No pool balance, no withdrawal, nothing to trust

Almost every mining pool credits your work to a balance and pays that balance out later — when it passes a threshold, when a block matures, when a batch cycle runs. That gap between earning and holding is where mining money has always gone missing: exits, hacks, thresholds you never reach, a dust balance stranded when you unplug. Lazarus does not have the gap, because it never takes custody in the first place.

Your payout is an output of the block itself. Prime hands every gateway the same coinbase output list before any work goes out, and a share whose coinbase pays anything other than that list is refused — so whichever machine finds the block, that block's coinbase pays every address in the TIDES window directly. The pool never receives your coins, which means it cannot hold, batch, freeze or lose them.

In practice: no account, no registration, no KYC, no withdrawal button, no pending balance (an output under 0.01 XBT is carried forward to your next one), and nothing owed to anyone if this pool disappeared tonight. Coinbase outputs are spendable after 100 confirmations like any other — except right now: the temporary Knots #419 rule makes every newly mined coin on this chain, at every pool and for every solo miner, wait 6,480 confirmations instead. A pool that pays you “once your balance passes a threshold” or “at maturity” is holding your coins in between; that is a real difference in what you are trusting, and it is worth knowing which kind you are on. Compare the pools on this chain.