A Letter to Slush Pool Miners
Recap of Development / Features brought to you in 2016 and Outlook into 2017
Dear Fellow Miners,
The year 2016 has gone by and a lot has happened, it was the 7th year of Slush Pool operation after all! Most of these events would not be possible without your contribution, since you help to make Slush Pool better and stronger. To commemorate this, we would like to recapitulate 2016 in short, and we invite you to join us. At the end, will also explore the outlook into the new year.
Year Start — Transparency
Becoming the most transparent and open mining pool in the world has always been our long term goal. In order to move closer to that, last year we introduced the so-called “Hash Rate Proof”. This proof confirms the pool’s declared hash rate through publicly available cryptographic and statistical analyses. Aaron van Wirdum wrote an excellent piece explaining the concept.
Scaling Debates
Throughout the year, the community was busy discussing SegWit and Blocksize, and will probably continue in 2017 as well. We felt that a prompt response from our side could inspire a common approach for all pools. Therefore, we introduced the Blocksize poll, which allows everyone to vote for their preferred scaling option. Moreover, we have deployed a new Bitcoin Core version 0.13.1. to our Stratum servers, which means we are also SegWit-ready now.
Increasing Miners Profitability
Direct
By running Core 0.13.1, which has ancestor fee rate mining (CPFP — child pays for parent), our pool is able to earn more income by correctly prioritizing transactions with high fee children compared to other pools. This has been already publicly praised by Gregory Maxwell on Reddit.
Indirect
As one of the few pools, we have always included bitcoin transaction fees into the block reward, to be divided among you — miners. The only fee we charge is a 2% flat fee. This fee strategy actually prevents your profitability from decreasing over time.
The explanation is simple: The increase of transaction volume has caused the value of bitcoin transaction fees to rise significantly; they currently represent 4% of the block reward, on average. Those pools that do not share these fees are therefore effectively charging a 4% fee on their miners. In other words, by mining at Slush Pool you are saving 2% of the block reward, compared to other pools. You also know beforehand how high the fee will be.
Convenience
Re-branding
You might have noticed last year we introduced a complete redesign of our UI together with a new domain: slushpool.com. We aimed to improve overall transparency and convenience in our interface, in conjunction with functionality improvements and statistics extensions.
Big mining operations — Worker management
To make large-scale mining easier, we have introduced a state-of-the-art management and monitoring system, which simplifies setup for thousands of workers. Automatic worker creations combined with multiple flagging & sorting options allow for quick and transparent worker management and monitoring.
Mining own payout transactions
The increase in transaction volume on BTC network was slowing down the payouts to our miners. In order to make sure you get your hard earned bitcoins on time, we started to preferentially mine them into our own blocks.
Safety
U2F authentication gives you an additional layer of protection for your Slush Pool account.
Competition
Global changes in mining environment have been primarily shaped by further centralization of hashing power, especially noticeable in the geographical distribution of the hash rate. On the other hand, even in this region, in China and India, pool competition has strengthened in the second half of the year. Moreover new, politically motivated pools, have emerged from the discussion about bitcoin scaling.
Bitcoin Network Hash Rate has risen by more than threefold, from 0.740 ExaHash/s to an astonishing 2.4 ExaHash/s. Absolute pool hash rate increased from 39 PH to 145 PH at the same time, which represents +260% in relative terms. In comparison with the total network hash rate, we have risen from 5.2% to 6.3% which is increase of 1.1% point in global market share. Slush Pool concentrated around 85% of Western hashing power in 2016, and we are planning to increase the share in Eastern hemisphere in the months ahead.
However, there are new mining areas too: Spanish-speaking countries, especially those once affected by deteriorating domestic monetary policy, have become a new home for big mining operations and an important source of our hash rate growth. We responded quickly with Spanish localization of our web.
Conferences
We took an active role in community discussion and development on different occasions. We kicked off the beginning of the year by organizing an Adam Back presentation in Prague. Then we attended and sponsored Scaling Bitcoin conference in Milan and visited Buenos Aires, Argentina for LaBITconf, where we started cooperation with promising Rootstock platform. Finally, we sponsored Hackers Congress Paralelni Polis Prague, where, among 40 speakers from various fields, Andreas Antonopoulos held a motivating presentation about Exponential Innovation.
Pool in Numbers
More than 160,000 new miners joined Slush Pool in 2016, about 440 new users a day, extending our 1,000,000+ customer base.
The increasing popularity of the new SlushPool.com domain is also reflected in our site ranking, recently breaking through the 44,940 global mark on Alexa and 32,819 rank in the USA.
Your loyal support allowed the pool to mine 2,841 blocks in total value of 52,393 BTC. Orphaned blocks rate stayed relatively low, only 18 blocks in total, which is 0.6% of all blocks found by the pool. Moreover we became proud sponsor of Matt Corralo's new FIBRE network, which has the potential to further lower this ratio in the future.
We addressed and replied to 1,750 support tickets, making sure your questions are always answered. And finally, probably the most interesting number for you: the overall yearly luck amounted to 101.22%.
Team changes
- CEO — Jan Capek (former CTO)
- CTO — Pavel Moravec (former lead developer)
- Founder and business strategy advisor — Marek Palatinus aka Slush
Outlook into 2017
The majority of pool profits is used for maintaining current infrastructure, building new one and most importantly to finance continuous development. This is what we are planning to do in 2017:
- Mobile Apps (Android & iPhone)
- Zcash mining pool
- Rootstock (RSK) merged mining
- Upgrades to voting system
- Dashboard configurator
- Premium support for enterprise miners
- Connection to new FIBRE network
Feel free to contribute your ideas directly into our Dev.Corner and let the miners decide what the features and priorities should be implemented in this year!
Thanks for mining with us. We are grateful for your continued support, trust, and confidence. We will make sure your flight to the MOON with Slush Pool in 2017 will be pleasant and full of innovations and improvements.
