TLDR: Lightning payouts will save SlushPool (braiins)
Slushpool will never be a top 30% hashrate pool, and that's fine but it could be a 5-10% pool again if it adopted a lightning payout function. Their biggest mess-up was trying to compete with foundry and antpool, when they should have stuck to their original mission to begin with: A pool for the plebs. Plebs are not running more than a few machines, likely on residential electricity rates, or maybe a small hashhut.
However, with difficulty screaming higher, many are turning off their S9 machines. Not because they want to, but because it takes far too long to get enough sats to withdraw on-chain. This is where lightning comes in. Imagine running your S9 and getting paid out every 24 hours via lightning. Now think about all of the hash that all of the unplugged S9s would be if added together. This number is actually substantial and is sitting on the table waiting for a pool to accept them.
I have no idea what slushpool was thinking over the last 3 years but it is not too late to be a pool for the people again. I want to see people plug in their S9s and get paid more than once a year. This is how you do it. And the best part of lightning payouts is the infrastructure isn't even expensive. Slushpool could run a node with Voltage for just $200/mo with a clearnet IP and have full access to the entire LND API for payouts. Many companies already use Voltage for similar things (such as rewards payouts, the bitcoin company, etc.).
Let's do the math real fast... Current hashrate is 607.78EH/s
There are 131,000,000 housholds in the US.
A typical S9 is 13.5 TH/s. Only 45,000,000 households need to run 1 S9 miner to equal the current TOTAL bitcoin hashrate of 607 EH/s.
I am not saying every household will run an S9, I am just saying that S9s ADD UP!!!!! Letting S9s shut down is the worst decision, and a pool with LN enabled payouts to LN address or keysend is LONG OVERDUE. Braiins is going to die unless it adopts lightning payouts, which is extremely cheap to do.
I am not sure if anyone at braiins will see this, but if you know anyone that works there please share with them, or share wherever you can. Lightning payouts need to be a thing. And fast.