For those who haven't been following, the following changes are planned:
- minebitshares.com will pay out in BitUSD
- minebitshares.com will eliminate its pool fee
- The payout will be subsidized ("juiced")
![+5%](http://bitsharestalk.org/Smileys/aaron/5percent.png)
by our marketing budget
Essentially, we're allowing people to merge-mine the juice, but only if they use our pool and accept BitUSD payouts.
If our target pool volume is $1000 / day, that works out to $30,000 / month new capital, for which the budget would be funding "juice" at
![+5%](http://bitsharestalk.org/Smileys/aaron/5percent.png)
which would be $1500 / month or $50 / day (comparable to a traditional marketing campaign).
I think it would be better to simply split $50 / day among all miners who show up. If the pool volume is
more less than $1000 / day, then they get
better than
![+5%](http://bitsharestalk.org/Smileys/aaron/5percent.png)
returns. Since our pool volume is
tiny at the moment, this would lead to
fantastic returns for people who switch early which would be a great boost to our marketing (we might get several people saying "switch to this pool, I did and quadrupled my returns OMG"). More importantly, if we exceed our target, then we can save a lot of money. If we hit $2000 / day, then our budget would still be capped at $50 a day and the miners simply get 2.5% instead.
Offering a fixed juice budget is basically a no-reserve single-price auction for the capital inflow, which allows the market to efficiently discover the "right" juice percentage. Which in theory should be pretty close to zero, i.e. if we're the only pool willing to operate at a loss, we should be able to capture the entire market.
Offering a fixed juice percentage of
![+5%](http://bitsharestalk.org/Smileys/aaron/5percent.png)
is still buying capital inflow, but like any scheme where you have a price that doesn't respond to market signals, it's likely the price will be too high (we'd be paying more than we need to, exceeding the target and busting the budget) or too low (we could be offering a higher return and attracting more people while remaining within the budget).