Continuum Mining Pool: No fees; Client uptime monitoring via twitter and email

[mmortal03]

Ok, I think now we're allowed to ask... martok, are you absolutely sure there's no problem with the pool that would cause it to miss winning shares?

It appears there is nothing amiss with shares.
The pps side has found 3 blocks since it went up, scoring has not found a block. I was curious as to whether there was a pool problem also so ran the software on the testnet for a bit and all works fine with finding blocks and recognizing whether they are PPS or proportional. I think we just need more hashing power on proportional side.

Note also that when the round does complete, a share history will be made available. Assuming your client logs its share submits, you will be able to compare that against the history to ensure all your shares were counted.

You should make a request to people with more hashing power to join on the proportional side to get continuum out of this rut.  Having no proportional blocks since May 30th is not a nice selling point that you want to maintain for much longer.  I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people have left this pool after a week or two of no payouts.

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[martok]

Continuum apparently had issues starting an hour or two ago.  More recently, I am able to connect and get work, but have massive stale/rejected shares (close to 10%) that are clearly not because a new block has been found in the network. 

Let me know when the issues have been resolved, and I'll switch back from my backup pools.

Is anyone else seeing this? My miners have a 1% reject rate currently.

[twmz]

Continuum apparently had issues starting an hour or two ago.  More recently, I am able to connect and get work, but have massive stale/rejected shares (close to 10%) that are clearly not because a new block has been found in the network. 

Let me know when the issues have been resolved, and I'll switch back from my backup pools.

Is anyone else seeing this? My miners have a 1% reject rate currently.

Let me switch back and see if it is still happening.  Might have been on my end and restarting miners fixed it.

[martok]

You should make a request to people with more hashing power to join on the proportional side to get continuum out of this rut.  Having no proportional blocks since May 30th is not a nice selling point that you want to maintain for much longer.  I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people have left this pool after a week or two of no payouts.

That is very possible. But whether people leave or join the pool for reasons of no blocks being found is not within my influence. I will note though that if everyone switched from PPS to score based today, we would be in a much better situation as far as finding blocks goes. and the variance would be much lower. We would have approximately 30 ghash in score-based hashing which would result in more BTC earned even for PPS miners due to the 0 fee setup.

[mmortal03]

But whether people leave or join the pool for reasons of no blocks being found is not within my influence.

All I can suggest is enhancing your PR by promoting your unique current features, and implementing additional features as much as possible.  That is within your influence, and people then just have to be convinced to come back by becoming aware of such things.

I will note though that if everyone switched from PPS to score based today, we would be in a much better situation as far as finding blocks goes. and the variance would be much lower. We would have approximately 30 ghash in score-based hashing which would result in more BTC earned even for PPS miners due to the 0 fee setup.

Yeah, I really don't get why people who flock to this pool more often go with PPS than score based.

[martok]

Hello all,

I am writing to inform everyone that I am discontinuing PPS mode in the pool. I had a set limit of losses for PPS and that has been exceeded. Beyond that, I want to focus exclusively on developing the best (in a technical sense) pool I am able. Going back to an entirely score based method will allow me to do that with a minimum of fuss. I realize that this will cause some to leave the pool, though I would encourage you to move your hashing power over to the score-based pool. It will continue to be immune to hopping attacks and will have its history published to ensure transparency.

Note: Once PPS is switched off, PPS miners will be completely paid out so long as balance is above 0.01 BTC..

Thanks.

[Moussekateer]

Hello all,

I am writing to inform everyone that I am discontinuing PPS mode in the pool. I had a set limit of losses for PPS and that has been exceeded. Beyond that, I want to focus exclusively on developing the best (in a technical sense) pool I am able. Going back to an entirely score based method will allow me to do that with a minimum of fuss. I realize that this will cause some to leave the pool, though I would encourage you to move your hashing power over to the score-based pool. It will continue to be immune to hopping attacks and will have its history published to ensure transparency.

Note: Once PPS is switched off, PPS miners will be completely paid out so long as balance is above 0.01 BTC..

Thanks.

Sorry to hear that Martok. Was wondering why I suddenly received a small payment from the pool.

[mmortal03]

Hello all,

I am writing to inform everyone that I am discontinuing PPS mode in the pool. I had a set limit of losses for PPS and that has been exceeded. Beyond that, I want to focus exclusively on developing the best (in a technical sense) pool I am able. Going back to an entirely score based method will allow me to do that with a minimum of fuss. I realize that this will cause some to leave the pool, though I would encourage you to move your hashing power over to the score-based pool. It will continue to be immune to hopping attacks and will have its history published to ensure transparency.

Note: Once PPS is switched off, PPS miners will be completely paid out so long as balance is above 0.01 BTC..

Thanks.

I obviously support your decision, martok.  As a reminder, don't forget to change the thread subject and your signature once you turn off PPS. As usual, I'm going to continue to point my megahashes at your score-based side until it find one.

[PoulGrym]

Just would wanted to say thanks for your PPS services and will try and support you to find one Block on the Prop as I've already been hashing for 11 hours, that's if the switch started when you posted. Could it be possible to have your own user/miner banned from the pool once the block is found, so we can have an indication of when blocks and payment is payed. Just would like to have the option to change to another pool with out the losses.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Just would like to have the option to change to another pool with out the losses.

There are no losses. You can freely change to another pool any time you wish. This will have no affect on your payout for already submitted shares (if no block is found they will quickly depreciate whether you're in or out).

[tschaboo]

Hello all,

I'm a very new miner. Depending on which computers are currently running, I'm having 110 - 630 MH/s. I decided to use this pool as my primary pool because this seems to be the only one that uses Meni's scoring system. I don't get it, but I'm very confident he got the math right. Martok also seems to be trustworthy.

One thing bothers me though ... I made the following calculation:
The expected number of hashes to find a block is EH=3766548342687541 (http://blockexplorer.com/q/hashestowin), the hashrate of the pool right now is HR=11825476621 (http://www.continuumpool.com/hashrate.php).

If I calculate EH/HR/3600/24 I get 3.7 days to finish a block in average.

But http://www.continuumpool.com/roundstart.php says that the last block was found 2011-05-30 14:20:23.526037-07. That's about 24 days!!! So, what's wrong here?

[martok]

Hello all,

I'm a very new miner. Depending on which computers are currently running, I'm having 110 - 630 MH/s. I decided to use this pool as my primary pool because this seems to be the only one that uses Meni's scoring system. I don't get it, but I'm very confident he got the math right. Martok also seems to be trustworthy.

Welcome to the pool.

One thing bothers me though ... I made the following calculation:
The expected number of hashes to find a block is EH=3766548342687541 (http://blockexplorer.com/q/hashestowin), the hashrate of the pool right now is HR=11825476621 (http://www.continuumpool.com/hashrate.php).

If I calculate EH/HR/3600/24 I get 3.7 days to finish a block in average.

But http://www.continuumpool.com/roundstart.php says that the last block was found 2011-05-30 14:20:23.526037-07. That's about 24 days!!! So, what's wrong here?

Well fortunately I'm we found a block very soon after you posted this so we're standing on the other side of a very long round. It's worth noting though that the pool's hashrate was not constant throughout that time. The round is being dumped and the entire history will be up soon at http://www.continuumpool.com/history/

[mmortal03]

Well fortunately I'm we found a block very soon after you posted this so we're standing on the other side of a very long round. It's worth noting though that the pool's hashrate was not constant throughout that time. The round is being dumped and the entire history will be up soon at http://www.continuumpool.com/history/

Excellent news!  How soon should the round's distributions appear on each worker's balance page, for example: http://www.continuumpool.com/balance.php?worker=1D6v2gzXV4Tj7RtHPfpWmy5fRD68ZmN6Mm

[tschaboo]

Welcome to the pool.

Thank you! I joined your pool right now ...

Well fortunately I'm we found a block very soon after you posted

... and now I'm very unhappy that I didn't do that a few hours earlier. 
I could have been rich by now. 

It's worth noting though that the pool's hashrate was not constant throughout that time.

Ah, ok, I didn't consider that. So I hope that the pool stays above 10GH/s and we find another block soon.

[martok]

Well fortunately I'm we found a block very soon after you posted this so we're standing on the other side of a very long round. It's worth noting though that the pool's hashrate was not constant throughout that time. The round is being dumped and the entire history will be up soon at http://www.continuumpool.com/history/

Excellent news!  How soon should the round's distributions appear on each worker's balance page, for example: http://www.continuumpool.com/balance.php?worker=1D6v2gzXV4Tj7RtHPfpWmy5fRD68ZmN6Mm

Balances should be updated though that particular worker doesn't seem to have current shares. The last share submitted by the above worker was at 12:10 server time (GMT-7). The block solution was found at 17:00 so there were nearly 5 hours between last share and solved block. Does this match your records?

[martok]

Hello all,

Too many posts from me today, last one.

The files at www.continuumpool.com/history/ have been updated to reflect today's rounds. I have changed the format of dumps though to be more easily parced by scripts. Rather than the XML output, shares are in a simple tab delimited format. Note that "\n" appearing in a field isn't a newline but rather a NULL cfield. I have dropped the payout dumps as they are redundant and can be calculated by doing the math.

[mmortal03]

Well fortunately I'm we found a block very soon after you posted this so we're standing on the other side of a very long round. It's worth noting though that the pool's hashrate was not constant throughout that time. The round is being dumped and the entire history will be up soon at http://www.continuumpool.com/history/

Excellent news!  How soon should the round's distributions appear on each worker's balance page, for example: http://www.continuumpool.com/balance.php?worker=1D6v2gzXV4Tj7RtHPfpWmy5fRD68ZmN6Mm

Balances should be updated though that particular worker doesn't seem to have current shares. The last share submitted by the above worker was at 12:10 server time (GMT-7). The block solution was found at 17:00 so there were nearly 5 hours between last share and solved block. Does this match your records?

Yep, that sounds right.  What's the cutoff?  That particular worker ran for many days in the last round, it just wasn't run in the time frame immediately surrounding the solved block due to some air conditioning issues that came up.

[martok]

Yep, that sounds right.  What's the cutoff?  That particular worker ran for many days in the last round, it just wasn't run in the time frame immediately surrounding the solved block due to some air conditioning issues that came up.

Afaik, there isn't a constant cutoff but rather the shares degrade as new shares come in. So the actual amount of time you can be away before a block is found varies based on the hashrate of the pool. The higher the hashrate, the quicker a share will devalue but then at the same time, the more frequent blocks are found so your expected value remains constaint. Ok hopefully I have that right.

Anyways, we did find another block later today, hopefully you were around for that one.

[Meni Rosenfeld]

Yep, that sounds right.  What's the cutoff?  That particular worker ran for many days in the last round, it just wasn't run in the time frame immediately surrounding the solved block due to some air conditioning issues that came up.

I think the current half-life is about 550 shares. So if 5000 shares were submitted after yours your payout will be close to 0.

Think of this as a gentler version of solo mining. You don't have a good chance of being rewarded for blocks found while you were out, but your variance is much lower than solo when you're in (and on average it's the same whatever you do, and all that).

[PoulGrym]

Has anyone got any payout's yet? I've mined with no breaks since the PPS Switched. Still I did leave my miner mining with the appendix of 0PPS to my miners name. I've still not received any payout tho. Stats severs seems down, for me at least. If I've got it clear. We've solved the long long long very long block.. plus another one.. Is this correct?

Cheers..

[edit] Sweet! Stats are back up, I see 3 BTC heading my way soon I hope ^_^ *It's nice we're lucky at times* Well be staying here to next difficulty jump I guess.

P.S Please do rar or zip the history txt files.. >_< file 5 is 1.2Gb 0005.txt.xz [Mirror] 129mb

13PZZ.. 11 BTC Sweet! @1.7Gh What setup is that?