Privacy issues on pools are almost entirely “what IP is connecting, from where” (as this likely lets you find the physical farm, which is by far the biggest concern with pools). Changing the payout scheme to have more privacy might also seem like it would prevent the pool from knowing the exchange a specific miner uses, but in practice each miner gets a fairly specific amount paid out, so the pool can match payouts with miners. Sure, the miner could go to substantial effort to hide their activities (like taking payout to another ecash mint) but (a) that’s likely to be relatively rare so it’ll stick out anyway and (b) they could do that just as well if the pool just does lightning payouts or even on chain payouts.
I’m not really sure where “simplifies accounting” even comes from, tbh. Accounting for a pool isn’t complicated? You just, like, keep track of a share count for each user. Even with a fancy payout scheme you’d have to do that anyway, if only because users want to see it in a fancy dashboard. So fancy payouts are just added complexity.
Of course pools *should* do payouts in ways that increase payout frequency so that small miners have less outstanding balance with a pool at any time, but making shares ecash tokens is substantially overkill.
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Ecash enables accountless mining pools. I think your mind is stuck in the account based model and this thinking leads you to false conclusions.
As @calle said, pool redemptions decouple submitted work from redeemed value. The pool won't be able to link these two because eHash tokens can be freely traded before redemption. The value represented by a proof of work share can go through any number of splits, joins, and trades before it is redeemed. How do you disentangle that using IP tracking? You could try, but if there is any significant volume...good luck with that.
BOLT12 and on-chain addresses just add the account aspect back in. This is a strict reduction in privacy for the user. They can certainly choose this option if the pool offers it but in terms of privacy it is better to receive ecash mining rewards and spend it directly. This way all your activities occur within the anonymity set of the ecash mint.
The ecash model simplifies accounting because the pool no longer needs to track the work of every user that connects to it. Instead, the pool accounts for all shares within a time window and that's it. Instead of maintaining hundreds or thousands of accounts in perpetuity the pool manages one 'account' per hour with a prearranged start and end date. I prefer to think of them as contracts. When the contract end date approaches all the assets (mining shares) and liabilities (eHash tokens) of the contract can be zeroed out and removed from the books. The pool never needs to carry a balance for users that have not met their withdrawal threshold.
This is a dramatic simplification in accounting because it removes an entire class of liabilities that need to be tracked. The business owner no longer needs to be concerned with unredeemed shares.
The eHash tokens (1token = 1share) need to be redeemed first by the miners, before they can be traded.
So, the pool needs to send them *somewhere* - otherwise they remain on the pool's books.
The tokens are probably locked to the miner's npub until he withdraws - which is an "account" (same as some pool use Bitcoin addresses as accounts)
Right?