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?