PPS): PPS plus an average of network fees per share. The dominant scheme for big miners, but it needs deep reserves, which favours the largest pools.
Newer approaches
- TIDES (OCEAN, 2023): each block's full reward is split over the last eight blocks' worth of work and paid straight from the coinbase, non-custodially.
- DATUM (OCEAN, 2024): not a payout scheme but a way for miners to build templates on their own node.
- SLICE (DMND): rewards miners for building good templates via Stratum V2 Job Declaration.
- Solo pools (solo.ckpool.org, Public Pool): you keep the whole block if you find one.
See also
- Mining poolA mining pool combines the hashrate of many miners so they get small, regular payouts instead of waiting years for a whole block.
- Stratum V2Stratum V2 is the newer protocol between miners and pools. It encrypts the connection, uses compact binary messages and, optionally, lets the miner rather than the pool choose which transactions go into a block.
- MiningMining is the work that adds new blocks to Bitcoin. Miners run special computers (ASICs) that guess numbers; the winner of each round earns the block subsidy and the fees.
- HashrateHashrate is how many guesses per second all Bitcoin miners make together. More hashrate means more energy protecting the network.
References
- Bitcoin Wiki: Comparison of mining pools en.bitcoin.it
- M. Rosenfeld, Analysis of pooled mining reward systems (2011) arxiv.org
- OCEAN: TIDES docs ocean.xyz
- Braiins Academy: rewards and payouts academy.braiins.com