Bitcoin mining<\/a> has come a long way since the days of GPUs and basement set ups. In that time, miners have advanced in countless ways. For example, ASICs are now the standard, not GPUs. Furthermore, enterprise grade players have entered the field, opening new frontiers and bringing with them the size and institutional recognition that opens the doors to otherwise unreachable places for smaller miners. Nowadays, the mining landscape is one where grid services, curtailment strategies, and energy market participation are no longer edge cases but core strategies. As the world around it has moved forward, there\u2019s one question we keep hearing from miners: can PPLNS adapt?<\/p>\n Many miners, particularly those working closely with energy providers or integrating Demand Response mechanisms, have come to view PPLNS with suspicion. They worry that it penalizes downtime and rewards only uninterrupted hashrate\u2014a bad deal for those who routinely curtail machines to support the grid or provide other services.<\/p>\n This fear isn\u2019t baseless. It traces back to a pivotal moment in the mining industry\u2019s recent past, one that apparently sealed the deal for many on PPLNS style payouts: the fallout between RIOT and Braiins Pool.<\/p>\n At the time, Braiins was using the Score payout system. Designed in 2011 by Slush himself, Score was engineered to solve the problem of pool hopping\u2014when miners would jump between pools<\/a> to exploit reward systems. There\u2019s also been a misconception that Score is a PPLNS style payment system, but as Rosenfeld\u2019s bible on pool payout systems<\/a> describes, Score and PPLNS are distinctly different payout methods. The main difference is how they account for shares, specifically, Score implemented a rolling window with exponential decay function, this effectively made the lookback window very short. On the other hand, PPLNS is a family of payout systems with various types of fixed length lookback windows.<\/p>\n As shown on this archived website<\/a> of how Score worked, you can see that after 90 minutes your hashrate had no more presence on the pool. This means that the moment a miner starts mining, their share of rewards fairly quickly reaches the fair value of the hashrate. On the other hand, when a miner stops mining, it drops equally fast, as shown on the gif below.<\/p>\n This might have worked well in the era of cowboys and hackers, but it was never designed with today\u2019s complex mining environments in mind. Certainly not with Demand Response, where miners intentionally and profitably take machines offline to stabilize energy grids or bid into ancillary markets. To Score, that kind of behavior looks no different than a pool hopper\u2014someone attempting to cheat the system.<\/p>\n So when RIOT left Braiins, citing concerns about payout mechanics, it sent a shockwave through the mining world. Due to the aforementioned misconception, Score system\u2019s flaws got unfairly projected onto a broader category of payouts, PPLNS got caught in the fray, catching a stray bullet in the process, and the industry collectively threw the baby out with the bathwater.<\/p>\n But the mining world has changed, and it\u2019s time for the phoenix to rise from his ashes.<\/p>\n Enter SLICE<\/strong>, a modern, open-source Stratum-V2-ready payout system created by the DMND team. It\u2019s an improvement and evolution of PPLNS, that rethinks how miners get paid, rewards are calculated, and \u2014most importantly\u2014 how downtime is treated respect\u00a0<\/p>\n to Score. All while preserving miner\u2019s right to build their own block templates with SV2.<\/p>\n At its core, SLICE is about fairness and transparency. It preserves the foundational idea of PPLNS\u2014paying miners in proportion to their actual contribution to solving blocks\u2014while modernizing it for today\u2019s decentralized mining landscape.<\/p>\n The key innovation lies in how SLICE structures reward calculation, and on how the lookback window works. Rather than treating the entire pool as a monolith, SLICE breaks time into smaller, dynamic \u201cslices\u201d of work to properly distribute the fee component. These slices represent batches of shares submitted over a specific period, where we control for the amount of fees in the mempool, and compare and score different job templates for the financial value they represent. When a block is found, SLICE distributes the block subsidy and transaction fees separately. The subsidy is allocated proportionally by hashrate, while the fees are distributed based on hashrate and financial value.<\/p>\n![\"Mining](\"https:\/\/cdn-ilddnad.nitrocdn.com\/XgjmJNBNBbZQEuHAZVzgTqmzytAUTSfp\/assets\/images\/optimized\/rev-d9b18a2\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image2.gif\" "\\"SLICE:")
<\/figure>\nSLICE: A Payout Mechanism for the 21st Century Grid<\/strong><\/h3>\n