As some of you noticed, the payouts yesterday were much lower than in the previous days; some of you did not get a payout at all (below 5 sats Zappool accumulates). This is due to the irregularity of blocks found by Ocean.

As visible below, between Jan 1 and 4 there were unusually many, 17 blocks, but on between Jan 5 and 7 only 3 blocks. This is 4.25 per day vs 1 per day! (Info from https://ocean.xyz/dashboard).

It looks like today's payouts will be slimmer as well... But please keep calm, and keep hashing, on average payouts should be fine!

Zappool tries to even out fluctuation a bit, by paying out most of the estimated-but-not-yet-received payout early. However, for the estimate it uses the payout average of the last 12 blocks. If there are irregularities even when averaged over 12 blocks, payout fluctuates. I also show here the average block payout (sat/TH) from the given block: there is a large variation, from 80 to 15.

Zappool is Nostr-first, and is present on Nostr only. You will just not see me shill Zappool on x or youtube.

Total payouts done by Zappool is above 50K now. Let's 1000x it in 2026!

Great work! For pooled home mining it may be worth checking out https://zappool.org -- nostr integrated and permissionless. Might be a good companion for bitaxes sold.

I wouldn't want to force any policy on Zappool users, but if nostr app-specific user settings are implemented, it's possible to have a user setting (take part in block parties or not).

Interesting idea. I've been thinking about block parties before, but I don't have much first-hand experience, I need to find out more.

Zaps are implemented in Zappool, from now on payouts are done as Zaps by default!
With this, Zappool is feature complete, so I declared it v1.0 live version.

Zaps are shown in most Nostr clients; e.g. https://www.fatzaps.com/npub17qt0gf99uxe3n3aa8nj93hspe0x3vfn7wwmv42adfc96y8g8ngcqpakg7l (The zaps are to npubs, not a post, that's why not all clients show them).

If you don't want the Zap, only the lightning payment, you can prefix your npub by "NOLN:" (nostr lightning),
e.g. "NOLN:@npub17qt0g...".
See https://zappool.org/faq.html#can-i-get-paid-to-my-nostr-account-without-the-zap-event .

Sometimes I sit back and think about how wonderful is all the tech on which Zappool is built upon:

A crazy guy had the idea to reverse-engineer a mining chip, and build an open source miner hardware, just for fun. Joined by another crazy guy (across the ocean) they did it: Bitaxe was born, now produced by many companies by hundreds of thousands.

Another crazy crazy guy created a mining pool that is permissionless: Ocean pool was born, now with more than 20 exahash of power.

And there is the whole Nostr world, and the whole Lightning ecosystem.

And all based on bitcoin.

Whose genesis block was created exactly 17 years ago (well, tomorrow).

2026 is gonna be full of ZAPS!

Not to worry about that one: that's the difference between what has been rewarded by Ocean and what has been actually paid out. So even if all zappool users disappear at once, those few sats will be paid out by Ocean in a few days.

Now that Zappool is working quite stable, my task is to make some publicity and attract more users. I want to finish real ZAPs (not only LN payment, but Nostr-visible zap), and it is working already in my test environment, so I will turn it on soon!

Total payment amounts added to the dashboard, and ...
... it turns out Zappool is losing money 🙃

32247 sats paid out to you guys, 31352 received from Ocean
that's a net negative of 895 sats.

Why? Because @nprofile1q... pays later, and always owes 1-2 days worth of rewards.