There are various schemes for payout that mining pool use.
The two most fundamental categories are Pay-per-Share and Proportional.
You can probably gather the basic ideas from the names.
Pay-per-share schemes will pay you a fixed amount of money for each share.
This payment is guaranteed and constant per share, regardless of how much reward the pool makes.
Most pools use this scheme, as it’s easy to implement and to understand.
As you can tell, this is more advantageous for the miner, as variance of their payout is reduced.
This implies that pools take on more risk because they will incur costs if blocks aren’t found by the pool.
On top of that, there’s no incentive for a miner to actually submit valid blocks to the pool.
We’ll see why this is an issue in the Game Theory lecture.
Proportional schemes are the other category which pay out only when a block is found.
The reward of each miner is proportional to the number of shares submitted before the block was found.
This is more advantageous for the pool, as they’ll never pay out more money than they have, but it leads to more variance and risk for miners.
Because of the difficulty of buy-in, proportional schemes aren’t seen often, if ever, in the mining world.
This is a demonstration of several different payout schemes that have been thought of.
The point is that there are many ways to go about paying miners, and each one has a different set of incentive tradeoffs.
It all depends on the size and assumptions of the mining pool.