CSZiggy wrote:I'm still surprised this was actually a requested feature by enough people to utilize the pool's limited resources to put in.
Every time I've read about charity mining and thought about the 5% fees here, I've thought to myself--aren't I already charity mining for the owners?
Could you put a running total for the week or the month/year on how much has been donated in total, either to the workers of the company or some other charity event. I'm sure all the users of the pool would like to see justification that the new feature for charity is being used and was worthwhile to put in over something more meaningful that would have boosted profits or added more coins or exchanges.
I don't anticipate this feature being used by many customers. In fact, a poll showed that only 1% of income is expected to go to charity.
That said, there are a number of reasons why the feature was implemented. First, I personally don't care if this particular feature was profitable, because if we can redirect funds from miners' pockets into curing diseases, that's worth any amount of money. Second, the feature allows people to tip employees, which is important from a management perspective to improve productivity, so in some ways the future productivity gains may outweigh the cost of the feature.
Third, even though only 1% of existing miners said they would make donations, it's unlikely that a random sample would be willing to donate a lot of money. But there are people out there who do want to donate to charity who will join the pool just for that purpose because no other pool offers the feature, who would never have joined otherwise. That will probably double or triple the contribution totals.
Fourth, the work performed on charity mining isn't transferable to other features. There are people working on other algorithms, for example, but that's extremely specialized work that requires 3 months of training. It isn't possible to simply switch out charity mining for another feature because different people are needed, and as most people know, the economy has a severe labor shortage right now.
But most importantly, even if people follow the poll exactly, 1% of $30m is about $300,000. That's a lot of charitable contributions.