Bitcoin mining has come a long way since the era of GPU and basement setup. At that time, miners made progress in countless ways. For example, ASICs are now standard, not GPUs. In addition, enterprise-level players have entered the field, opening up new borders and bringing scale and institutional recognition, which opens up other unattainable places for small miners. Today, mining landscapes are grid services, and cutting strategies and energy market participation are no longer marginal cases, but core strategies. As the world around us develops, we have been listening to a question from miners: Can PPLN adapt?
Many miners, especially those who work closely with energy providers or integrate demand response mechanisms, have already doubted PPLN. They fear it will punish downtime and reward only uninterrupted hashrate – a bad deal for those who often cut machines to support the grid or provide other services.
This fear is not unfounded. It goes back to a recent pivotal moment in the mining industry, which clearly led many to a deal on PPLNS-style spending: the consequences between Riot and Braiins Pool.
At the time, Brians was using the scoring payment system. Score was designed by Slush himself in 2011 to solve the problem of jumping on the platform, when miners would jump between pools to take advantage of the reward system. Some people also misunderstand that the score is a PPLNS style payment system, but as Rosenfeld’s Bible on the Pool Payment System, the score and PPLN are obviously different payment methods. The main difference is how they interpret the sharing, specifically, the score implements a scroll window with exponential decay function, which effectively makes the review window very short. On the other hand, PPLN is a series of payment systems with various fixed-length traceback windows.
As shown on the archive’s website, how the score works, you can see that after 90 minutes your hashrat no longer exists on the pool. This means that the moment miners start mining, their reward share quickly reaches the fair value of Hashrat. On the other hand, when the miner stops mining, it will drop just as quickly as shown in the GIF below.
This may have worked well in the era of cowboys and hackers, but never took into account today’s complex mining environments. Of course, there is no demand response, and miners intentionally and profitably take machines offline to stabilize the energy grid or bid for the auxiliary market. To score, this behavior looks no different from a pool hopper – someone is trying to trick the system.
So when Riot left Braiins, concerns about payment mechanisms were cited, which caused shock waves in the mining community. Due to the above misunderstanding, the flaws of the scoring system are unfairly projected onto wider spending, and PPLN is trapped in the competition, in the process capturing the wandering bullets, the industry throwing babies away along with bathing water.
But the mining world has changed, and it is time for the Phoenix to rise from his ashes.
Slicing: Payment mechanism of 21st century grid
Enter piecea modern, open source layer V2 payment system created by the DMND team. This is an improvement and evolution of PPLN, which rethinks how miners get paid, calculate rewards, and – most importantly – how to treat downtime is respected
Score. While retaining the right of miners to build their own block templates using SV2.
The core of the slice is about fairness and transparency. It retains the basic idea of PPLN, that miners are proportional to their actual contribution to the solution, while modernizing it into today’s decentralized mining landscape.
The key innovation lies in how the slice structure rewards calculations and how the review window works. Slicing does not treat the entire pool as a whole pool, but divides time into smaller dynamic “slices” to properly distribute the cost components. These slices represent stocks submitted over a specific period of time, we control the expenses in the Mempool and compare and score different work templates to their financial value. When a block is found, the slice allocates block subsidies and transaction fees respectively. The subsidy is distributed proportionally by Hashrate, and the expenses are distributed based on the hashrate and financial value.
This is especially important in a world where miners can choose their own trading sets. Some miners can prioritize high-cost MEV-style bundles. Others may exclude certain types of transactions for ideological, political or technical reasons. Slices ensure that in each slice, miners will be rewarded based on the quantity and quality of their work without penalizing them for downtime or strategic energy decisions. For those who want to know more, this article may be helpful.
Request for a no-finite response
Slice is particularly attractive to miners participating in demand response or reduction programs, it doesn’t punish you for being offline.
That’s because slices don’t decay your spending because you take a break. Your stock remains in the PPLNS window, the scroll window for the latest work, as long as they are recently enough. This way, each share can be processed independently, and is expected to receive 8 expenses, as Slice uses an 8-block scrolling window, so each valid share is eligible for spending on the next 8 blocks on average. This means that no matter how big or small the pool is, you will never have bad luck, and days without obstacles, disconnect, let the pool find a block without getting paid.
This means miners can turn off the power during peak demand hours, support their regional grids, and find fair cuts after recovery operations, and most importantly, their shares are still in the window even if they are offline. In other words, if the pool is not lucky, then the miner is asked to perform a demand response and close, even if the pool finds a block during the downtime, the miner will get a fair share of all the time it takes to go online. That’s because every share generated during this period will be active and will be paid on average for 8 blocks.
This is not a solution. This is the function. It makes slices fully compatible with modern energy strategies that require flexibility, whether you are participating in the frequency regulation market, gradually decreasing in grid emergencies, or simply optimizing off-peak pricing.
For example, suppose a miner mines in a swimming pool and the pool hasn’t found the neighborhood of that day. This means that the pool has not found a block, so the miners have not received their salary for the day. Now, miners are closed, providing ancillary services for several hours during peak summers, during which the pool finds the block. In a score-based pool, miners don’t see a SAT after 90 minutes, when the attenuation has full effect. But even if the pool found a block after 30 minutes, miners could hardly see anything due to the exponential decay. On the other hand, the miner will own all the shares mined on the same day, as the average of 8 per share is received per share. Therefore, miners will benefit in good times and not be punished in bad times.
Payment transparency and auditability
In addition, Slice not only modernizes payment fairly, but also minimizes trust in pool operators. Each slice is fully reviewed. Any miner tracks, indexes and publicly verifies each share, so the miner can independently verify its share in the block reward. There is no black box, no “Trust my brother”.
And if the pool operator tries to cheat (e.g., dilute spending by injecting fake shares), the miner can challenge the integrity of the slice. The job declaration extension for slice-dependent layer V2 includes mechanisms for publishing shared data, verifying Merkel roots, and ensuring that each share corresponds to the actual computational work.
For miners who care about decentralization, slices are not only a payment plan, but also an accountability tool.
From defense to strategy
The transition from fractions to slices not only represents a technological upgrade. This is a psychological change. Mining pools no longer need to defend against bad actors by punishing everyone. Instead, they can build spending in a way that reflects reality: miners are mature players working in the Bitcoin blockchain, and are energy ecosystems.
Using slices, PPLN is no longer a responsibility and becomes a strategic advantage. It can better capture revenue, more transparency and tunability, and smoother with grid services.
In a world where uptime is optional, but fairness is unnegotiable, this is exactly what enterprise-level miners need, a strategic pool partner that can drive and innovate, allowing the future and enable miners to make more money with the same hardware.
This is a guest post from General Kenobi. The opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
