Slice: Make PPLN work to meet demand

Bitcoin mining has come a long way since the age of GPU and basement setup. Meanwhile, miners have progressed in countless ways. For example, ASICs are now standard rather than GPUs. Additionally, enterprise-grade players have entered the field, opened new frontiers and brought them scale and institutional awareness to open doors to places that are unreachable for small miners. Today, mining landscapes are where grid services, reduction strategies, and participation in energy markets are no longer edge cases, but core strategies. As the world around it has moved forward, there is one question we are asking from miners. Can PPLN be adapted?

Many miners, especially those who work closely with energy providers or integrate demand response mechanisms, have come to see suspected PPLNs. They are worried about punishing downtime and rewarding only uninterrupted hashrates. This is bad for those who regularly cut down on machines to support the grid or provide other services.

This fear is unfounded. It goes back to pivotal moments in the recent past of mining. This apparently sealed off the PPLNS-style payouts, the deals of many people regarding the fallout between the riots and the Briins pool.

At the time, Bryin used a score payout system. The score, designed by Slush himself in 2011, was designed to solve the problems of pool hopping. Miners jumped through the pool and utilized the reward system. There was also a misconception that scores are PPLNS-style payment systems, but Rosenfeld’s Bible in the pool payment system explains, scores, PPLN are clearly different payout methods. The main difference is that they implemented a rolling window with exponential decay function in which the scores are exponential. This has made the lookback window very shorter. PPLNS, on the other hand, is a family of payout systems with different types of fixed length lookback windows.

As shown on how the score works on this archived website, after 90 minutes you will see that the hashrate is no longer present in the pool. This means that the moment miners begin mining, their share of rewards reaches the fair value of the hashrate fairly quickly. Meanwhile, when miners stop mining, it drops equally fast, as shown in the GIF below.

This may have worked well in the days of cowboys and hackers, but it was never designed with today’s complex mining environment in mind. Certainly there is no need to meet demand. Miners will intentionally and profitable machines offline to stabilize the energy grid and bid on the sub-market. To score, such behavior looks like a pool hopper, someone who tries to trick the system.

So when Riot left Braiins citing concerns about how payments work, it sent a shockwave into the mining world. The aforementioned misconceptions have led to flaws in the score system being unfairly projected onto wider categories of payments, PPLNs getting caught in a fight, catching a bullet of straying in the process, and the industry collectively abandoning babies in the bath.

But the world of mining changes and it’s time for Phoenix to rise from his ashes.

Slices: Payment Mechanisms for the 21st Century Grid

input sliceA modern open source layer-V2-compatible payout system created by the DMND team. It’s an improvement and evolution of PPLN, rethinking how miners are paid, whether rewards are calculated and most importantly, how downtime is treated.

Score. While preserving minor rights to build your own block templates in SV2.

At the core, slices are about fairness and transparency. It preserves the basic idea of ​​PPLN paying miners proportionately to their actual contribution to solving blocks, whilst modernizing it for today’s decentralized mining landscape.

A key innovation lies in the way slice structure rewards calculations and in the way the lookback window works. Rather than treating the entire pool as a monolith, slices spend time working on smaller, dynamic “slices” tasks to properly distribute the fee components. These slices represent batches of shares filed over a specific period. It will be a specific period. There, you control Mempool’s fees and compare and acquire different job templates for representative financial value. If a block is found, the slice will distribute block grants and transaction fees separately. Subsidies are allocated proportionally by hashrate, but fees are distributed based on hashrate and financial value.

This is particularly relevant in a world where miners can choose their own set of transactions. Some miners may prioritize luxury MEV style bundles. Others may rule out certain types of transactions for ideological, political, or technical reasons. Within each slice, the slice ensures that miners will be rewarded, depending on both the amount and quality of work, without punishing downtime or strategic energy decisions. For those who want to know more, this article can prove useful.

No penalty demand response

What’s particularly appealing to miners who take part in demand response and reduction programs is that they don’t punish you for being offline.

That’s because just because you take a break, the slice doesn’t break your payments. Your stock will remain as PPLNS window, or a rolling window of recent work that will be subject to payment. In this way, each share is treated independently and the slices use an 8-block rolling window, so we expect to get 8 payouts. This means that no matter how big or small the pool is, you don’t have the terrible luck of eating unlucky days without blocks, cutting off, finding blocks in the pool, or getting paid.

This means miners can supply electricity during peak demand hours, support local grids, and collect fair cuts from blocks found after reopening operations. In other words, even if there is a streak of bad luck in the pool, miners are called to perform a demand response, and the pool finds a block during downtime, the miners will receive their fair distribution throughout everything online. That’s because each share generated during that time will be active and on average receives 8 blocks of payment.

This is not a workaround. This is the feature. Make slices fully compatible with modern energy strategies that require flexibility, whether you’re joining the frequency-regulated market, ramping down in a grid emergency, or simply optimizing off-peak pricing.

For example, let’s say miners are mining in the pool and the pool has not yet found the blocks of the day. This means the pool has not yet found the block. Therefore, the miners have not yet been paid that day. Now miners shut off to provide auxiliary services during peak summer hours and during peak hours. Meanwhile, the pool finds the block. In a score-based pool, miners did not display that single SAT 90 minutes after the damping had a full effect. However, even if the pool found the block after 30 minutes, due to the exponential collapse, the miners saw little. Meanwhile, miners will receive payments on all the shares mined throughout the day, as each share receives an average of eight payments. Therefore, miners benefit at good times and are not punished at bad times.

Payment Transparency and Auditability

Moreover, slices do not only modernize payment fairness. Do so in a way that minimizes trust in pool operators. All slices are fully auditable. Each share is tracked, indexed and published by miners, allowing miners to independently verify their share of block rewards. There’s no black box or “trust me.”

Additionally, if the pool operator attempts to cheat by injecting fake stocks to dilute the payout, the miners can challenge the integrity of the slice. The declarative declaration extension to Stratum V2, which relies on slices, includes mechanisms that expose shared data, validate Merkle Roots validation, and ensure that each share corresponds to the actual computational task.

For miners who are concerned about decentralisation, slices are not just payment schemes, they are accountability tools.

From defense to strategy

The shift from score to slice represents more than a technical upgrade. It’s a mental change. Mining pools no longer need to punish everyone and protect bad actors. Instead, they can build payments in a way that reflects reality. Minors are sophisticated participants working not only in the Bitcoin blockchain but also in the energy ecosystem.

With slices, PPLNS will suspend responsibility and become a strategic advantage. This allows for better revenue capture, greater transparency and auditability, and smoother integration with grid services.

And in a world where uptime is optional, but fairness is unnegotiable, that’s exactly what enterprise-grade miners need, bringing the future today and allowing miners to make more money with the same hardware.

This is a guest post by General Kenobi. The opinions expressed are entirely unique and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.