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First off: I apologize if this already exists, or if it doesn't work for some reason (I'm here to learn, so please tell me if so).

I recently started playing around with an Antminer S9 for the learning experience. When choosing a mining pool, I looked at 'regular' pools as well as at solo ckpool. The allure of winning the lottery when solo mining is compelling, particularly when a single S9 will only generate a small handful of sats daily in a shared pool. So this got me to thinking...

What if there was a shared pool that split rewards similar to how real world lotteries do. Rather than counting just one type of 'share', the pool would could track a few different types of shares at different set difficulties. All miners who hit "high" difficulty shares split say 50% of the block reward. The difficulty would be set so that there are only a small number of winners at this share difficulty. This could allow a home miner such as myself the thrill of getting a much larger than regular award if I get lucky, while still collecting some rewards for getting lower level shares.

A sample split could be:

Block Found (10% of reward pool ): 1 winner
High Difficulty Share Found (split 15% of reward pool ): ~1 to 20 winners
Medium Difficulty Share Found (split 25% of reward pool ): ~20 to 100 winners
Low Difficulty Share Found (split 50% of reward pool ): ~100 to 1,000 winners

Maybe it's just me - but as someone doing this for fun and education, I'd enjoy variable rewards with lots of luck involved. But not so luck based as trying to hit a solo block that is unlikely to happen in my lifetime.

Just an idea. Thoughts?

Maybe it's just me - but as someone doing this for fun and education, I'd enjoy variable rewards with lots of luck involved. But not so luck based as trying to hit a solo block that is unlikely to happen in my lifetime.

It is an interesting idea!

A related question for you: in your exploration of the mining world for fun and education, did you come across any interesting use cases for integrating LN with the mining side of things?

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Related question: is there a pool where I can currently override my share difficulty to simulate this experience? Setting a difficulty that is too high for my hash power, but hoping to get lucky to hit a single share.

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