Bitcoin mining has come a long way since the days of the GPUs and basement. During that time, miners have emerged in countless ways. For example, ASICs are now the standard, not GPUs. Furthermore, players in the business quality have entered the field, opened new boundaries and brought in size and institutional recognition that open the doors to otherwise unattainable places for smaller miners. Today, the mining landscape is one where grid services, restriction strategies and participation in the energy market are no longer edge cases but core strategies. As the world around it has progressed, there is a question we still hear from miners: Can PPLNs adapt to?
Many miners, especially those who work closely with energy providers or integrate demand response mechanisms, have come to see PPLNs with suspicion. They care about it punishing downtime and rewarding only uninterrupted hashrate – a bad deal for those who routinely limit machines to support the grid or provide other services.
This fear is not groundless. It traces back to a central moment of the mining sector’s recent past, one that apparently sealed the agreement for many on PPLN’s adjustments: the fall between Riot and Braiin’s pool.
At that time, Braiin used the score payment system. Designed in 2011 by Slush Even the score was designed to solve the problem of pool hopping – when miners would jump between pools to take advantage of reward systems. There has also been a misconception that scores are a PPLN add -on system, but as Rosenfeld’s Bible on pool payout systems describes, scores and PPLNs are clearly different payment methods. The biggest difference is how they account for shares, specifically, score implemented a rolling window with exponential due function, this made effective appearance very short. On the other hand, PPLNS is a family of payout systems with different types of length lookback windows.
As shown on this archived site for how scores worked, you can see that your hash rate after 90 minutes had no more presence on the pool. This means that the moment a miner begins mining when their share of rewards fairly quickly the fair value of the hash rate. On the other hand, when a miner stops mining, it falls as quickly as shown on GIF below.
This could have worked well in the era of cowboys and hackers, but it was never designed with today’s complex mining environments in mind. Certainly not with demand response where miners intentionally and profitable take machines offline to stabilize the energy sources or offer auxiliary markets. To score, that kind of behavior looks no different from a pool jump – someone is trying to cheat the system.
So when Riot left Braiins and referred to concern for payout mechanics, it sent a shock wave through the mining world. Due to the aforementioned misunderstanding, the scoring system’s deficiencies were unfairly projected on a wider category of payouts, PPLNs were caught in the crisis and caught a stray ball in the process, and the industry collectively threw the baby out with the bath water.
But the mining world has changed and it is time for Phoenix to rise from his ash.
Slice: A payout mechanism for the 21st century grid
Enter SLICEA modern, open source Stratum-V2-ready payout system created by the DMND team. It is an improvement and development of PPLNs that are considering how miners get paid, rewards are calculated and – most important – how downtime is dealt with respect
to score. All with Miner’s right to build their own block templates with SV2.
At its core, Skive is about justice and transparency. It retains the basic idea of ​​PPLNs – pays miners in relation to their actual contribution to solving blocks – while modernizing it to today’s decentralized mining landscape.
The most important innovation lies in how the calculation of slice structures rewards the calculation and how the lookback window works. Instead of treating the entire pool as a monolith, slice time breaks into smaller, dynamic “slices” of work to properly distribute the fee component. These slices represent parties of shares submitted over a specified period in which we check for the amount of fees in Mempool and compare and score different job templates for the financial value they represent. When a block is found, the Slice Block distributes the supplement and the transaction fees separately. The subsidy is awarded proportionally with hash rate, while the fees are distributed based on hashrate and economic value.
This is especially relevant in a world where miners can choose their own transaction sets. Some miners may prioritize bundles with high fee style; Others may exclude certain types of transactions for ideological, political or technical reasons. Skive ensures that miners within each slice are rewarded according to both the amount and the quality of their work – without punishing them for downtime or strategic energy lodges. For those who are curious to learn more, this article may prove to be useful.
Demand response without punishment
What makes Skive especially attractive to miners participating in demand response or restriction programs is that it doesn’t punish you for being offline.
That’s because Skive doesn’t due to your payment just because you took a break. Your shares remain in the Pplns window – the rolling window of the recent work that is eligible for payments – as long as they are recently enough. In this way, each share is processed independently and is expected to receive 8 payouts as Skive uses an 8-block rolling window, each valid stock remains eligible for payment in the next 8 blocks on average. This means that no matter how big or small the pool is, you will never have the good luck of eating up unlucky days without a block, disconnecting, having the pool find a block and not getting paid.
This means that miners can turn off in peak times, support their regional grids and still gather their fair cut from blocks that exist after resuming operations, most importantly, even if they are offline if their shares are still in the window. In other words, if the pool has a strip of impolsees, and then the miner is called to perform demand response and shut off, even if the pool finds a block during their downtime, the miner gets their legal share for all the time they were online. This is because each stock generated during this time will be active and get paid for 8 blocks on average.
This is not a solution. This is the feature. It makes slice fully compatible with modern energy strategies that require flexibility, whether you participate in frequency regulation markets, ramp down during grid emergencies or simply optimize for pricing outside peak.
For example, let’s say that a miner mining at a pool and the pool has not found that day’s block yet. This means that the pool has not found the block yet, and therefore miners have not been paid for that day. Now the miner shuts off to provide auxiliary services during high summer load for a few hours during this time, the pool finds the block. In a score -based pool, mines would not see a single put on it after 90 minutes when the decay has had full effect. But even if the pool found a block 30 minutes later due to the exponential decay, mines would hardly see anything. On the other hand, the miner would have all the shares they extracted during the day receive a payment as each share receives an average of 8 payments. Thus, the miner would take advantage of the good times and not be punished in the bad times.
Payment transparency and audit ability
In addition, Slice doesn’t just modernize Payout Fairness – it does in a way that minimizes confidence in the pool operator. Each slice is fully auditorious. Each stock is traced, indexed and publicly verified by any miner so that miners can independently verify their share of the block of block. There is no black box no “Believe me bro.”
And if the pool operator tries to cheat – says by injecting false shares to dilute payouts – mines can challenge the integrity of the disc. The expansion of the job declaration to Stratum V2, which Slice is dependent on, includes mechanisms for the publication of sharing data, verification of Merkle roots and ensuring that each share corresponds to real calculation work.
For miners who are interested in decentralization, Slice is not just a payment scheme – it’s a responsibility tool.
From defensive to strategic
The shift from score to Skive represents more than a technical upgrade. It’s a mental shift. Mining pools no longer have to defend themselves against bad actors by punishing everyone. Instead, they can structure payouts in a way that reflects reality: that miners are sophisticated participants who work not only in Bitcoin blockchain, but also the energy ecosystem.
With Slice, PPLNS stops being a responsibility and becomes a strategic advantage. It enables better income trapping, more transparency and audit ability and smoother integration with grid services.
And in a world where uptime is optional, but justice is non-conveyable, that’s exactly what business quality miners need, a strategic pool partner that pushes forward and innovates, brings the future today and allows miners to make more money with the same hardware.
This is a guest post of General Kenobi. Opinions that are expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those from BTC Inc or Bitcoin magazine.