Selection Strategy of Mining Pool under Various Different Payment Mechanisms

Abstract

Blockchain is becoming increasingly popular and has received extensive attention in various fields. In a proof-of-work-based blockchain, miners usually choose to join a mining pool for mining to gain revenue. Different mining pools may use other payment mechanisms, and each miner can earn different revenues in different pools. There are currently four common payment mechanisms used by mining pools to distribute mining revenue, namely, PPS, PPLNS, PPS+, and FPPS, and there are no relevant research results on the selection strategies of these four payment mechanisms. To this end, this paper models the pool selection problem as a risky decision problem and proposes the selection strategies of these four mining pool payment mechanisms. Firstly, miners’ income under the four payment mechanisms is given; then, a mining pool selection strategy based on the change of computing power is constructed based on the Laplace criterion; finally, the proposed strategy is verified and analyzed by simulation. The experiments show that the proposed mining pool selection strategy is effective. The results of this paper can provide an essential reference for miners when making pool selection decisions.